Norton Manages Bill Honoring Student Civil Rights Activists Killed in Campaign She Helped Organize

Norton Manages Bill Honoring Student Civil Rights Activists Killed in Campaign She Helped Organize

January 27, 2010

WASHINGTON, DC - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), chair of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over federal properties, today managed a bill which recalled her own personal history in the Mississippi civil rights movement, to name the FBI field office in Jackson, Mississippi, for student civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, killed in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, which Norton helped organize. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were among thousands of students who went to Mississippi during the summer of 1964. H.R. 3562 names the field office, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson as a result of the murders, in honor of the slain students. "The students came to Mississippi to foster peaceful change by registering black people to vote," Norton said in her introductory statement, as the nation's first African American president prepared to give his first State of the Union Address tonight. "After they disappeared, I recall the long days and nights until their bodies were discovered...this bill offers an opportunity to recognize their sacrifice, which galvanized the nation's conscience to the brutality that everyday Americans were facing while pursuing equality."