5/30/2007 6:00:00 PM
Fannie Lee Chaney, mother of slain civil rights worker, dies at 84
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By DOUGLAS MARTIN
The New York Times
Fannie Lee Chaney, a $28-a-week bakery worker who became a target of racial hatred herself after her son James Chaney and two other civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, died last week in Willingboro, N.J. She was 84.
Her son Ben, James' younger brother, confirmed the May 22 death in a telephone interview.
Visitation will be Friday at Clark Memorial Funeral Home in Meridian. Services will be Saturday at 1 p.m. at First Union Missionary Baptist Church. Mrs. Chaney will be buried in Okatibbee Baptist Church Cemetery next to her son.
Four decades after losing her son, Chaney drew national attention in June 2005 when she testified for the state of Mississippi in the murder case against one of the killers.
James Chaney, a black man from Meridian, and two white civil rights workers from the North, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, disappeared in Neshoba County on June 21, 1964, at the onset of a summer-long drive by an umbrella group of civil rights organizations to register black Mississippians to vote.
The search for them seized the world's attention, ending only with the discovery of their bodies in an earthen dam near the town of Philadelphia on Aug. 4. All had been shot, and Chaney had been beaten almost beyond recognition.
Seven members of the Klan were convicted of federal civil rights violations. None of them were imprisoned more than six years, but the killings helped inspire the historic civil rights march at Selma, Ala., in 1965, the passage of the Voting Rights Act that year, and several documentary and dramatic treatments, including the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning."
"If it had been my son alone," Fannie Lee Chaney said in 1967, "nothing would have been done. Two white boys were killed, so they did something about the killing of my child who was with them."
James' sister Barbara Dailey told The Courier Post of Cherry Hill, N.J., in 2005 that her mother had at first not understood the civil rights movement.
"She was trying to find out as much about it as she could," Dailey said, "so that she could understand what was happening, how dangerous it was for him and how she could keep him safe. But by the time she figured that out, he was dead."
After her son's murder, Chaney sued five restaurants in Meridian for racial discrimination. She was fired from her job and could not find other work. Crosses were burned on her lawn, and a firebomb intended for her family's house destroyed that of a neighbor.
Then, in 2005, an eighth Klansman, Edgar Ray Killen, who had been released as a result of a hung jury in the federal trial, was cleared of murder by a state jury but convicted of manslaughter. He is serving a 60-year sentence.
Chaney was the last witness for the prosecution at Killen's trial. She shuffled to the stand with a cane and, in a voice hobbled by age, told of the last time she saw James alive. Ben was crying, she recalled, and wanted to go with his older brother, whom he idolized, on a round of civil rights activities. But she would not let him.
"J.E.," as she called James, "never came back."
Chaney recounted the eggs thrown and gunshots fired at her house after the murders, as well as the telephoned death threats.
"They said they were going to put dynamite under my house," she said, "and blow us to bits."
Besides working in a bakery, Chaney did odd jobs. Her husband, also named Ben, was a plasterer. One Sunday afternoon, when James was in his mid-teens, Ben Chaney called her to say he was leaving her. He never returned.
In addition to her son Ben, of Manhattan, and her daughter Barbara Dailey, of Willingboro, Chaney is survived by two other daughters, Janice Chaney of Brooklyn and Julia Chaney-Moss of Willingboro.
Before her husband left her, she said, he had been concerned for his son's safety. As a teenager, James had been participating in "freedom rides" to integrate bus travel, and his disapproving father had disciplined him for doing so.
Four days after James disappeared, Fannie Lee Chaney was interviewed by The New York Times and spoke of the day he had told her he was in the civil rights movement. James said, "I can probably do something for myself and help somebody else," she recalled.
Her son's murder was not Chaney's first experience with the disappearance of a family member. She remembered how her grandfather had refused to sell his house and land to white people. All that was ever found of him were a pair of shoes, his shirt and a watch, she told The Courier Post.
After crosses were burned in her yard, she moved to New York and found work at a nursing home changing linens and emptying bedpans. After 30 years, she moved to suburban New Jersey.
Chaney felt scant satisfaction that Killen was finally brought to justice. "Mighty long time," she told The Times, saying of the killers, "Most of them dead about now."
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