Word: schwerners
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Dates: during 1964-1964
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Chancy was one of Schwerner's most helpful aides. He was a slender Meridian Negro lad who had dropped out of high school as a sophomore, became a plasterer, eventually joined CORE. When COFO called for volunteer instructors for the Ohio training course, Chancy went with Schwerner...
...Saturday, June 20, their week-long Oxford orientation course completed, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman and five other young civil rights workers got into a CORE-owned blue station wagon to drive to Meridian. They had scheduled their trip so as to avoid driving through Deep Dixie after dark, always a perilous proposition for integration workers in such states as Alabama and Mississippi. As they passed through Birmingham, Ala., a car loaded with white teenagers pulled alongside, screamed "Nigger lover!" at a white girl student sitting next to Chaney in the station wagon...
Before leaving town, they dropped by the COFO office. Schwerner told an aide to call the FBI if he was not back by 4:30 that afternoon. Threats had become a commonplace in his life, but in recent weeks they had seemed even more ominous. Besides, he knew that the license number of the station wagon had been circulated by the area's Citizens Council. Chaney had the car's tank filled with gasoline before leaving Meridian; the three workers did not want to make any unnecessary stops in dangerous territory...
...drove a mile down the road to the farmhouse of Junior Roosevelt Cole, 58, a Negro and lay leader of the church, who told them that on the night of the fire he was dragged from his car in the churchyard and clubbed unconscious by a mob of whites. Schwerner asked Cole to come to Meridian Tuesday. "We want to get this fire business straightened out," Schwerner told him. "We want to stop all this...
While booking them-Chaney for speeding, and Schwerner and Goodman "for investigation"-Mrs. Millie Herring, wife of the jailer, wrote "Negro male" after each man's name, then scratched out the entry beside Schwerner's and Goodman's and penned in "white." Said she later: "I declare, I was just so confused I wrote it wrong." All three were questioned, fed a meal of spoon bread, green peas, potatoes and salad by Mrs. Herring. Then, after Chancy paid a $20 fine, they were told to get out of the county...