Gemma Birnbaum: All We Have Standing Between Us is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Additional funding provided by the Leon Levy Foundation, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Atran Foundation, and Anonymous.
Visit the companion exhibition in New York City, on view now at the Center for Jewish History, through 2026.
Archival Audio – Joachim Prinz – Washington 1964
When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned in my life and under those tragic circumstances is that bigotry and hatred are not ‘the most urgent problems.’ The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence!
Gemma Birnbaum: Before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his powerful and iconic “I have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, American Jewish Congress President Rabbi Joachim Prinz addressed the crowd. His remarks contained a cautionary tale, what he observed in Germany as his home country fell to the brutality of the Nazi regime. Prinz argued that solidarity with the Black community and advocating for civil rights was essential not just for those who had also experienced oppression, but for the future of the United States.
After the devastation of the Holocaust, many American Jews found parallels in the persecution, and institutional and societal discrimination of Black Americans. Many Jewish Americans became active participants in the Civil Rights Movement, engaging in protest, coalition building, and public acts of solidarity.
Welcome to All We Have Standing Between Us, I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society. This week’s episode, It Ought to Be Possible, begins with a dream.
Archival Audio – I Have A Dream Speech – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. Let freedom ring. And when this happens- When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’
Andrew Sperling: The Civil Rights Movement was a struggle led by Black Americans for racial equality and desegregation between the 1950s and 1960s. This was really the peak period when activists waged legal challenges against racist laws, and communities organized numerous boycotts, protests, and direct action initiatives to dismantle the racism in American social and institutional life.
Gemma Birnbaum: Andrew Sperling is the Historian and Director of Academic Initiatives at the American Jewish Historical Society.
Andrew Sperling: You had large influential organizations like the NAACP – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – that worked through the court systems to change institutional segregation, and you also had more grassroots efforts coming out of Black religious life and Black student groups, young activists who did not accept that they would continue to live as second-class citizens.
Gemma Birnbaum: For nearly a century living under Jim Crow, Black Americans across the southern United States and beyond endured discrimination, in spite of legislation including the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations and public transportation, and prohibited their exclusion from serving on a jury.
Britt Tevis: In 1883, the Supreme Court says, actually, that law, it’s not constitutional. If businesses want to discriminate in places of public accommodation, that’s a private issue. We do not think the federal government ought to have the right to legislate or intervene.
Gemma Birnbaum: Britt Tevis is assistant professor of history and the Phyllis Backer Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies at Syracuse University.
Britt Tevis: The elimination of much of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 also had implications for Jews, and we see that in the way that these private businesses decided not only to exclude African Americans but also to exclude Jewish patrons. That was also true in the realm of housing. That was also true in the realm of education. That was also true in the realm of employment.
Gemma Birnbaum: Chief among the issues facing Black Americans was voter suppression. While American Jewish men had largely enjoyed the right to vote in all states since 1828, restrictions on Black voters came to light in a 1944 study published by the Committee of Editors and Writers of the South. Legal tactics included poll taxes, literacy tests, and all-white primary elections; and outside the law, voter intimidation that included threats and acts of violence.
In the Summer of 1964 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, launched the Freedom Summer campaign – a massive voter registration drive that brought volunteers from around the country into Mississippi, including a large number of college students from the Northeast.
Unita Blackwell, an activist and the first Black woman to ever be elected as mayor in Mississippi, described her first interactions with the Freedom Riders.
Archival Audio – Freedom Summer – Unita Blackwell
Well they came to our church. They came to Sunday school that morning and they were pointing the finger at me and saying that, “Just like that lady talking back there in the Sunday school class that God help those who help themselves, and you can help yourself by trying to register to vote.” That’s the first time in my life that I ever come in contact with anybody that tells me that I had the right to register to vote. And that was my beginning of getting involved. And there was eight of us that said that we would go and try to register to vote. And I was asked would I join the SNCC, which was Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and I said, “Yes. What do I have to do?” And they said, just try to encourage people to go and try to register, go over to the courthouse. And that was my start of going around here to my neighbors and friends and asking them, you know, would they come and go to the courthouse and try to register to vote.
