10 | JUNE 1 • 2023 

A 

group of 14 Jewish and African 
American board members of 
the Friends of Pasteur, along 
with other school alumni and family 
members, recently took a thought-provok-
ing five-day trip to historic Civil Rights 
sites in Alabama. They included Marcy 
Feldman and Deborah (Debby) Manning 
who founded the Friends, a nonprofit 
organization that has provided volunteer 
tutors and extensive enrichment programs 
for Pasteur, a public school in northwest 
Detroit, since 1997.
The trip was planned by board member 
Cary Levy after he and his wife traveled 
to Alabama last year. They were moved by 
what they learned about the long and diffi-

cult fight against segregation in the South.
“It changed my perception of things 
that I thought I knew. Spending my life 
in the North, I thought the terrible things 
that I occasionally heard about Jim Crow 
and the South were isolated incidences,” 
Levy said. “In truth, obviously, they were 
commonplace. The movement of slavery to 
discrimination to terror and then segrega-
tion was a systematic way of depriving the 
Black community of all the privileges of 
being an American citizen.” 
Levy wanted to share this experience 
with his fellow board members, and 
six agreed to take the trip. They visited 
museums and monuments that brought 
to life the Civil Rights struggle that they 

had viewed as young people on television 
newscasts during the 1960s.
Deborah (Debby) Terrell, one of the 
African Americans on the trip, said, “Cary 
was so excited about what he had seen. I 
wasn’t sure I would be able to handle it. It 
was hard looking at what our elders went 
through.”
For several of the Jewish board mem-
bers, the trip was “sobering and educa-
tional.” Elizabeth (Liz) Jacobs described 
the “oppressive atmosphere” that the 
museums and monuments depicted. “The 
Jim Crow laws were a perpetual effort to 
dehumanize,” she observed. Feldman was 
struck by the Legacy Museum’s depiction 
of a continuum from slavery to lynching 

OUR COMMUNITY
ON THE COVER

Local Jewish and African American community 
members tour historic Civil Rights sites.

SHARI S. COHEN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Michael and Marcy Feldman, Elliot and Wendy 
Wagenheim, Erica Peresman, Debbie Manning, 
Debbie Terrell, Gilda Jacobs and Cary Levy at the 
Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.

Confronting a 
Painful Past 

CLOCKWISE: Debbie Terrell on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Debbie Manning on the 
Edmund Pettus Bridge. Statue of voter registration official with a jar of jelly beans. 
African Americans had to correctly guess the number of jelly beans in order to reg-
ister to vote. Debbie Manning, Debbie Terrell and Cary Levy with a statue of Rosa 
Parks near the spot where she boarded the city bus and was subsequently arrested 
for not giving up her seat to a white person. 

PHOTOS COURTESY OF FRIENDS OF PASTEUR 

