All my life, I have fought for human rights, civil rights, social justice. And the origins of that passion, I believe I can find in my personal experience of youth and adolescence, in the way I was raised, in the influence of the Rabbi of my congregation. I also see in it the trace of the study of the prophets at rabbinical school, and the impact of the Holocaust in my life.
My parents, who were Canadian Jews, pursued secular studies, and I never lived in a Jewish neighborhood. At home, I never heard a racist remark or a word of disparagement about another religion. Black students who studied with me at college often came to the house, we did our homework together, and for me that was part of the normality of life.
On the other hand, I was often the victim of antisemitism. I suffered from it physically and morally. I was often called a dirty Jew, and I often heard hurtful remarks from my classmates, my neighbors — some of whom were friends — my teachers in primary school and at college. It was not rare for me to be called a Christ-killer, a cheating Jew, a grasping Jew, or to hear “it’s a shame Hitler didn’t kill all the Jews.”
When I was at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, to prepare for the Rabbinate, I attended the courses of teachers some of whom are very well known today and who transmitted to me, along with the message of the prophets, their passion for social justice, their revolt before the exploitation and oppression of the stranger, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the worker. For me Jewish identity, what is called holiness, justice, the prophetic message, all have the same face. They represent what God asks of men. For me, the study, the knowledge, and the practice of Judaism take on meaning only if the prophetic message is taken seriously, put into act — and the same goes for the essential part of rabbinical literature.
My studies bearing on the texts of the prophets remain painfully, inseparably bound to my studies on the Holocaust. I think in particular of discussions with students and teachers, some of whom were survivors. Every morning, at five o’clock, I would go to converse with my master, Leo Baeck, for whom I felt an immense respect, and who was a survivor of the Holocaust. I keep in memory those conversations, thanks to which I truly understood the meaning of an expression like conspiracy of silence. To shed torrents of tears and share the suffering of others does not change a community that allows itself to sink into unconsciousness.
It was while I was still at rabbinical school that I acquired the conviction that the life of a rabbi required that he live the precepts before teaching them. A conviction that, as I would soon have to learn, creates many problems in the real life of a rabbi. A rabbi living the precepts of Judaism being most often a burden, or a spoilsport, for his congregation and more broadly for his community. What for me was to live Judaism sometimes meant, for the members of this community, mixing religion and politics, awakening the hostility of the neighbors, or simply creating scandal around the Jewish community, awakening a latent antisemitism.
One June evening, while watching the news on television, I saw that a bus carrying Freedom Riders had been burned. These freedom riders were trying to gain entry to public facilities between states. Still in shock, I immediately telephoned the leaders of the Freedom Riders movement, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to ask how I could make myself useful. The next day, I took the plane to New York, I went to the offices of CORE, and I began to organize a march for ministerial freedom. After fifty or sixty phone calls, we had put together a group of twenty ministers of religion. Of the twenty, five were rabbis. Politicians and teachers were among them.
I must explain that the primary aim of The Ministerial Freedom March was to test the bus terminals serving passengers traveling from one state to another, to verify that their facilities (cafeterias, toilets) could be used by all passengers, black and white, in application of the federal law (which also applied to the conditions of travel between states), which stipulated that all services were to be shared and that there should be no segregation. According to federal law, there was to be no racial or religious discrimination among travelers moving between states, which included restaurants, waiting rooms, toilets, water fountains in all the bus stations and airports used by travelers moving from one state to another. The point was to verify that federal laws were above the laws of the states and the cities.
We all knew, before beginning our journey as Freedom Riders, that we were going into cities and states violently opposed to these laws. For us, the only way to verify the situation was to attempt to use together, black and white, the services of these cities and these states, to be arrested, and thus to prove before the federal court that there was a violation of federal law. The problem was that all the trials began in the city courts, before the judges of the city courts, then before the County Court, before going to the federal court on appeal.
After a first positive experience, a second experience.
