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"