A Change is Gonna Come

How the civil rights movement shaped a young woman's life.

BY: Cheryl Rivers

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It was 1964, Freedom Summer in Mississippi. For a 15-year-old white girl caught up in the cause, the murder of three young civil rights workers was a defining moment. On June 21, 2005--41 years to the day since James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared--a jury in Philadelphia, Mississippi, found 81-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen guilty of manslaughter in their deaths.

When I heard about the arrest of Edgar Ray Killen in early January 2005 for the 1964 killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, my first reaction was deep sadness. News of the arrest tapped into the intense grief I felt 41 years ago as a teenager in Jackson, Mississippi.

I first got caught up in the civil rights cause when I was a 12- and 13-year-old, the age when idealistic adolescents begin to see the world with great clarity about right and wrong. Sit-ins, freedom rides, the 1963 march on Washington-those were the sources of my moral formation.

I remember my frustrated incomprehension that the adult world didn't respond to the civil rights movement. To me this was a clear issue of right and wrong. At bedtime, I would bargain with God: "If you will make this better, if you will change people's hearts, I will believe in you." The civil rights years were a time of real spiritual crisis for me.

By the summer of '64, I had a driver's license and could elude my parents' supervision. I was determined to be part of the "Freedom Summer." My friends and I were somewhat naïve, believing integration was such an obvious good it must come soon.

I was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s moral leadership throughout my youth: There had been the march on Selma, the freedom rides. And I admired the sacrifices and courage of other pacifist African-American ministers, who were willing to be arrested for the cause. They were able to persevere because their faith told them that taking action was a moral imperative. Those ministers articulated so eloquently the idea that each of us should strive toward a heaven on earth. If you believe in salvation, you want to attain it, and you want to attain it now.

To me, Dr. King and his peers were moral exemplars. They shaped my understanding of integration as a value. I thought that African Americans owned moral integrity and truth. While I wanted integration to afford blacks the economic and educational opportunities whites already enjoyed, I also believed very strongly that the inner changes that had to take place before our society could embrace equal civil rights needed to happen in the hearts and minds of white people.

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