Rita Schwerner waiting by the phone

Rita Schwerner

On Nov. 24, the nation’s first African-American president awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award, to three civil rights workers who were murdered in 1964: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.

Many are not aware that Rita Schwerner, wife of Mickey Schwerner, had been in Mississippi in 1964 for the six months prior to the brutal murder of the three men. Why did she go? What did she do?

Rita is one of the most visible of the Jewish women civil rights workers who went south from 1960 to 1966 as part of established civil rights organizations. Their mission was to integrate public facilities; teach in freedom schools and adult literacy classes; participate in sit-ins, in freedom rides, in voter registration drives; and, as writer Debra L. Schultz notes, “get arrested.”

Most were well-educated northern students who chose this path because of the values that their Jewish upbringing instilled. Their parents “exposed them to the concepts of social justice, going so far as to include explicit injunctions against racism.” They were also motivated by a comparison of the violence in the south to the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. “What it meant to be a Jew was ‘never again,’ and what ‘never again’ meant was not only ‘never again’ to Jews, but ‘never again’ to stand by and let things like that happen.”

But they were also motivated by the need to have a more interesting life than that of the stereotypical housewife. Rita Schwerner remarked, “I did not see myself as saving anyone. But I did have a view of saving myself from a split-level house [in the suburbs].”

Rita worked in a small Mississippi town organizing the blacks to register to vote. Even in her grief, she had the presence to point out to the media, “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.”

Editor’s Notes: Source for quotes is  Schultz, Debra L. “Our Unsung Civil Rights Movement Heroines,” Lilleth, Fall, 1999.

TOBY ROSSNER (tobyross@cox.net) was the director of media services at the Bureau of Jewish Education from 1978 to 2002.