Why I’m Marching on Sunday, October 30, 2005, In the Boston Re-enactment of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March

By MICHAEL JACOBY BROWN

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother’s family was from Poland; my father’s from Hungary. When I was a boy, my mother often showed me photos in our family album. “Hitler killed him. Hitler killed her,” she would say, pointing one by one to my cousins, little children who looked like me.

Hitler made a fetish of “Jewish” noses and darker looks. He turned a nation to hate the Jews by demonizing our facial features – so inferior to the Aryan “master race.” This helped to pave the way for our extermination as “unsuitable, sub-human, vermin.”

So, in 1965, when I saw photos of people beaten by state troopers in Alabama because of the color of their skin and the shape of their noses, it reminded me of what happened to my family.

How do people become expendable? This had happened to my family. How could I let it happen to others? I lived in suburban New York. What could I do to stop the hatred, the injustice?

In March of 1965 a friend and I boarded a bus to Alabama for the final days of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was seventeen. My mother told me not to go, but I had hitch-hiked across the country the previous summer and I had seen segregated bathrooms and diners. I had picked cherries with migrant workers in Oregon. I had seen a man fall off a ladder and watched the boss yell, “My ladder, my ladder!” as the man lay unconscious on the ground.

Montgomery, Alabama, was a different world. I slept between the pews on the floor of a Black church. I heeded my hosts’ warnings: Don’t walk the streets with your sleeping bag. When inside the church, duck your head when you pass the windows. “People could get shot,” they said. I hardly believed them.

Then one night Viola Luizzo, a woman from Detroit, was shot and killed driving some people back to Selma from the church. I guess they do shoot people here.

If there was any organized Jewish presence on the march, I could not tell. It was easy to spot the nuns, priests, and ministers by their habits and collars. They stood out, like the soldiers with their tents and jeeps. But as a teenager on this march, I did not see the Jews. My parents, who were certainly Jews, cared about justice. They had taken me to my first picket lines as a child. But the organized Jewish community? If Jews cared about this injustice, it was not apparent. Certainly at the Hewlett East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, where I had my bar mitzvah, this fight was invisible.

It is 40 years later. Life is different, at least in some ways.

The American Jewish community has enjoyed an unprecedented rise to equality and security that my parents’ families would never have imagined when they fled to this country. Our success and the successful establishment of the State of Israel are daily repudiations of Hitler and all that he stood for.

There are no more “Colored Only” bathrooms and drinking fountains. But in many other ways, things are not so different. Our neighborhoods and schools are still separate and unequal.

So on Sunday, October 30, 2005, at 1:00 pm, I plan to be at the First Church in Roxbury, joining others to re-enact the Selma-to-Montgomery march and Dr. King’s march against school segregation in Boston in April of 1965.

Where will the Jewish community be on Sunday afternoon, October 30? Where will your impressionable teenagers be? What will they see you doing? I hope you will join me and many others for this march, and for the long march to make justice and equality a reality.

 

For more information, contact The Mass Foundation for the Humanities, on the web at:

www.mfh.org/retracingthestruggle. Tele: 617 445-3700 (Ask for Ron Bell)

The March starts with a rally at First Church in Roxbury, 10 Putnam Street, Roxbury. The march leaves at 2 pm. with a rally in the Boston Common at 3:15 approximately.