Natalie-the-JFP-blogger didn't ask any questions she just stared as Bender dressed down the press corps for not doing more to reveal, and undo the effects of, this statewide conspiracy to forcibly deny black people the same rights as white people. This did not please white Mississippi-a state where the upstanding citizens of the White Citizens Council worked with the state-funded spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to funnel information like the license-plate number of Chaney's station wagon to the enforcers of the Ku Klux Klan, many of whom were officers of the law. Then, Bender was a 22-year-old who set up a Freedom School in Meridian with her husband so that black people could learn to read and earn the right to vote. Rita Schwerner Bender was a widow who was getting close to a modicum of justice for the Klan murder of her husband, Michael Schwerner, along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, on Father's Day, 1964. As cameras clicked all around her, Irby stared intently at the petite, gray-haired woman in the middle of the media circle on the third day of the Edgar Ray Killen trial in June 2005. Natalie Irby, 23 and looking more rock 'n' roll than the rest of the media with tattoos peeking out from under her sleeves, stood in a circle of media, her pen poised over her notebook, not writing much. It was warm under the mammoth magnolia tree on the north side of the Neshoba County Courthouse, just yards from where the Confederate soldier stood on his marble pedestal until a storm knocked him over and broke his arm off a few years back.
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