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Key Alabama Civil Rights
Sites Visited by Pasteur
Friends in Alabama
• Rosa Parks Museum
• Freedom Rides Museum
• Civil Rights Memorial Center
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parsonage
• Edmund Pettus Bridge
• Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church
• The Legacy Museum — From Enslavement to
Mass Incarceration
• National Memorial for Peace and Justice (known
as the National Lynching Memorial)
Jewish Support for the
Civil Rights Movement
Many Jewish individuals and organizations support-
ed the Civil Rights Movement as volunteers, orga-
nizers and funders beginning in the early 1900s
and continuing through passage of key Civil Rights
legislation during the 1960s:
• Jewish individuals helped to establish the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the Urban League
and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee.
• Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a noted theo-
logian, author and professor at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, joined Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. in the famous 1965 March on
Selma. Other rabbis joined marches in the
South, and some were beaten and jailed.
• During the “Mississippi Summer” of 1964, an esti-
mated 40 to 50 percent of the volunteers from
across the country working to register Black
voters were Jewish. Two Jewish activists from
New York — Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner — were killed with James Chaney, a
local African American volunteer, by the KKK in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964.
• In 2018, a local Coalition for Black and Jewish
Unity was established by the Council of Baptist
Pastors of Detroit and the Jewish Community
Relations Council /AJC. The Coalition promotes
solidarity between the Jewish and Black com-
munities in Metropolitan Detroit and speaks out
and opposes racism, antisemitism and other
forms of ethnic-based hatred. (See accompany-
ing story.) ADL Michigan and the Detroit Urban
League joined the Coalition in 2021.
• The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit,
as well as other Federations, have conducted
educational trips to Civil Rights sites.
Sources: MyJewishLearning.com, Jewish Virtual
Library, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism,
Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity
and mass incarceration of African
Americans.
AN EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
For African American board
members Manning, Terrell and
Tomeka Munford, the trip was
emotionally powerful as they
learned more about the history
of African Americans, including
some of their relatives.
“I wasn’t sure that I could han-
dle all this degradation but I’m so
thankful that I went,” Manning
said. “I was very glad to go with a
multicultural group. It was pull-
ing at my heartstrings. It was an
enlightening, beneficial trip about
the history of our ancestors. People
lost their lives but not their spirits.
The fight goes on.”
Terrell was particularly affected
by the exhibits about the strug-
gle for voting rights. African
Americans who tried to register
to vote in parts of the South faced
a barrage of difficult questions —
including a requirement to guess
the number of jelly beans in a large
jar on a white official’s desk. Terrell
said that “the trip will fuel ten-
dencies toward social justice and
inspired me to do more.”
The Detroiters learned how
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