Despite its high purpose, the Negro revolution breeds violence and death. Among its victims have been Baltimore Postman William Moore, shot on an Alabama highway while on a one-man civil rights march; Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers, shot in the back by a bushwhacker; and those four Negro girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church.
Last week there was more violence, and three more victims may have been added to the grim roster. They were two young white men and a Negro youth, all civil rights workers, missing in the murky, snake-infested swamps of eastern Mississippi, where the charred shell of their Ford station wagon was found.
The Trip South. The trail to the Mississippi swamp started on the serene, sycamore-shaded campus of the West ern College for Women at Oxford, Ohio. There, two weeks ago, an in doctrination course started for some 800 Northern college students who had volunteered to spend the summer in Mississippi working toward increased Negro voting registration. The project was sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a combine of four civil rights organizations, and by the National Council of Churches.
Among the staff for that indoctrination course were Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Chancy, 21. "Mickey" Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y., wig manufacturer, was a Cornell graduate in 1961, a social worker on New York's Lower East Side before joining the Congress of Racial Equality two years ago. Last January, Schwerner and his wife Rita, 22, went South, opened a Negro community center in Meridian, Miss. It included a 10,000-book library donated by Northern students. Rita taught reading and citizenship, instructed Negro women in how to work sewing machines, while Mickey worked on Negro vote registration.
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.
Among their Oxford students was Andrew Goodman, 20, son of a New York City building contractor and a junior at Queens College. The Mississippi project was Goodman's second active civil rights venture; he had been among those who picketed President Johnson at the World's Fair opening.
On 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.