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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 

