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Across the street from
the Kumler Chapel on the grounds of Miami University, formerly known
as the Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio, is the Freedom
Summer Memorial.

The memorial, dedicated in April 2000,
commemorates Freedom Summer training conducted at the Western
College for Women (now Miami University) and the role those
trainees played in the civil rights movement.

The memorial also
remembers the
sacrifices of the three murdered civil rights workers, Mickey
Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman (see related page on
this web site, "Retracing Freedom Summer."

While I visited this site several
months after its dedication, I did not know until the first week of
July 2001 that these three martyrs attended the same June 14 - June
20 1964 Freedom Summer training sessions held at the Western
College for Women.
From those sessions, they drove to the
CORE (Council On Racial Equality) office in Meridian, MS, arriving
on June 21, 1964. They were
murdered that night by the Ku Klux Klan who had been planning for
weeks to kill Mickey Schwerner who had been working for months in
Meridian as a voting registration activist.
This incident is chillingly noted in
one side of the Freedom Summer Memorial which reads "The FBI
announces that two of the three bodies found near Philadelphia Miss.
last night have been identified as Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner. (Third subsequently identified as James Chaney)
Tuesday August 4, 1964 Washington DC"
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