Each One Teach One

Each One Teach One: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

In the summer of 1964, three young men climbed into a blue Ford station wagon to investigate a burned church in rural Mississippi, and none of them made it home alive. Their names were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and their deaths became one of the defining moments of the American civil rights movement, a moment so significant that the Stanford Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute records that Dr. King himself called their murders "an attack on the human brotherhood taught by all the great religions of mankind."

To understand why these three men were targeted, you have to understand what they were doing in Mississippi in the first place. Freedom Summer, also called the Mississippi Summer Project, was a coordinated effort by the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register Black voters in a state where, according to the Stanford King Institute, intense and violent segregationist resistance had already blocked the direct-action tactics that worked in cities like Birmingham. Michael Schwerner, a twenty-four-year-old CORE organizer from New York, and James Chaney, a young Black Mississippian who had joined the movement locally, had spent months building trust with the Black community in Neshoba County, and according to the SNCC Digital Gateway, they planned to turn Mount Zion Methodist Church into a Freedom School that summer. Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old Queens College student, had just arrived as a volunteer to help.

Their organizing made them targets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's own historical account describes how, on June 16, 1964, a mob of Klansmen looking for Schwerner instead found an empty church, so they burned it down and beat the congregants who were there. When Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner drove to Neshoba County on June 21 to investigate that fire, they never made it back. They were arrested on a pretext of speeding, held in the Philadelphia jail for hours while Klansmen were alerted, and then released after dark straight into an ambush.

What happened next is documented in painstaking detail in the United States Department of Justice's own investigative report, which confirms that Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price coordinated with Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen to intercept the three men on Highway 19 and drive them to a remote road, where they were shot and buried beneath an earthen dam. Their bodies were not found for forty-four days. As the PBS American Experience documentary account notes, it took roughly one hundred fifty FBI agents and hundreds of Navy personnel searching the Mississippi backcountry before the remains were finally uncovered on August 4, 1964.

The killings sparked national outrage precisely because two of the victims were white Northerners, a hard truth that many organizers at the time already understood and resented. Yet the tragedy did what years of organizing alone had struggled to do: it forced the federal government's hand. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act just days after the men vanished, and the murders directly fueled the political momentum behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Justice, however, moved at a crawl. Only seven of the twenty-one men implicated were ever convicted on federal charges, and none served more than six years, according to the Andrew Goodman Foundation, the organization the Goodman family founded to keep his memory alive. It was not until 2005, forty-one years after the murders, that Edgar Ray Killen was finally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to sixty years in prison.

In 2014, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a recognition that came half a century too late but affirmed what their communities always knew: that three young men who believed a Black Mississippian deserved the same ballot as anyone else paid for that belief with their lives. Each one teach one is not just a slogan. It is exactly what Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were doing when they died, teaching people how to read, how to register, and how to demand freedom that had been withheld from them for generations. Their example asks the rest of us a simple question: what are we willing to teach, and what are we willing to risk, so that someone else can be free?