Voting activist killed during Freedom Summer in Mississippi believed country should be integrated

By GARY FIELDS
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Stephen Schwerner doesn’t remember how he learned that his younger brother Michael was missing in Mississippi along with colleagues Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. What he remembers is that as soon as the family heard the news, they were certain of their fate: “We were sure they were killed,” he says. It was the summer of 1964, an era marked by murders, beatings, disappearances and church bombings amid the struggle for voting rights and the fight against segregation. The disappearance of the three men, who had been part of a drive to register Black voters, and the discovery of their bodies was an inflection point that shocked the national conscience.