My Speech
I gave my first speech tongiht. Went pretty well. There are some errors but shouldn't affect the reading.
I have been privileged to be part of the inaugural class of Cultural Leadership. Our group is made up of 21 young people – 13 African-American, 8 Jewish – representing 14 different high schools and 18 houses of worship. The knowledge that I have gained and the experiences I have had will stay with me for life. Every month we met on a Sunday afternoon and had a workshop devoted to a specific topic such as African and African-American history, Jewish history, racism, anti-Semitism, and we were taught leadership skills, too. Throughout the year we had three retreats. Every Friday night of the retreats we went to a different Synagogue for Shabbat services and on Sunday morning for Church. The first retreat held almost a year ago on MLK Birthday weekend opened us up to what we will be doing for the year and got us talking about some of the tough issues. The second retreat was devoted to the Civil Rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, and we were honored to have Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth fly in and speak to us. At that time we had no idea how important he was. It was not until the summer that we understood how important he was – to the civil rights movement and to Birmingham, Alabama.
Over the summer we went on a three week life-changing trip to New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, then Anniston, Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuskegee and Selma, Alabama, then to Mississippi where we visited Meridian, Jackson, Utica, and Greenville, Greenwood, Clarksdale, Money, and Ruleville in the Delta, to Little Rock, Arkansas, and finally Memphis, Tennessee. Our trip was devoted to learning about Civil Rights, Social Injustices, and Human Rights. Along the way we visited many museums dedicated to these causes and spoke with countless living legends of the Civil Rights era that aren’t found in any text book.
We met with dozens of speakers including, Rabbi Mark Schneier, Congressman John Lewis, Elizabeth Eckford – one of the Little Rock Nine, and one of my favorites, Julian Bond, chair of the board of the NAACP who spoke to us on the status of African-American and Jewish relations and had me in awe the entire time. One recurring theme that he kept coming back to was the importance for the “two quintessential victims of Western society†to form an alliance. This alliance was started earlier than the Civil Rights movement, but it was then when it reached its peak.
For example, both the NAACP in 1909 and the Urban League in 1910 were started by Blacks and Jews. Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy Southern Jew, created 5000 schools in the south for Blacks in the first half of the 20th century,. At one point 40% of southern blacks attended Rosenwald schools – and we visited one.
Jewish and Black relations in the Civil Rights movement will always be associated with the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner. Goodman and Schwerner were Northern Jewish boys who went south to help during Freedom Summer – the effort to register black residents in the South to vote – and joined up with Black Mississippi native James Chaney. The three were murdered together and the story received national attention.
The marches from Selma to Montgomery started a short time later. After the first march came to a bloody end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, MLK asked for more marchers. One of the supporters was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Together they walked hand in hand several times. Two religious leaders from Saint Louis,; Sister Ebo and Rabbi Lipnick, are being honored today for joining MLK and Heschel in the March for equality. On our journey in Cultural Leadership we were able to walk hand in hand across the bridge as well. We all experienced an “ah ha†when a police car passed us by. 40 years ago that trooper would have been on the other end of the bride waiting to beat us, instead he honked his horn at us urging us on.
Let me tell you about something that happened to us in Mississippi. One evening, late at night we were all swimming in a pool at a hotel in Greenville and an older white lady went up to one of us and asked who we were and what we were doing there. He told her that we were Cultural Leadership and explained who we were and she paused for a moment and said, “If only the whole world was like you all in this pool, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today.â€
While standing in an elevator at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis Tennessee, an elderly African American couple, made a comment that I will not forget. I had just told them why I was visiting and the goal of my journey and they made me understand how important a certain connection was. They told me that without Jewish aid during the Civil Rights Movement, it would have been a losing battle and they were thankful for the help. It was at that moment that I understood that no lecture or exhibit on Black-Jewish relations would have the same impact as that personal comment.
One thing that we all came away with from our trip and our year is the understanding of how important it is for people to get the real history of the Civil Rights movement. We all understand that it is up to us to pass on the knowledge to others and hope that they in turn will pass it on.