Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
Here we find ourselves in the very thick of the movement, 1964, and the ‘Mississippi Burning’ murders. Those readers who are familiar with this incident will no doubt take note here that we have omitted a third victim of those murders, James Chaney, of Meridian Mississippi, and we have. This is because our story here is not so much about the murders themselves, as about Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights movement, and Goodman and Schwerner are certainly the poster children of this.
The basic story of Mississippi Burning was the abduction and murder of the three men as they were touring the state urging blacks to register to vote. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Having address congregation members at a black denomination church in Longdale Mississippi, the three were leaving town when their car was run off the road, and they were abducted and shot before being buried in the banks of an earthen dam. During the subsequent investigation, it was revealed that members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia, Mississippi Police Department were implicated in the incident. The outrage generated over this incident was one of the main factors helping the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to gain passage.
Both the white victims were Jews, and from direct activism, to finance and law, the American Jewish community was deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Representing just one per cent of the white population of the South, Jews, on the whole, were spared the worst of the race antagonism, regarded usually as honorary white protestants. As ‘Brown versus the Board of Education’ set in motion the collapse of all segregationist legislation in the South, the Jews found themselves caught between loyalty of the white community and demands of black emancipation. In the end, very few opted to side with the former.
In general, Jewish/black relations in the south were cordial, and when the protests became national in the late 1950s, Jewish money flooded in. Edith Stern, for example, daughter Julius Rosenwald, Chairman of Sears Roebuck, contributed vast sums from the Stern Family Fund to civil rights activities in the South. Offering open support, however, could be tricky. ‘The money dried up at the banks and loans were called in,’ one Jewish storekeeper recalled, ‘If you had a restaurant, linen was not picked up. If you owned a store, the local police could play havoc with you on the fire laws.’
However, on the other hand, almost every civil rights lawyer in Mississippi at that time was Jewish. The individual sacrifice of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, however, reflected a critical mass of young Jewish activists, many of whom were Ivy League students, who pushed forward the agenda of black emancipation with a highly visible white presence. One particular rabbis, Arthur Lelyveld, was beaten severely in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Physician Edward Sachar, who volunteered his medical services to the freedom marchers, narrowly escaped death as his automobile was forced off a Mississippi back road by local Klan members.