28 Days of Soul Food: The Weekend Edition
How an American baker turned civil rights activist got retribution for her son in one of the country's most heinous, racially charged murders of the 1960s.
Fannie Lee Chaney was a baker earning $28 a week and living in Meridian, Mississippi, with five children and a husband in the 1960s. They were living a quiet life until her son, James, decided to join Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and register Black residents to vote. He, along with white activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York, was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
After her son’s death, Chaney sued five restaurants in the area for racial discrimination. She was also fired from her job, and her family’s lives were threatened so much that they were forced to move to New York.
She stopped baking, found work in a New Jersey nursing home, and continued to fight for justice for her son’s murder. In 2005, she finally got it when she testified for the state of Mississippi in the murder case against Edgar Ray Killen, one of her son’s murderers. While Killen was cleared for murder by the jury, he was convicted for manslaughter and given a 60-year sentence. He died in prison.
Fannie May Chaney passed away in 2007. Here is a nice tribute to her legacy.
[Illustration by Brooklyn Street Art]