When her husband was murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964 in Mississippi, Rita Levant Schwerner Bender used the ensuing media attention to focus the public’s awareness on the importance of civil rights. Bender and her first husband, Michael Schwerner, shared a passion for the civil rights movement and moved to Mississippi in 1964 to register Black voters. During training for Freedom Summer, Michael Schwerner and two other volunteers, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were murdered by the KKK. In a statement, Bender, widowed at 22, pointed out that the media attention was due entirely to the fact that her husband and Andrew Goodman were white, calling out the fact that murders of African Americans regularly went unremarked on throughout the South. Just months later, she participated in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention, protesting the lack of representation for Black voters. Bender graduated from Rutgers School of Law in 1968 and worked with the ACLU for several years before opening a family law practice specializing in adoption and assisted reproduction. Almost 50 years after the attack, the final member of the group behind her husband’s murder was convicted in 2005, though Bender continued to assert that the high media attention of the case was primarily due to continued racial bias towards white victims. She spent many years working to provide legal aid for indigent populations and served on multiple legal commissions for social justice issues before retiring from practice in December 2023.