insider and outsider, the Jew in Mis-
sissippi is one of the "not-quite-
whites," as a young Mississippi Jew
put it. Or as a young black said of his
Hebrew neighbors, "Oh, they're not
white. They're Jewish."
The civil rights movement of the
1960s did not help the Jews' situa-
tion. There are proportionately fewer
Jews in Mississippi than in any other
southern state except Arkansas.
Barely over 0.1 percent of Mississip-
pians — about 3,000 — are Jewish.
A clear majority of the northern
civil rights workers who descended
on the state two decades ago were
Jewish. Northern rabbis played a
conspicuous role in the movement.
National Jewish organizations
strongly backed the drive for integra-
tion.
Many Mississippi Jews tried to
dissociate themselves from these
outsiders. Few, if any, were rabid
anti-integrationists, but some did
join the White Citizens' Councils (the
Klan's allegedly more respectable
alter ego) when there was no safe way
to avoid it. One Delta native remem-
bered how his father, a shopkeeper in
a town of 2,000 was inducted: "The
local organizer of the Council walked
into the store and said, 'Are you with
us or with the goddamn niggers?'
"Then they handed my daddy a bill
for the amount of his annual dues."
The handful of Mississippi Jews
who overtly supported civil rights
were sometimes ostracized by their
own- congregations. Two Mississippi
rabbis who spoke out on the side of
the blacks, Perry Nussbaum of
Jackson and Charles Mantinband of
Hattiesburg, faced revolt in their
temples. Of Nussbaum, Bevery
Daniel, a Jackson housewife who
now heads the Hadassah chapter in
that city, remarked: "Everybody
wished he'd shut up," And of Mantin-
band, Jerry Shemper, who runs a
Hattiesburg firm, commented, "We
ran him out of town." A woman in
Meridian who had invited a Jewish
civil rights lawyer to lunch was
forced to break the date when mem-
bers of her temple sisterhood heard
about it. Mississippi Jews also left
their national associations in large
numbers. B'nai B'rith, for example,
lost 25 to 40 percent of its member-
ship in the state.
Though fewer "outsider
agitators" remained in Mississippi
after enactment of the Voting Rights
Act in 1965, the atmosphere did not
A "Freedom Rider" bus burns in the early 1960s.
Twenty years after the violent civil rights
battles, underneath the corn pone and the .
hush puppies, Mississippi Jews are still more
comfortable among their: own kind.
A CERTAIN
FREEDOM
BY CRAIG MELLOW
Special to The Jewish News
Alex Loeb, a Jewish department
store-owner whose great-grand-
fathers fought for the Confederacy,
was one of the few white people in
Meridian, Miss. — Jewish or not —
who liked Mickey Schwerner.
Schwerner, who had come down from
the Bronx to work for the Council of
Federated Organizations (COFO) in
the historic black voter registration
drive of 1964, went to Loeb to get his
miniscule paychecks cashed, ex-
plaining that no one else in town
would do him the favor. The two of
them would sit and talk in Loeb's
office. .,
Like Schwerner, Loeb believed
in civil rights for blacks. He acted on
his belief at some risk. His store was
on a Ku Klux Klan blacklist and he
Craig Mellow is a free-lance writer based in
Jersey City, New Jersey.
had been threatened with violence.
But he joined a group organized by
Meridian's Episcopal minister to
lobby the city and state power
structure to negotiate with black
leaders. He and his wife Jean also
refused to fire their maid after dis-
covering she was a COFO organizer.
Another Jewish merchant who had
turned down a Klan request that he
dismiss an "uppity" black truck
driver had found his delivery van ,
shot up shortly afterward.
Still, Loeb thought Schwerner
had no business being in Mississippi.
"No, I didn't adriiire what Schwerner
was doing," he said recently.
"Schwerner was trying to stir up
trouble here. The black leaders were
trying to get something accom-
plished without stirring up trouble."
Loeb remembered Schwerner
"coming in to hock me about the
number of blacks we had employed. I
knew he was gonna do it. So on a trip
to New York to visit my wife's family,
I had gone into Saks Fifth Avenue
and Lord and Taylor and went from
top to bottom counting the number of
black salespeople. So when he started
in on me, I said, 'What the hell did
you have to come way down here for?
I think you could have done some
work up there.' For a minute, he
grinned."
In that summer of 1964,
Schwerner and another Jew from
New York Andrew Goodman, and a
black man, James Chaney, were
-murdered. The sentiments of most
Mississippi Jews were summed up by
a woman in Jackson: "It's horrible
this happened. Why didn't they stay
home?"
In a society traditionally con-
cerned with the distinction between
immediately ease up. The last major
wave of Klan violence in Mississippi
started in 1967 and ran to 1968.
While blacks were primary
target, some poison was
was left over for
Jews. The temple in Jackson was
bombed in September 1967. Rabbi
Nussbaum's home was bombed two
months later. The Meridian temple
was attacked in May 1968. In June
1968, local police and the FBI were
notified of an attempt to murder
Meyer Davidson, a Jewish business-
man in Meridian. A shoot-out
ensued. One attacker was killed and
the other was captured.
The Klan in Mississippi with-
ered, but it did not die. A cross was
burned as recently as 1978 on the
lawn of a Jewish woman in Jackson.
She had written an article for the
op-ed page of the local paper. Shortly
after the fire, her eight-year-old son
picked up the phone and heard a
.