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Looking back at events that shaped the Civil Rights Movement
Editor's note: Kevin McKinley is a retired educator in the Nevada Public School System.
By Kevin McKinley
Special to the Daily Mail
I took out on a trip this morning to the deep south to see some of the places I taught about for years in history and sociology at Nevada High School. I will write more extensively possibly about this trip later but as I prepare for bed, I am in Philadelphia, Miss., ...the site of the killing of the three civil rights workers detailed in the 1988 Gene Hackman and William DeFoe film "Mississippi Burning."
The three young men were killed in 1964 while trying to register blacks to vote. Their names were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They found the bodies of the three workers 44 days after they disappeared; they were buried in an earthen dam near the murder site.
After the state government refused to prosecute, the federal government initially charged 18 individuals with civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and received relatively minor sentences for their actions. Outrage over the activists' disappearances helped gain passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I will visit the grave of James Chaney tomorrow in Meridian, Miss., and also the home of Medger Evers in Jackson, Miss.
Today I visited Little Rock Central High School, where nine students were initially denied admittance to school in 1957, although schools had been legally desegregated for three years as a result of the historic Supreme Court Case Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan.
Federal troops, sent by President Eisenhower, had to be called in to escort the nine black kids to class ---- against the orders of Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus, who had ordered his law enforcement officers to keep the school segregated.
I also traveled to Money, Miss., the site of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American. Till had whistled at a white woman in a small grocery store.
The white woman, Carolyn Bryant, chased young Till out of the store. Later, Roy Bryant and his half brother found Till at his great uncle Mose Wright's, home.
He was kidnapped and never was seen alive again.
Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted of the murder but later sold their story to "Look Magazine." They admitted to the killing.
The history of our country has both good and bad chapters.
I am taking a few days to explore the latter.