Gemma Birnbaum: Among the white out-of-state volunteers that traveled to the South, Jews were disproportionately represented.
Archival Audio – NBC News 1964
NBC News presents: Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner, a special report on the three workers for civil rights still missing in Mississippi and a review of the motives and forces behind those who plan to carry on the work. Now here is NBC News correspondent Frank McGee.
Frank McGee: First the known facts. James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner went to Mississippi to help register Negroes as voters. It had been stressed at the training school they had just
completed that their purpose was not to stage sit-ins, marches, or demonstrations. It had also been stressed that the federal government could offer them little protection.
Gemma Birnbaum: In the spring of 1964, Queens College junior Andrew Goodman attended a talk given by civil rights activists Aaron Henry and Fannie Lou Hamer. The talk inspired Goodman, whose mother was a labor rights activist and community organizer, to get more involved, and in June of that year, he left New York to teach at a Freedom Summer training session for CORE – the Congress of Racial Equality – in Ohio. It was there that he met fellow student activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.
Archival Audio – NBC News 1964
Chaney, a 20-year-old Mississippian was a veteran of the civil rights movement in his home state he assisted in the training classes, Goodman, 20, a New York College student had never participated in the Civil Rights Movement, but a friend says Goodman could never understand how some people could be so lacking in compassion. Schwerner, 24, a seasoned New York social worker left Mississippi where he had worked since January to assist in the training school at Oxford Ohio. The first, one week training course was completed a week ago yesterday, and 175 students began drifting toward Mississippi. Last Saturday morning June 20th at 3:30 Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner, left Oxford for Meridian Mississippi. They left early, they said, because they did not want to arrive in Mississippi after dark.
Gemma Birnbaum: On June 21st, their first full day in Mississippi, James Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were both Jewish, were pulled over and arrested, allegedly for speeding. They were put in jail, and ultimately released, but not before the arresting officer alerted local KKK leader Edgar Ray Killen of their whereabouts.
Andrew Sperling: Mickey Schwerner and his wife, Rita, had joined the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and they were very well known for their activities. Schwerner had already stirred up controversies by boycotting stores, and becoming a trainer, meaning he instructed people on what to do in a protest. So he was known in the community. People knew he was Jewish, and he was disliked by white Christian supremacists. So the deputy sheriff arrested the three workers. They get released, but the deputy sheriff is actually a member of the Klan, and so the Klan follows them along a secluded road with the clear intention to murder them. They’re armed.
Archival Audio – J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon B. Johnson
White House Secretaries: Let’s put Hoover on. All right. Thank you. Uh, well, uh, to put him on first-
J. Edgar Hoover: Uh, Mr. President.
President Lyndon Johnson: Yeah.
J. Edgar Hoover: I wanted to let you know we have found the car.
President Lyndon Johnson: Yeah?
J. Edgar Hoover: Now, this is not known. Nobody knows this at all, but the car was burned, and, uh, we do not know yet whether any bodies are inside of the car because of the intense heat that, uh, still is in the area of the car. The license plates on the car are the same that was on the car that was in, uh, Philadelphia, Mississippi yesterday. And apparently, this is off to the side of the road. It wasn’t t– going toward Meridian, but is going in the opposite direction. Now, whether there are any bodies in the car, we won’t know until we can get into the car ourselves. We’ve got agents, of course, on the ground, and as soon as we get definite word, I’ll, of course, get word to you. But I did want you to know that apparently what’s happened, these men have been killed.
Andrew Sperling: After the murders, a swarm of FBI agents and journalists swoop into the town to investigate this act of violence, which generates, of course, tremendous grief, but also awareness at a national scale of the ugliness of racial violence in the South.
Gemma Birnbaum: The backlash from segregationists was fierce, and fueled a fire of racist and antisemetic rhetoric.
