Micheal Schwerner
Micheal Schwerner was a Civil rights activist born in New York City in
1939.After graduation at Cornell University in 1961; he became a social worker
of the Hamilton-Madison Settlement House on New York's Lower East Side. He
married Rita in 1962. Then in January 1964, they both became field staff workers
for the (Core). They both moved to Meridian, Mississippi to open a field office.
James Earl Chaney helped them get settled.
During a training session for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project at
the Western College for Women in Oxford Ohio, he met and invited Andrew Goodman
to join the Meridian CORE field Office. While during back to Meridin on June
21,1964, after inspecting a torched black church in Philadelphia, Mississippi
and Schwerner Chaney and Goodman were pulled over by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price
and two carloads of Ku Klux Klan. They were killed and buried near a damn under
construction. The FBI began the biggest investigation ever conducted. They found
the decomposed bodies, which have been brutality beaten, before they were
killed, thanks to an anonymous informer. In 1967, the KKK and Price were found
guilty of federal civil rights violations. Micheal Schwerner is remembered in
the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama where his name is engraved.
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