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| by A. David Dahmer |
| April 04, 2012 |
(l-r) Carroll Heideman; Andrew Witt, associate professor for the Edgewood College History Department; Rita Bender, honorary lecturer,for the 7th Annual Hatheway History Lecture; And Dean Pribbenow, Dean of the School of Integrative Studies
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In 1964, Bender's husband, Mickey Schwerner, was murdered in Mississippi for trying to help African Americans get the right to vote.
We must address issues of poverty — the unequal apportionment of education, health care, housing, and jobs and we must recognize that the justice system is not working for people of color, said Rita Bender at the 7th Annual Hatheway History Lecture titled “The Unfinished Civil Rights Struggle” March 29 in the Anderson Auditorium on the Edgewood College campus.
Bender is the widow of Michael Schwerner, a civil rights worker who was murdered with two other men in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964. Schwerner was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) field workers killed in Philadelphia, Miss., by the Ku Klux Klan in response to their civil rights work, which included promoting voting registration among Mississippi African Americans. Schwerner’s plight is portrayed in the film “Mississippi Burning.”
“The 1960s were a monumental and historical time that significantly changed race relations in our country.... but we cannot be relegated to the past,” Bender told the crowd. “We have unfinished business. It is certainly true that we have not moved to a post-racial society. We must go far back in our history if we are to understand this profound struggle. We must acknowledge where we are now and what are the remaining legacies of human bondage, and what we can do to repair the damage.”
Bender is currently a lawyer in Seattle, Washington. She has been an active participant in civil rights and justice advocacy since the early 1960s. She served as a civil rights field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian, Miss., and thereafter worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party prior to attending law school at Rutgers University. Bender was a visiting faculty member at the University of Mississippi for the 2009-2010 academic year in order to teach a course on restorative justice, and she has presented papers and lectured at numerous universities over the years on restorative justice as well.
The undoing, Bender said, of the profound moral wrong of slavery is unfinished work. “How ironic that many of the people who fought the [American] Revolution with glorious ideas of liberty were themselves owners of human chattels,” Bender said. “The continuation of slavery was much debated by the framers of the Constitution, the southern colonies insisting on its perpetuation as a condition to joining the Union. Indeed, our Constitution was a disastrous political compromise and it enabled slavery to continue — a blight and an unbearable burden on an infant nation that would cause unimaginable suffering and disunity for years to come.”
Bender asked the audience to consider “whether we can truly heal as a society if we refuse to acknowledge and confront our past in a meaningful fashion.” She would go on to give an in-depth history of the plight of African Americans in America and civil rights struggles from slavery to modern times also touching on Reconstruction, Jim Crow America, African American World War II fighters, and the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
The Southern strategy of 1968 revitalized the Republican Party, she said, which went on to meld a coalition of wealthy white voters, along with the religious right, and those working class people who could be convinced that they had lost their jobs to people of color, due to misguided federal programs.
“Beginning with President Richard Nixon, the Republican party courted disaffected white voters,” she said. “It was no coincidence that Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair where notorious civil rights murders had occurred in 1964.
“Poverty is one of the legacies of slavery and its inevitable consequence. Jim Crow was designed to keep the former slave population poor and under educated. A redistribution of wealth has occurred but it has gone to people who have already amassed a staggering amount of money,” Bender continued. “According to the 2010 census bureau, 27.4 percent of black families live below the poverty level nationwide. The poverty rate of the black population is three times that of the white population.
“The overwhelming disparity between wealth and poverty and the cavalier disregard for the poor is a national shame,” she added. “America is still the richest, most-powerful country in the world and has the ability to bring racism and domestic poverty to an end.”
In June of 2005, former Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of killing three civil rights workers 41 years ago in Philadelphia, Mississippi including Bender’s husband, Michael Schwerner. Bender was at the trial and watched the sentencing. At the time, Bender said that the trial and its outcome was not the final peace needed for the town of Philadelphia or the state of Mississippi to move on from its violent and racist past. Instead, she said, there are still many more events from that time that need to be made public and addressed before real healing can happen. The feeling was still the same today.
“Now, almost a half of century after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, we are still struggling to heal the profound injury to our nation,” Bender said. “We must recognize the links between race and poverty. We have to address the unequalness of education, health care, housing, and jobs. And we must do more than just recognize the problem. We must get out and make our family, friends, and neighbors understand that sitting out an election is not an option. We must make our elected officials understand what we expect of them and that if they do their part, we will do our part to protect their back.
“Organizing does not end with an election but rather it is continuous work. We must do the work to form coalitions that will move forward and obtain meaningful remedies,” she added. “We can learn from the civil rights efforts and use that knowledge and perseverance to give us strength. We must take this struggle for civil rights forward. Our nation depends on it.”
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