American Jewry in the civil rights struggle

In the summer of 1964 student volunteers came to Mississippi to register black voters. On 21 June, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan murdered three of them: James Chaney, a local black man, and two New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Both were Jews, and both under twenty-five. The bodies were found forty-four days later.

The participation was out of all proportion: by various counts between half and two-thirds of the white volunteers of Freedom Summer were Jews, as was a large share of the lawyers who argued the desegregation cases. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary walked in the front rank of the Selma to Montgomery march on 21 March 1965 and wrote afterwards: "I felt my legs were praying."

The agreement was not universal. Southern congregations were afraid, and with reason: between 1957 and 1968 at least a dozen synagogues in the South were bombed or targeted. And by the late 1960s the alliance was coming apart: quarrels over hiring quotas, black nationalism, and positions on Israel after the war of 1967 divided yesterday's allies.

Mississippi did not try the killers of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. A federal court convicted seven of violating civil rights; the organiser, Edgar Ray Killen, was convicted of manslaughter only in 2005, forty-one years later.