Remembering James Chaney, Voting Rights Hero and Martyr

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

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Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

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May 30, 2012

From the African American Registry

James Chaney was born on this date in 1943 in Meridian, Mississippi.

During Freedom Summer in 1964, Chaney worked with an interracial team, including New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, to organize a community center in Meridian and to register African Americans for voting.

James Chaney, civil rights hero and martyr

On June 21, 1964, with two Jewish associates, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Mississippi Freedom Summer project, the three set out to investigate a church bombing in Longdale, MS, a potential site for a Freedom School teaching literacy and voter education. As the three of them were driving back to Meridian, police in Philadelphia, MS, detained them. Chaney was arrested for speeding and Schwerner and Goodman were arrested as suspects in the church bombing. No phone calls were allowed nor were any of them allowed to pay the fines.

The men were released that night but killed by members of the KKK. The FBI recovered the bodies of the murdered men from an earthen dam on August 4.

Read more about Chaney and about what happened to his killers here and here.

Voter disenfranchisement still deters Black voters.

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