PHILADELPHIA, Miss. Rita Schwerner Bender walked up to the witness stand Thursday and took the somber courtroom back to that fateful day four decades ago the moment she realized the man she loved, her ...

It's been more than 40 years since civil rights worker Michael Schwerner was killed in Mississippi. Rita Schwerner Bender, his widow, talks about what the Killen verdict means to her. As ...

On June 21, 1964, three young men disappeared near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael (Mickey) Schwerner and James Chaney worked for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in nearby ...

Five days after three civil rights workers suspiciously vanished while investigating a church bombing in Mississippi during the turbulent summer of 1964, a young woman named Rita Schwerner confronted ...

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. – An 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman was taken from the courthouse on a stretcher and hospitalized with high blood pressure yesterday, the opening day of testimony at his ...

On the C-SPAN Networks: Rita Schwerner-Bender is a Spouse with two videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 1989 News Conference. The year with the highest average number of ...

A sound montage of some of the voices in the news this past week, including the jury foreman in the trial of former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen; Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan; ...

Steve Schapiro’s haunting photos document that year’s civil rights warriors who traveled from Oxford, Ohio, to Mississippi to support Black voters. Actually, at the time that the Oxford portion of ...

Sally Belfrage dreaded answering the library’s phone. It was never someone asking about a mystery book or an upcoming story time that summer in 1964 — just relentless questions about her body and ...

Rita Levant Schwerner Bender is a civil rights activist and lawyer. She and her first husband Michael Schwerner participated in the Freedom Summer of 1964, where Michael was murdered by the Ku Klux ...