Voter suppression sure has changed. A bit of our history. If you read this piece you'll find a kind of thinking and blame that surfaces too often in human folk.
by Patsy Sims
"Patsy Sims has published three books, including The Klan, and is working on a memoir tentatively titled Doing Time in Texas: The Story of a Girl, a Prison, and a Town Called Sugar Land. She directed Goucher College's creative nonfiction program ..."
ISSUE 86 No Twang of Conscience Whatever Oxford American - The Southern Magazine of Good Writing
"The three workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were engaged in a massive drive to register black voters and had that Sunday, June 21, 1964, driven the forty miles from Meridian to examine the ruins of a burned-out black church that was to have been used as a training school. Chaney was black and a Meridian native; Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and from New York, and in that charged climate of 1964 they were not welcome in Mississippi, or in most of the South. All three worked with the Congress of Racial Equality. All three were in their early twenties, “hardly more than boys,” the government prosecutor would say at the eventual trial of Killen and seventeen other men.
The trio’s smoldering Ford station wagon was recovered two days after their disappearance, but the search for bodies stretched into weeks, the weeks into a month, with the Mississippi River giving up the corpses of two black males who in some real or imagined way had dared cross the color line—but not the bodies of the three voting-rights workers."
by Patsy Sims
"Patsy Sims has published three books, including The Klan, and is working on a memoir tentatively titled Doing Time in Texas: The Story of a Girl, a Prison, and a Town Called Sugar Land. She directed Goucher College's creative nonfiction program ..."
ISSUE 86 No Twang of Conscience Whatever Oxford American - The Southern Magazine of Good Writing
"The three workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were engaged in a massive drive to register black voters and had that Sunday, June 21, 1964, driven the forty miles from Meridian to examine the ruins of a burned-out black church that was to have been used as a training school. Chaney was black and a Meridian native; Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and from New York, and in that charged climate of 1964 they were not welcome in Mississippi, or in most of the South. All three worked with the Congress of Racial Equality. All three were in their early twenties, “hardly more than boys,” the government prosecutor would say at the eventual trial of Killen and seventeen other men.
The trio’s smoldering Ford station wagon was recovered two days after their disappearance, but the search for bodies stretched into weeks, the weeks into a month, with the Mississippi River giving up the corpses of two black males who in some real or imagined way had dared cross the color line—but not the bodies of the three voting-rights workers."
