In 1964, the Klan killed three young activists and shocked the nation

[Zorro]

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — Even in a decade marked by hatred and violence, what happened here on a sultry June night 60 years ago shocked the nation for its brazenness.

Amid Freedom Summer, a daring effort to register Black Mississippians to vote, three young civil rights workers came to town. It was a perilous time. Black churches were being torched throughout the South. Segregationists remained defiant.

As a young boy, James Young would watch his father lie on the living room floor, rifle at the ready, in case someone burst through the family’s door.

“The community would get information that the Klan is riding tonight, or they may be riding this weekend,” Young recounted later in life. “So during those times, my father would be prepped.”

https://wapo.st/3VvnzCv

I remember the time, and the later murder of Viola Liuzzo. Seems that the Republicans want to take us back to that era.

[bullimiami]

1. If it hapoened today the republicans would be giving them medals

and speaking engagements.

Oh wait, it has, and they did.

[Aristus]

2. Or they could no doubt fall back on the "Defendin' propitty" excuse.

It worked for Kyle Rottenhouse.

[Mosby]

3. The three of them are considered martyrs in Judaism

Beacon Hebrew Alliance

Some “very fine people” murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964, when they were registering voters as part of Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

Chaney, 21 at the time of his death, was an African American and a Mississippi native. Goodman and Schwerner, respectively 20 and 25, were Jewish New Yorkers who had volunteered to spend the summer on a Mississippi voter registration drive organized by CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), along with thousands of other northern whites, an estimated half of whom were Jewish.

In an absolutely sincere sense, they died al-kiddush haShem, as martyrs who were sanctifying the name of the Holy One.

Every year at Yom Kippor, the traditional liturgy recounts Rabbi Avika and the other martyrs who were killed by the Romans for holding fast to Torah, even as ruling authorities denied the values of Torah and those who live it.

So too James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed by America’s racists for their commitment to the radical teaching that everyone was an expression of the Holy One, including America’s poor, despised and disenfranchised.

https://www.beaconhebrewalliance.org/blog/james-chaney-andrew-goodman-and-michael-schwerner