Reason First: The Freedom Summer Murders

What ought to be addressed about the racial issue is not just social but mystical. In the murders of civil rights workers Earl Chaney, 21, Michael Henry Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman 20, all sought to aid the construction of a Freedom School on Mount Zion Union Methodist Church that had previously been firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

A small collective waited for the men to pass in the night. The three workers never saw a morning sunrise again. Authorities removed their scorched Ford station wagon from a swamp. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) discovered all three of the bodies of the men on a farm.

Edgar Ray Killen, a Baptist minister who also moonlighted as the KKK’s chaplain, called up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) associate Buford Posey saying essentially that the NAACP member was next after the three other civil rights workers received rounds that proved fatal.

This is sick, twisted irony piled on top of each other. The Baptist minister allegedly is supposed to see no color, only the soul of the parishioner. And what is his parish? Mankind. So Killen, who was among the fifteen men charged in the case, became the only one who would be formally arrested for murder. The charge that stuck remained manslaughter which carried with it a sentence of 20 years for each of the three counts to be served successively. Killen died in prison on January 11, 2018.

This so-called man of the unknown and unknowable represented the evil that is mysticism. His level of viciousness is shared by most anyone who decides to go against people because of an alternative interpretation of that unknowable force. The compounded wickedness is present in most any faction as the world mainly proclaims mysticism.

Two of the victims of the Philadelphia, Mississippi lynching had been Jewish (Schwerner and Goodman) and one Christian (Chaney). According to intersectionality, should the Jews have been spared while the colored young man should have died? Schwerner and Goodman belonged to a separate faith. Some might argue that their ideas remained superior to those of Chaney's. Not to mention, they had lighter skin than his.

Or should the Jews have been murdered for being the total opposite of the Christisn faith? Killen supposedly subscribed to the same mystical set that most blacks and Klansmen alike worship. The collision of racism and mysticism creates messy scenes like the one that took place on June 21, 1964.

The Mississippi Civil Rights Murders should forever stand as a call to replace mysticism with reason. The unthinking brutes who claim to be righteous never fully show that they are for individual rights. Ancient texts don’t speak of freedom of speech. They deny the individual his rights to speak against the unknown and unknowable amongst a whole host of instances of irrationalism.

All three of the young men put faith in some deity. But so did Killen. What if they had dropped the mysticism and collectivism and picked up rationality and egoism?

The way to tell the story is to paint the portrait of three innocent young men attacked by a mob. Their torched vehicle and their bodies showed the evil present even in the minds of the allegedly righteous. The unknown and unknowable has had a vice-like grip on the minds of the populace for millenia. The same supposed supernatural force that Killen continued to believe in until his dying day allegedly loves everyone and anyone. Should his evil have been excused because he was an ordained minister? In what ways do those who believe also forgive Killen and the scores of other monsters who committed heinous crimes? Do they get a pass morally?

It’s extremely difficult in most circumstances to parse out the issue of ethics as it applies to the majority of people around the globe who have faith. And there’s something. Should blacks be called “majorities” based on their faith? They overwhelmingly fall to their knees and lift up praises to the unknown and unknowable. The truth is that these murders should always stand for the hatred for reason that arises out of the connection with mysticism. May reason be remembered in the case of these young men of freedom.