Bill Schechter ’68 is the author of Bringing History Home: A Teachers Quest To Make The Past Matter and was a high school teacher for over three decades. He can be contacted at schech@rcn.com.
“We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” (Magnolia)
61 years ago, in 1964, Cornell alum Michael Schwerner ’61, along with two fellow civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman (son of two Cornell alums) and James Chaney, a native son of the south, travelled from Meridian, Mississippi to the town of Philadelphia to investigate the burning of a Black church. They were participants in the Freedom Summer organizing campaign. On their night-time return to Meridian, they were stopped by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who had been tipped off by the local sheriff, severely beaten and shot to death. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a nationwide search to find their bodies. Sadly, it took their brutal murders to enable Congressional leaders to win passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.
In 2014, on the 50th anniversary of the murders, a small group of alums, students and faculty proposed that Cornell build an outdoor memorial to the memory of these three brave activists. They wanted one that would be more visible and ‘present’ than the small stained glass window in Sage Chapel that students might view only once in their four years at the University. Let it also be noted that before going south, Schwerner, a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi, was largely responsible for the desegregation of Cornell’s fraternity system.
The Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner Clock Tower at Goodman’s alma mater, Queens College, was named after the three and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which he attended briefly, has inducted Goodman into its outdoor display of distinguished alums. Chaney is memorialized by a plaque in front of a church in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
A succession of Cornell presidents in the early 2000’s all gave permission for a public-facing memorial commemorating the three to be built, but the price tag placed on the project by University administrators was simply too high. The group couldn’t raise the money and nothing was done.
Why recollect this failed effort now?
Because not only was the memorial not built, but on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court eviscerated one of the last sections of the Voting Rights Act still intact.
Students, alumni and faculty alike should not have to depend on wandering into a darkened transept of Sage Chapel to maybe discover the story of these heroic activists, whose actions embody what it means to be a Cornellian. The need for a campus memorial is more important than ever, one that is a visible daily expression of the University’s values and ideals.
Bravo to anyone in 2026 who will take up this as yet unfulfilled challenge.
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