Voting activist killed during Freedom Summer in Mississippi believed country should be integrated
Associated PressNEW YORK — Stephen Schwerner doesn’t remember how he learned that his younger brother Michael, nicknamed Mickey, was missing in Mississippi along with colleagues Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. That’s a terribly sad commentary on America, but that’s the truth.” Stephen Schwerner, two-and-half years older than his brother, said their parents instilled in them a deep belief in human rights and social justice. “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to go to Mississippi.” His brother organized and his sister-in-law, Rita, ran a freedom school, Schwerner said. “In many ways, the story — the struggle for human rights in the United States — is two steps forward and then one back, and maybe three steps backward,” Schwerner said. “This is how it’s supposed to be — that reading of the Declaration of Independence knowing full well it didn’t apply to most people because when it said all men are created equal, it really meant landowning white men,” Schwerner said.
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