50 years on, Mississippi still burns

It was a quest for freedom that cost them their lives.

Saturday marks 50 years since James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered while trying to help African Americans in Mississippi register to vote during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.

That summer, hundreds of young, white northerners had descended on the staunchly segregationist state to help with civil rights organizing and black voter registration drives. On June 21, Goodman, Schwerner and Mississippi native Chaney set out from the town of Meridian to investigate a church burning — they never returned.

Their disappearance and deaths (at the hands of a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob) sparked nation-wide outrage, shifted national attention to the brutal resistance to granting blacks equal rights in the south, and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It was a significance not lost on Schwerner’s wife, even as federal agents searched for her still-missing husband. “It's tragic, as far as I'm concerned,” Rita Schwerner told reporters, “that white Northerners have to be caught up in the machinery of injustice and indifference in the South before the American people register concern.” And she he took it one step further: “I personally suspect that if Mr. Chaney, who is a native Mississippian Negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others that have come before, would have gone completely unnoticed.”

In the 50 years since the three men were killed, there has been progress on multiple fronts. But true to the south, that progress has been slow.

Mississippi has made an earnest effort to own its tumultuous history of racism with the first state-funded civil rights museum in the country, being built “side-by-side” with the state’s history museum in Jackson. In that museum, the history of Freedom Summer, the brutal killing of Emmett Till and many other atrocities will be shown in all of their unforgiving detail (at least that’s the plan). But it’s two steps forward, one step back for the state that still features the Confederate flag inside of its own.

The state is one of many in the south and Midwest that have ushered in strict voter I.D. laws, taking advantage of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that drastically weakened the Voting Rights Act.

The laws will make it (and in some case already have made it) disproportionately more difficult for the poor and minorities — most pointedly, African Americans — to exercise their right to vote.

From Texas to North Carolina, and in states with conservative legislatures and governors across the country, new ways to restrict voting are all the rage. The Texas GOP platform [PDF], released Thursday, calls for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act so the state can return to the voting laws it had on the books pre-civil rights movement.

That was the very world Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner lost their lives trying to change, and yet a half-century after their murders, it doesn’t look good for advocates pressuring Congress to move on bill that would give the VRA back some of its muscle.

It’s been 50 years, and it seems the south is still burning.