Jews & Civil Rights

By DOUG CHANDLER

The first words Bernie Dinkin heard in Mississippi, where he worked in the civil rights movement 40 years ago, are still chilling today.

“Hey Jewboy,” came the taunt, shouted by a large, barrel-chested man from across the street. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Harlem?”

The man got at least one thing right: Dinkin, a native of Philadelphia, PA, is Jewish, as were many of the people who, in the 1960s, fought in the South for civil rights.

Of all the volunteers who headed south at the time, perhaps as many as one-third or even more were Jewish, Rabbi Israel Dresner, another activist, guesses, noting that Jews made up only 3 percent of the population in the early ’60s. The disproportionate number of Jews involved in the civil rights movement has been noted in books, articles and films.

For many of those active in the movement, memories of that time have surfaced again in recent months as Mississippi, Alabama and other Southern states try to address an era they consider a stain on their history.

One such development took place last June, when a jury in Mississippi convicted a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, now in his 80s, for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Those killed included two Jewish natives of New York, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, as well as James Chaney, 21, a black resident of Mississippi.

The memories also resurface on occasions like Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, especially for those who were friends of King or, like the civil rights leader, spent time in Southern jails.

Discussing the period, Andrew Goodman’s 89-year-old mother, Carolyn, said her son went to Mississippi motivated by a burning sense of social justice — one connected at least partly to Jewish history.

“My husband and I lived during the whole period of Hitler and Mussolini,” she said, “and we spoke very openly” about the Holocaust, as well as developments in the South. “All our kids were just incensed by the injustice certain people encountered.”

As a result, they felt a tremendous amount of empathy for Southern blacks, who feared for their lives in an era of racial harassment, lynchings and murder, said Carolyn Goodman, who still lives in New York. “You take a young man like Andy who said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening in this day and age. It’s like the Middle Ages.’”

The same passion for justice is what brought Dinkin to Mississippi in 1965, about a year after the killings.

Dinkin, a retired organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, now called UNITE, worked in McComb, MS, where he and others “helped launch Headstart centers, registered voters — and tried to stay alive.”

Now 72 and a resident of Elkins Park, PA, he said he attended a racially mixed high school and recalls “black customers in the Jewish fish market speaking Yiddish.” He also remembers that his father had black friends in the 1940s, rare for even a Northern city.

“There was a theme in the family that I learned from my parents of social justice,” Dinkin said. “It wasn’t anything religious, but that was my belief, and I’ve lived it for a long time. My idea of Judaism is social justice for all.”

Very few of the Jewish civil rights workers traveled south “as Jews first,” said Charney Bromberg, who also worked in Mississippi. Instead, each entertained a strong social conscience or came from a family involved in socialism, trade unionism or other causes. But they did have a sense of history.

“They were the sons and daughters and grandchildren of an immigrant generation that was tremendously involved in movements for social justice,” both in Europe and in this country, said Bromberg, 61, a resident of Tarrytown, NY, and the son of socialist parents.

In addition, he continued, nearly all of them believed their Jewishness “was central to their involvement,” which, in turn, was closely tied to the story of Passover. “They understood the Exodus and the meaning of fighting for freedom.”

That theme, in fact, “became the central narrative of the black civil rights movement,” said Bromberg, a comment echoed in other interviews. Dinkin said one of the most touching moments during his time in Mississippi took place when an elderly black woman approached him, saying, “You rescued the Israelites from Egypt and now you’re down here to help us.”

The three years that Bromberg spent in Mississippi had their terrifying moments, including the day he learned that the Klan had put out a contract on his life. He received the information from an FBI agent, said Bromberg, who worked between 1964 and 1967 for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

The information came after he had driven to a rural area with one of his partners, a black teenager from Mississippi, and discovered a row of parked cars belonging to Klan members who, according to the FBI, were planning to ambush the two. Bromberg raced past the cars with his colleague, who, by then, was suffering from a ruptured appendix, and finally found a hospital that would treat the teenager.

Like other civil rights workers, though, he followed a series of common-sense tips that would keep him safe, said Bromberg, who later worked for the Anti-Defamation League and is now the executive director of Meretz USA, an affiliate of a progressive-Zionist political party in Israel. Those precautions included varying the routes he traveled.

The few rabbis who traveled south included Israel Dresner, the spiritual leader of Temple Sha’arey Shalom in Springfield, NJ, from 1958 to 1970. Dresner, now living in Wayne, NJ, took part in the first Freedom Ride for members of the clergy — a trip that ended with his arrest and those of nine others in Tallahassee, FL.

The Freedom Rides, organized by CORE in 1961, brought volunteers to the deep South, where laws prohibited blacks and whites from riding on buses together and restricted blacks to the back of the bus. Their aim was to integrate facilities along the way, as well as the buses.

All in all, said Dresner, he was jailed for his activities on four separate occasions.

The rabbi also became close to King after visiting the reverend in a jail cell in Albany, GA. King asked the rabbi and another cleric to travel north and gather additional members of the clergy to support the movement. But the 75 people they helped recruit, as well as the two clerics, were arrested “on some trumped-up charge,” he recalled, leading to yet another stint in jail.

Jewish participation in the civil rights movement was much broader and wider than that of any other group, said Dresner, a board member of Meretz USA. “We were 11 times what we should have been,” given the number of Jews in the general population.

He believes the extent of their involvement is linked to the teachings of Jewish tradition.

“There is no other commandment repeated as often in the Tenach,” the Jewish Bible, as the one that instructs Jews to love the stranger as they love themselves, Dresner said. “It’s repeated 36 times in different forms.”