Andrew Sperling: White Christian racists resented that civil rights possibly meant desegregation of their schools and public facilities, and they refused to tolerate racial integration. Jews became embroiled in this because the assumption was that Jews controlled the civil rights movement.
So violent segregationists pointed to the fact that Jews were among the founders of the NAACP. They pointed to the seeming abundance of Jewish student activists who came from the North to help register Black Southern voters. They pointed to real facts of Jewish involvement to say that the Jews are meddling in our local politics, and they are manipulating our Southern way of life.
So it’s, it’s sort of a doubly racist assumption because on one hand they’re gesturing to established antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and control, and yet on the other hand, they’re, they’re also suggesting that Black people were not intelligent or sophisticated enough to run their own movements. There had to be someone else behind it. So it’s these joint beliefs that motivate the violent backlash to the civil rights movement.
Gemma Birnbaum: Within the Jewish community, tensions and even some resentment began to grow between Southern Jews and their Northern counterparts.
Andrew Sperling: When Jewish Northerners were traveling south and participating in freedom movements, including in Freedom Summer, some Jewish Southerners sympathized with their goals privately. Some were also vocal opponents of segregation, but there were also many who felt as though these people were meddling in local politics and were instigating problems for the local Jewish communities. And the assumption was that, here are these privileged college kids that get to come down from New York City. They stir up a controversy. They entice people into blaming Jews for defying the racial codes of the South, and then they get to leave and return home safely, while the Southern Jews face the consequences.
Britt Tevis: There were bombings at Jewish synagogues and cross the South in Jewish community centers. These bombings, according to the people who were planting these bombs, was in response to the perception of Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. And so I think for Jews in the South, in a way that can’t necessarily be appreciated by Jews in the North, Jews in the South truly have witnessed anti-Jewish violence in real time and for good reason were quite nervous about having to face that kind of violence and rhetoric and vitriol again.
And so we see a huge divide between the local Jewish community and the Jewish leadership from the North who view the greater goal of unity, the greater goal of political alliances, the greater goal of addressing the mass disenfranchisement faced by African Americans as demanding action.
Gemma Birnbaum: In spite of the dangers in speaking out, the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner motivated many Jews to become further entrenched in the movement, rather than shy away.
Andrew Sperling: And many Jewish leaders took it as a directive. They said, “We cannot have let these three men die in vain, especially when two of them come from our communities, and the greatest possible tribute to their memory is to continue their fight for social justice.”
The civil rights movement comes to its maturity pretty soon after the Holocaust, so they understood that, due to the antisemitism they faced, whether it was the violent white nationalists like the Ku Klux Klan or the social elitism of WASP society white Anglo-Saxons. When Jews participated in these civil rights demonstrations, they were also fighting for their rights as Americans as well.
Archival Audio – Selma March 1964
8 o’clock in the morning in Selma, Alabama, the date, March 9th, 1965, a date that may well become seared in the pages of history when the full story of the civil rights struggle is told. It seems inevitable that before this day is over, there will be many split heads, broken limbs, and damaged bodies, or worse, in the cause of Negro liberty.
Andrew Sperling: In 1965, there were three marches from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, and this was to be a non-violent demonstration in support of Black voting rights, and more generally against all laws of Jim Crow segregation.
Gemma Birnbaum: Organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC, the Selma to Montgomery marches were a direct response to the failed voter registration campaign that the Freedom Summer organizers had hoped for.
The first march gained national attention, as the country watched peaceful protestors face the brutality of Alabama law enforcement on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. The televised confrontation showed police officers attacking and beating unarmed marchers with batons and spraying them with tear gas. 25-year-old activist and future Congressman John Lewis recalled the moment the officers advanced.
Archival Audio – John Lewis Oral History
The troopers came toward us with billy clubs, tear gas, bull whips trampling us with, with horses. I felt like it was the last demonstration, it was the last—protest on my part, like I was going to take my last breath from the, from the tear gas. I saw people rolling, heard people screaming and hollering, we couldn’t go forward, if we tried to go forward we would gone into the heat of battle, we couldn’t go to the side, to the left or to the right, we would have been going over into the Alabama river, so we were beaten back down the streets of Selma, back downtown to the Brown Chapel, AME church. I don’t know to this day, how I made it back to the church.
