Jews Who Died While Helping Blacks in Civil Rights Movement in the South

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              

Michael Schwerner                          James Chaney                               Andrew Goodman

During the 1960s, there were many young Jewish people who supported the Civil Rights Movement.  Statistically, Jews were one of the most actively involved non-black groups at that time.  Jewish students worked in connection with African Americans for CORE, SCLC, and SNCC as full-time organizers and summer volunteers during the Civil Rights era.  About half of the white northern volunteers in volved in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project were Jews.  Also, about half of the civil rights attorneys active in the South during the 1960s were Jews.  In fact, many in the Jewish community supported the Civil Rights Movement.  Jews felt they had much in common with the Black position in the USA and had been suffering from anti-Semitism, and Blacks suffered from a similar thing-anti-Black.  

In June 1964, Jewish leaders were arrested in St. Augustine, Florida where the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history took place at the Monson Motor Lodge.  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, was outspoken on the subject of civil rights.  This was at the period of Jews listening to the call from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was there as well.  Abraham marched with Dr. King in the Selma to Montgomery march.  

In the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders of 1964,  2 white activists  were killed, murdered;  Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both Jewish.  Their work included   promoting voting registration among African Americans, most of whom had been disenfranchised in the state since 1890. James Chaney, Black activist, was also killed along with the 2 Jewish men.                                                                    

Andrew  Goodman, born November 23, 1943,   was one of three Civil Rights Movement activists murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan.  He is known for his quotes:  Whoever moves into a community has a vested interest in it;   A people must have dignity and identity, The road to freedom must be uphill, even if it is arduous and frustrating. He was 21 years old. 

 In 1964, Goodman, recruited by John Lewis, volunteered along with fellow activists Michael Schwerner, his wife Rita Schwerner Bender, and James Chaney to work on the "Freedom Summer" project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to register black people to vote in Mississippi. Having protested U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's presence at the opening of that year's World's Fair, Goodman left New York to train and develop civil rights strategies at Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio. In mid-June, Goodman joined Schwerner in Meridian, Mississippi, where the latter was designated head of the field office. They worked in rural areas on registering blacks to vote. 

 

 Michael Henry "Mickey" Schwerner, born November 6, 1939, was one of three Congress of Racial Equality field workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.  He was 25 years old.  The Ku Klux Klan targeted Schwerner after he and his wife, Rita, had taken over the Meridian CORE field office, where they established a community center for blacks as part of grassroots organizing. Schwerner tried to establish contact with white working-class citizens of Meridian and went door-to-door to speak with them. He also organized a black boycott of a popular variety store until it hired its first African American, under the principle of "don't shop where you can't work".  Schwerner had been working closely with an assistant James Chaney, also a civil rights activist in Meridian. On the morning of June 21, 1964, the three men set out for Philadelphia, Neshoba County, where they were to investigate the recent burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church, a black church that had agreed to be a site for a religious school for education and voter registration.

                                                           

                                   

James Chaney of Mississippi, born May 30, 1943, was only 21 when he was killed, being a few months older than Andrew.  He was also one of three Congress of Racial Equality field workers killed in his own home state.  At the age of 15 as a high school student, he and some of his classmates began wearing paper badges reading "NAACP", to mark their support for the national civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1910. They were suspended for a week from the segregated high school, because the principal feared the reaction of the all-white school board. He organized voter education classes, introduced CORE workers to local church leaders, and helped CORE workers get around the counties.

In 1964, he met with leaders of the Mt. Nebo Baptist Church to gain their support for letting Michael Schwerner, CORE's local leader, come to address the church members, to encourage them to use the church for voter education and registration. Chaney also acted as a liaison with other CORE members.

The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) actively promoted civil rights.

Brandeis University, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college university in the world, created the Transitional Year Program (TYP) in 1968, in part response to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. The faculty created it to renew the university's commitment to social justice. Recognizing Brandeis as a university with a commitment to academic excellence, these faculty members created a chance to disadvantaged students to participate in an empowering educational experience.

The program began by admitting 20 African-Americans. As it developed, two groups have been given chances. 

1. The first group consists of students whose secondary schooling experiences and/or home communities may have lacked the resources to foster adequate preparation for success at elite colleges like Brandeis. For example, their high schools do not offer AP or honors courses nor high quality laboratory experiences.  Students selected had to have excelled in the curricula offered by their schools.

 2. The second group of students includes those whose life circumstances have created formidable challenges that required focus, energy, and skills that otherwise would have been devoted to academic pursuits. Some have served as heads of their households, others have worked full-time while attending high school full-time, and others have shown leadership in other ways.

While Jews were very active in the civil rights movement in the South, in the North, many had experienced a more strained relationship with African Americans. In communities experiencing white flight, racial rioting, and urban decay, Jewish Americans were more often the last remaining whites in the communities most affected. 

With Black militancy and the movements on the rise, Black Anti-Semitism increased leading to strained relations between Blacks and Jews in Northern communities. In New York City, most notably, there was a major socio-economic class difference in the perception of African Americans by Jews. Jews from better educated Upper Middle Class backgrounds were often very supportive of African American civil rights activities while the Jews in poorer urban communities that became increasingly minority were often less supportive largely in part due to more negative and violent interactions between the two groups.

Despite large Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress and the ADL being actively involved in the Movement, many Jewish individuals in the Southern states who supported civil rights for African-Americans tended to keep a low profile on "the race issue", in order to avoid attracting the attention of the anti-Black and antisemitic Ku Klux Klan. 

However, Klan groups exploited the issue of African-American integration and Jewish involvement in the struggle to launch acts of violent antisemitism. As an example of this hatred, in one year alone, from November 1957 to October 1958, temples and other Jewish communal gatherings were bombed and desecrated in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami, and dynamite was found under synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia, South Carolina. Some rabbis received death threats, but there were no injuries following these outbursts of violence.

"The deaths of affluent northern white students and threats to non-Southerners attracted the full attention of the media spotlight to the state. Many black activists became embittered, believing the media valued lives of whites and blacks differently. Perhaps the most significant effect of Freedom Summer was on the volunteers, almost all of whom—black and white—still consider it to have been one of the defining periods of their lives".

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement#American_Jewish_community_and_the_Civil_Rights_Movement

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/american-jews-and-the-civil-rights-movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Goodman_(activist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Chaney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schwerner