I took the plane to Jackson, in the state of Mississippi, the heart of racism and violent segregation, to join Martin Luther King and the group that had been constituted. On the campus of Tougaloo Southern Christian College, there were about thirty of us gathered, including three rabbis — two rabbis from the San Francisco area and myself. There were a certain number of academics, a retired judge, and white and Black ministers of religion. Almost all had actively militated in the struggle for social justice.
We gathered around Martin Luther King to discuss his plan. We were to divide ourselves into a certain number of small groups and meet with local leaders, in order to discuss the possibilities of reconciliation between the communities, and in order to explain the non-violent character and the aims of the Freedom Riders movement. The group I was part of was to meet the editor-in-chief of the most important newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the most influential figures in the city. He received us cordially, but refused any serious discussion. According to him, we understood nothing of the problems, and we would render a far greater service to the nation by returning to our respective communities, to attend to our local problems. The interview lasted half an hour and remained friendly and polite. As far as he was concerned, he thought there was no need for reconciliation. The blacks were happy in his community and there were no problems of relations between the racial groups. Each community knew its place and everything was calm until the moment when troublemakers like us came to provoke unrest and all sorts of problems. As there was no problem, there was really nothing to discuss. That was the end of this frustrating encounter. We had arrived full of hope and we were dismissed with a great show of empty slogans and platitudes. The other groups had had similar experiences. So, after listening to our reports, Martin Luther King suggested that we divide ourselves into two groups. One of the groups would do its work as Freedom Riders and go to verify whether or not the shared facilities of the airport practiced segregation, and the other group would go into the waiting room that already practiced integration, and would witness our more-than-probable arrest. Six of the members of this second group would take the plane to Washington in order to meet the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, and the acting chairman of the interstate commerce commission, Robert Murphy, in order to testify to our illegal arrest while we were attempting to have a coffee and eat something in the large federal airport.
Our arrest would indeed be an obvious violation of federal law.
I remember that Martin Luther King was a little giant who stood above the crowd like the Eiffel Tower above Paris. To sit down across from him to talk was to have the experience of reflection in quietude… Never did he raise his voice. Never did he descend into demagoguery. He never sought to heat up the atmosphere or to exacerbate hatred. He knew that hatred paralyzes the mind and that reconciliation could allow the mind to function in a different way and to see others truly. Martin Luther King breathed courage into the young, and his vision of a better world, for all, could allow them to overcome hatred.
I still marvel today at this alliance of calm and power, and I think it took its source in the inner vision of a better future. As if at one end of a tunnel, he could already see clearly the other end, there where darkness becomes light. No doubt it is this inner calm and this indomitable vision of the future that gave us all the strength to bring it into being.
King told me to put myself at the head of the group with the charge of speaking for it in dealings with the police. He wanted to be sure that there would be no provocations or violent responses to the provocations of the police. He was very clear about the fact that there was to be no violence on our part, whatever the police or the provocateurs might say or do.
At the airport, our group headed directly toward the shared rooms. We were stopped by a group of police officers. Their officer ordered us to stop dead. I took the floor: — Sir, we are hungry, we are thirsty, and we are going to go into the dining room. He said: — No, you are not going to go in there. After an increasingly tense discussion, we advanced a few more steps. — If you take another step, I arrest you. We all took a few more steps and he said: — You are under arrest.
We found ourselves under arrest, and shoved into a paddy wagon.
Arrived at the prison, once our personal belongings had been taken from us, we were allowed to telephone. I called my wife to inform her of our arrest and to tell her not to worry too much about it. Then each of us was led before a detective for a personal interrogation.
Mine began his interrogation with a question: “Rabbi, are you Jewish?” I answered, smiling: yes. Then he tried courteously to explain to me that I simply did not understand the problems that arose in Mississippi. There were many, many Africans in Jackson. They were different from us. — Different in what? I asked. He attempted an explanation about the existence of a fundamental difference at the level of intelligence and education. The whites did not want their children to be mixed with the blacks in schools, on buses, in restaurants, because they risked forming relationships that were too close. — What harm is there in that? — Well, perhaps they would end up marrying an African. Rabbi, would you have married an African woman? I answered that that was what I had done. (My wife was born in North Africa.)
