Three other young civil-rights workers weren't so fortunate. In June 1964, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white Northerners, and James Earl Chaney, a black Mississippian, were abducted and shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan. Their bodies were found in an earthen dam six weeks later.
Mr. Lerner told The Inquirer in 1989 that he recalled the chill he had felt when he learned the men were missing. "We all assumed they were dead," he said, adding: "You don't think those things are going to happen to you. Schwerner and Goodman were nice Jewish boys from the North. And they were your age. It was real."
Since 1993, Mr. Lerner had been on the faculty of Penn's law school, where he established a law clinic to provide an interdisciplinary approach to child advocacy - teaching lawyers, social workers, and doctors to work together. He inspired many of his students to pursue careers in child advocacy. Others, joining law firms, volunteered in the field, said his wife, Adelaide Ferguson, also a lawyer.
"His students loved him," she said.
Before becoming a professor, Mr. Lerner was with the firm of Cohen, Shapiro, Polisher, Shiekman & Cohen for 25 years and was involved with several high-profile cases.
In 1975, he was one of three lawyers who successfully sued the city in a wrongful-death case on behalf of the family of Leroy Shenandoah. An American Indian who was a Green Beret Vietnam veteran and a member of the honor guard at President John F. Kennedy's funeral, Shenandoah was beaten and shot to death by Philadelphia police.
