Klan victim widow says race a factor in verdict

updated 10:45 p.m. ET June 22, 2005

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - With every eye fixed on her, Rita Schwerner Bender kept her composure, leaning forward in the witness chair and taking the Mississippi courtroom back to a time when black people, and any who sympathized with them, lived under a terror threat.

She told of moving with her husband, Michael Schwerner, to operate a "freedom school" for blacks in the fiercely segregated Mississippi of 1964. Back then, she had described whispered threats on the home phone, including the voice that said, "The Jew-boy is dead."

But on this day the courtroom was so quiet you could hear spectators breathe when she recounted the moment she knew they were gone forever — when their blue station wagon was found, burned and abandoned.

"I think it hit me for the first time that they were dead, that there was really no realistic possibility that they were alive," she said.

Bender broke her customary silence about the 1964 murders in the hope her testimony could help convict an 80-year-old Ku Klux Klansman in their deaths.

And it did — 41 years to the day after Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were kidnapped and killed under the cover of night. On Tuesday, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter. He could have been convicted of murder.

And again, Bender remained composed despite deep emotions as she spoke outside the courthouse afterward.

"I hope that this conviction helps to shed some light on what happened in this state," the petite, white-haired widow said. "Yet, there is something else that needs to be said.

People still ‘choose to not see the truth’
"The fact that some members of that jury could have sat through that testimony, and could not bring themselves to acknowledge that these were murders, committed with malice, indicates that there are still people, unfortunately, among you who choose to look aside and choose to not see the truth.

"And that means that there's still a lot more yet to be done."

The young New Yorkers already had been through more than most married couples witness together in a lifetime.

Michael Schwerner, known as Mickey, had founded a New York chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in April 1963, a year when dogs and fire hoses were turned on those who dared to demonstrate. By Independence Day, the Schwerners would be arrested at a protest in Baltimore, just two months before the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed by the Klan and four little black girls gave face to the movement.

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