Gemma Birnbaum: In all, more than 60 marchers were injured including Lewis, and leaders like Amelia Boynton Robinson and Hosea Williams. The day would become known as “Bloody Sunday.” President Lyndon Johnson became inundated with letters and telegrams from across the country urging him to take action. The letters poured in from civil rights groups and their allies, as well as from everyday Americans.
In a telegram sent to President Johnson by Lillian Steinberg and Virginia Snitow, leaders of the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress expressed “shock and shame” at the police assault: “We urge you to restore and protect freedom of expression and to move promptly to end the restraints on the right to vote and other forms of racial inequality that have prompted the protests.”
Britt Tevis: American Jewish Congress was started in 1918. We see a lot of crossover between the lawyers who are engaged with the American Jewish Congress and lawyers who are engaged with the work of the NAACP. That, because they understood democracy as being the most hospitable to Jewish life, they aspired to make America as democratic as it could be for Jews and for others.
Gemma Birnbaum: On March 21, the country watched with bated breath as the third and final march began, this time, under escort of the Alabama National Guard, the FBI, and the US Marshals. Notable additions to the march were the presence of religious leaders.
Britt Tevis: We know from images, that there are a number of very prominent rabbis, perhaps most famously Abraham Joshua Heschel, but also Maurice Eisendrath and, Joachim Prinz, among others who– these are, Jewish figureheads who walk famously arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists.
Andrew Sperling: It was an important image for Americans to see because it represented interfaith coalitions, as well as a clear moral stance that second-class citizenship was unacceptable.
Britt Tevis: The global dissemination helped propel and almost force President Johnson’s hand, to see through the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Archival Audio – Voting Rights Act Passed
In the same room where President Lincoln signed the first emancipation order in 1861, President Johnson signed the 1965 voter registration act and pledge to millions of Americans a new chance to find a political voice.
President Johnson: “This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong, is one which no American in his heart can justify. The right, is one which no American true to our principles can deny.”
[Applause, music]
With a battery of pens and before, witnesses like negro leaders Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer, who were watching the climax of the campaign to which they devoted years of will and energy, the president signed. President Johnson moved the next day to implement the bill so far the strongest link in the legislative chain which the president titles the Great Society, the voting bill promises a profound effect upon the future politics of the entire nation.
Gemma Birnbaum: On August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. Designed to reinforce the voting rights outlined in 1870’s 15th Amendment, the act outlawed voter suppression tactics like literacy tests, authorized federal examiners to oversee and ensure fair elections in jurisdictions with low voter turnout, and placed additional required federal clearances before states could make changes to their voting laws.
The late 1960s saw a nation continue to come to blows over labor issues, civil rights, and the intensifying war in Vietnam. In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April 1968, and of Senator Robert F. Kennedy just two months later, the United States entered a new era of unrest, and a fundamentally changed political landscape. The response was a rise in conservatism, and Republican Richard Nixon was elected President. Longstanding alliances among Black and Jewish Americans were tested, and the new era ushered in what journalist Tom Wolfe once dubbed, “The Me Decade.”
Archival Audio – President Nixon Declares Victory
President Richard Nixon: I saw many signs in this campaign. Some of them were not friendly and some were very friendly. But the one that touched me the most was one that I saw in Deshler, Ohio, at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping, a little town. I suppose five times the population was there in the dusk, almost impossible to see—but a teenager held up a sign, “Bring Us Together.” And that will be the great objective of this Administration at the outset, to bring the American people together.
Gemma Birnbaum: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum. This episode was written by Rebeca Miller and me. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Archival material is courtesy of the AJHS collections, Washington University in St. Louis, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Getty Images, the US National Archives, the Richard Nixon Foundation, Critical Past, and the NBC News Archive.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections discussed in this episode, visit ajhs.org/democracy. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
