Rita Schwerner Bender

Rita Levant Schwerner Bender (born 1942) is a civil rights activist and lawyer. She and her first husband Michael (Mickey) Schwerner participated in the Freedom Summer of 1964, where Michael was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. As his young widow, she drew national attention for her commentary on racial prejudice in the United States, delivered at a press conference after her husband went missing. After the Civil Rights Movement, Schwerner became an attorney, now practicing family law in Washington state. She continues to advocate for civil rights today through her law practice and public presentations.

Schwerner and husband Michael both grew up in New York. They married when she was 20, he 22.

Rita Schwerner became active in the civil rights movement first in the north; she and Michael were both arrested at a civil rights protest in Baltimore in July 1963.

The Schwerners moved to Meridian, Mississippi in January 1964. She was a teacher, and the two worked at a freedom school and registering black voters.

The summer of 1964, known as "Freedom Summer" was an endeavor to register more black voters in the deep south. It was headed up by civil rights activist groups such as the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Rita Schwerner and her husband Michael (Mickey) were among a group of three hundred students who went to Mississippi to help with the voting campaign. They were 22 and 24 years old.

In June 1964, the Schwerners were attending a civil rights activism training in Ohio when they learned a church involved in the movement in Neshoba County, Mississippi, had been burned down and its clergy beaten. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, a black man, and Andrew Goodman, who was white (as were the Schwerners) drove the Schwerner family station wagon back to Mississippi to investigate. On Sunday June 21, the three men were driving together when they were stopped by Neshoba deputy sheriff Cecil Price outside of the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Price arrested the three men on charge of speeding and locked them in the jailhouse, only to release them around 10pm that night. The men were never seen again. Rita Schwerner was still in Ohio when she learned of their disappearance, and two days later, at the Cincinnati airport with Fannie Lou Hamer and getting ready to travel back to Mississippi, Schwerner learned their station wagon had been found burned, in a swamp.

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