James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner

Some “very fine people” murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964, when they were registering voters as part of Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

Chaney, 21 at the time of his death, was an African American and a Mississippi native. Goodman and Schwerner, respectively 20 and 25, were Jewish New Yorkers who had volunteered to spend the summer on a Mississippi voter registration drive organized by CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), along with thousands of other northern whites, an estimated half of whom were Jewish.

In an absolutely sincere sense, they died al-kiddush haShem, as martyrs who were sanctifying the name of the Holy One.

Every year at Yom Kippor, the traditional liturgy recounts Rabbi Avika and the other martyrs who were killed by the Romans for holding fast to Torah, even as ruling authorities denied the values of Torah and those who live it.

So too James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed by America’s racists for their commitment to the radical teaching that everyone was an expression of the Holy One, including America’s poor, despised and disenfranchised.

While we remember and honor the memories of those who gave their lives for these efforts, there were thousands of others, who contributed in far more modest ways to make America a more just place. Those were regular, everyday people, with jobs, responsibilities, mortgages and the like. People a lot like you and me.

We are now in the midst of an effort to revive the Poor People’s Campaign, the effort that Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin and others though was the natural evolution of the Civil Rights Campaign that martyred Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer.

Here at BHA, we’ve heard the New York State Chair of the Campaign speak, many of us have traveled to New York to hear Reverend William Barber speak, and now I hope you’ll join me and Cantor Ellen in Albany on June 11.

The mechanisms of oppression are marginally more hidden than they were in the 1960’s - there are few actual lynch mobs anymore and blacks, Jews and other minorities are rarely barred from participation in public life explicitly because of their racial, religious or gender identity.

And yet the work for which Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner and so many others gave their lives is far from done. The Poor People’s Campaign is trying to move that work forward, and I hope you’ll join us.

May we never be tested as they were, and may we merit to move their work forward.