In Memory: James Earl Chaney

Today is Saturday, 30 May 2009.

James Earl Chaney was born in the African-American ghetto in Meridian, Mississippi on this date in 1943. He would later become a volunteer, then a paid staffer in the organizing office of the Congress of Racial Equality at Philadelphia, Mississippi. On 21 June 1964, Chaney and fellow CORE staffers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were assassinated outside Philadelphia by the Ku Klux Klan.

On Chaney’s tombstone is the inscription:

“There are those who are alive,
Yet will never live,
There are those who are dead,
Yet will live forever.

Great deeds inspire and encourage the living.”
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Also on this date:

In 1788, Voltaire died.

In 1960, Pasternak died.