He looked at me, with anger and disgust. His charming behavior turned into hatred, a hatred whose effects I was to feel a little later.
We had been taken to our cells, which had a toilet but no window. We were talking, for none of us managed to sleep despite our exhaustion. Shortly afterward we heard footsteps. The door of our cell opened and a young man, of about a student’s age, was pushed in. He looked around with a certain apprehension and said that his name was Joel Greenberg. Rabbi Gumbiner and I introduced ourselves, and his emotion immediately became joy. Imagine a young Jewish freedom rider finding himself in prison and discovering in the same cell two rabbis who were themselves freedom riders. We introduced him to our colleagues. We were like a family. It was then that we began to hear shouts, and threats a few cells away… A man was shouting that he wanted to kill all those lovers of the Blacks. These phrases were at the least disconcerting and at worst terrifying. By morning we had got used to them.
We had neither combs, nor hairbrushes, nor shaving equipment, nor belts or ties… After twenty-four hours we looked dirty, and soon we were going to be summoned for trial. We were going to look like criminals, which is exactly what they wanted. As I was crossing the corridor, a prisoner called to me from his cell. He told me that he had been ordered to shout the threats we had heard, but that he was with us.
In the courtroom, the editor of the newspaper I had interviewed the day before raised his hand toward me and shouted “Hello, Rabbi.” I answered in return. Justice was swift. I was accused of having disturbed the peace. The police presented their thesis according to which they had been forced to arrest us in order to save the city from the riots that we were in the process of trying to foment.
My lawyer was a Black man. The judge constantly used his first name to address him, whereas to all the others he said “Mister.” If my lawyer rose to make an objection, the judge told him to sit down, to stay quiet, and to be silent unless spoken to. The judge did not once allow my lawyer to make an objection. This was not a fair trial.
Although the police had no solid argument, I was found guilty and sentenced to two months in prison. My lawyer arranged for bail, my belongings were returned to me, and I was released on bail, pending appeal. I was scandalized by the way my lawyer, a marvelous being and a cultivated man, had been treated by the court.
My wife was crying. My experience was far more unsettling for her than for me. My incarceration had been constantly mentioned on the radio. My wife had gone to the supermarket to buy provisions for the house and had met a wall of silence. The few members of the congregation who met her literally turned their backs on her and avoided her completely. This shocked her deeply, for they were close friends. Suzy’s pain was profound, despite the fact that, on hearing the news, many neighbors and members of the congregation had called to express their support for what I was doing and to offer the help that might be needed.
I received tremendous support from the clergy of all persuasions, support generally accompanied by an invitation to address their congregations. Many among them told me that they would have joined me in this kind of venture but that they knew the leadership of their congregation would never have allowed it.
Epilogue
In 1963 the struggle for civil rights took wing; a march for emancipation was prepared, planned for Washington for August 28, 1963. At that time, it was to be the largest march for civil rights in American history. It demanded a great deal of preparation, for everyone evoked the violence that risked breaking out; racist whites threatened to set off protests and violence. Some newspapers were selling fear. According to these newspapers, hundreds if not thousands of people risked being killed in such an atmosphere of exacerbated hatred. National newspapers demanded that the march be canceled, for the safety and the good of the people. All the Black organizations promised that there would be no violence and continued the preparation so that it would be so. Throughout the United States, the future marchers were educated in the sense of the method and the philosophy of non-violent social action, and in particular in the non-violent response to violence. Because of my experience as a freedom rider, I had been charged with preparing all the participants from Rochester for non-violent action and method. We were to have five buses of Blacks and Whites, of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, young and old, including children and retirees. But because of the tense atmosphere and the threats of violence, those who were driving our coaches to Washington could not find a fifth coach driver, and we left behind some fifty participants.
On that memorable day, I was accompanied by my wife, who was pregnant, and by my two sons aged six and four. In Washington, among the 300,000 participants, Martin Luther King set out his vision of the future with his immortal words: “I have a dream.” There was no violence, there were no victims, no dead, but America had changed. It was clear that civil rights legislation was going to be prepared.