Fifty years ago in Mississippi, civil rights activists from both the North and South came together for Freedom Summer, an effort to register and empower black voters. As our group from Tent: the South traveled from Louisiana to the heart of Mississippi, we spent a lot of time thinking about the legacy of these incredible people, as well as the complicated role that Jews played in the struggle. Here are five of the most surprising/poignant/profound/intriguing/difficult things that I’ve experienced so far in Mississippi:
1. We watched part of the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize while en route from Natchez to Jackson. A major part of the film’s narrative centered on the disappearance of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) members James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, all three of whom were ultimately found murdered and buried in a rural Mississippi field. Their bodies were not discovered until 44 days after they were kidnapped. And, during the search process, the bodies of eight other black men—five of whom were never identified—were uncovered. As the film played on our tour bus, I gazed out the window and watched the Mississippi countryside roll by. There was a peculiar resonance in that moment: here I was, a northerner riding on a bus with a group of other idealistic young people through the heart of the Deep South, looking out into the very fields that had been cultivated, both literally and metaphorically, with black blood. I felt at once an deep connection to the story playing out on the screen above me and an incredible distance from it. History was coming alive as I experienced the very places where it happened. And yet I realized how different it was to look back on incidents with well-documented outcomes than it was to experience those stories in real time. I also was troubled by the fact that the abduction and deaths of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman garnered national attention and went on to become part of the historic narrative because Schwerner and Goodman were white. (They were also both Jewish, as were one-third to one-half of the Freedom Riders from the North.) Had they been black like Chaney, they most likely would have disappeared from the world and the history books, like the other eight men found in the search.
2. We stopped briefly at Tougaloo College, a historically black college (HCBU) in Jackson. During Freedom Summer, Tougaloo served as a safe haven for black and white activists to gather and develop strategies. We began our tour in the chapel that had been used as a rallying place. It was there that some of the pillars of the movement like Medgar Evers, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken to the crowds of Freedom workers gathered there. Once again, the presence of ghosts of the past was palpable. Tougaloo College was also one of the few colleges in the first half of the 20th century to welcome Jewish professors fleeing from Europe (who themselves were especially sensitive to issues of political disenfranchisement). The land that now makes up the campus was an antebellum-period plantation, another aspect of its history that makes it inextricable from the story of race relations in the region.
3. We visited the Temple Beth Israel in Jackson. During the Civil Rights era, Rabbi Perry Nussbaum spoke out in favor of desegregation resulting inthe bombing of the Temple and his own home in 1967 . We stood in the very spot in the Temple where the bomb had gone off (fortunately no one was killed in either attack) and looked around. If we hadn’t been told the significance of where we were standing, we would have no way of knowing. There are no commemorative plaques or monuments. The only reference to the champion of social progress who retired in 1973 is a small photograph that hangs unassumingly in the entrance hallway. The lack of memorial reflects the congregation’s ambivalent and complicated relationship to Rabbi Nussbaum. In our seminar that day, we discussed how the strict racial spilt of the South created a dichotomy in which Jews were part of the white ruling class. Some feared that speaking out against the social order would jeopardize their own standing in the community. Although national Jewish organizations spoke out in favor of desegregation, many southern factions believed that it was neither a Jewish issue nor something non-Southerners should weigh in on.
4. After our stint in Jackson, we headed to what is perhaps the most complicated region in all the South—the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is often described as the South’s “South.” By the Civil Rights era the Delta had not yet felt the creep of urbanization and mechanization. As a consequence, the region held on to its old way of life, and its race relations reflected that. Because of the strict white/black spilt, none of the Jewish people we met reported experiencing any real anti-Semitism. One of our first stops was the Greenwood, about five miles from where Emmett Till was murdered. We visited the synagogue there and met with a woman who was a member of its dwindling congregation. The town has about 20 Jewish residents. The synagogue only has services when a visiting rabbi is able to join them from a big city, which is typical of most small Jewish congregations. When asked about the Delta Jews’ role in the struggle for racial equality, she told us that she believed Jews were always sympathetic to equality but that it was also very complicated. She, like other southern Jews we spoke to, had a slight tone of defensiveness that implied we, as outsiders, lacked a real understanding of the situation. After Greenwood, we drove to Indianola and had lunch with their mayor, who is Jewish. He spoke about growing up in the Delta during the 1960s, and how his parents, who ran a dry-goods store, remained neutral about race relations so as not to alienate either their white or black customers. Today, however, he is actively working to eliminate the poverty and educational problems in his town, and Indianola was named a Promise Neighborhood by the Obama administration.
5. In the town of Ruleville, Mississippi, we visited the grave of activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who made her life’s mission to increase black political representation for the people of the Delta. Although she only had a fourth-grade education, she worked tirelessly to bring the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to challenge the all-white delegation from Mississippi. I’ll leave you with the famous quote from Fannie Lou herself, which to me really captures the past struggles of Mississippi but also the dedication to progress embodied by so many of the people we met: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Tent: The South was organized by the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. To read more about my trip, click here.
To see photos from my travels, click here.
