Relatives question honor for civil rights workers
Source: Associated Press
Relatives question honor for civil rights workers
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press | November 23, 2014 | Updated: November 23, 2014 11:43am
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Three civil rights workers who were killed by Ku Klux Klansmen in 1964 are going to be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but the honor makes some of their relatives uneasy.
They worry it could relegate the racial equality movement to history books when it should instead be seen as relevant as ever, particularly in light of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old in August.
A widow of one of the civil rights activists said the honor, which will be awarded Monday in a ceremony at the White House, "distorts history."
"There were not just three men who were part of a struggle. There were not just three men who were killed," Rita Schwerner Bender told The Associated Press in a phone interview from her law office in Seattle. "You know, the struggle in this country probably started with the first revolt on a slave ship, and it continues now."
The civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — were killed June 21, 1964, in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The FBI launched a massive investigation that it dubbed "Mississippi Burning," and the three bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Relatives-question-honor-for-civil-rights-workers-5912692.php
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a fight for moral right will never be forgotten by me or many others. Even if those in Philadelphia, Mississippi never forget, that keeps the struggle, that has been ongoing to this very day, alive. The sad part is....it's still ongoing....racism is a systemic poison in this country's cultural veins that nothing yet has been found able to kill it. Hell can't even neutralize it. 
