Monday open thread: Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner

Fifty-six years ago today, civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Goodman went missing in Mississippi. Their remains would be found days later, murdered by white Mississippians opposed to their registering Black people to vote.

Too many people treat the civil rights revolution as if it were one long singing of "We Shall Overcome". They treat it as if all people had to do was march, and the power structure gave in. The civil rights movement was a revolution; like all revolutions, it was bloody, and people were killed. Whites in the South were not going to give up segregation and supremacy without a fight. Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were but three young men who gave up their lives for a cause greater than themselves. They weren't the only ones to pay the ultimate price. The anodyne portrait too many people have now of the 1960s betrays the life and death struggles in which civil rights activists engaged. They weren't in a university debate club; their opponents had no compunction about using deadly violence against them.

As we remember their sacrifice, and the sacrifices of countless others, we must redouble our efforts so that their hard-won gains aren't undone by the intellectual and moral descendants of those who murdered them. There is a straight line from their murder to current efforts to undo voting rights. Honor the dead.

This is your open thread.