Transcript WELCOME! We’re so glad you could join us. Introduce Yourself Get Set Up 1. Adjust your volume using the speaker button (you should see a speaker.

WELCOME!
We’re so glad you could join us.
Introduce Yourself
Get Set Up
1.
Adjust your volume using the speaker
button (you should see a speaker icon in
the top, black menu of your meeting
room).
2.
Enable your microphone using the dropdown menu under the microphone icon.
3.
4.
5.

Locate the group chat pod
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
Introduce yourself by typing in
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Your name
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Your location
Feel free to ask questions or
catch up with your colleagues
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+
Yes! This program will
be recorded.
We will make the recording,
handouts, and presentation
available to you.
JWA documents Jewish women's stories,
elevates their voices, and inspires them to be
agents of change.
Together we inspire (young) Jews to learn
about who they want to be and what impact
they want to have on the world.
Who is this?
What did she do?
Why did she do it?
Who am I?
What do I do/What do
I want to do?
Why do I do it?
GOALS

Learn how community and community organizing
played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement—
especially during Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Explore how Jewish experiences and values
informed Jewish relationships to activism in the Civil
Rights Movement.

Get practical tools and resources for teaching
students about social justice activism through a
Jewish lens.
What, if anything,
do you know
about Freedom
Summer?
FREEDOM SUMMER
1954
Brown v. Board
1960
Sit-in @ Woolworths in
Greensboro, NC
1955
Montgomery Bus
Boycott
1963
March on Washington,
John F. Kennedy Assassinated
1961
Freedom Rides
1965
Voting Rights Act
1968
Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Robert Kennedy
Assassinated
1966
Black Power Movement
1964
Freedom Summer
Source: Chronology from Civil Rights—The 1960s Freedom Struggle by Rhoda Louis Blumberg
Council of
Federated
Organizations
(COFO)
Volunteer Profile
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Jews made up an estimated half of all
white Freedom Summer volunteers
Student
Less than
1% of the US population at that
Nonviolent
time
Coordinating
Committee
Mostly
white, affluent; many college
students(SNCC)
Stopped for training in Oxford, OH before
heading to different communities in the
South
Need

Extensive voter intimidation and
complicated voter registration
process
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Low literacy rates, poverty
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Systemic racism and violent
intimidation; retaliation from
Whites
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Lack of Black representation in
legislature despite large Black
population
Volunteer Action Taken

Literacy classes, education
about voter registration
process, and other subjects in
“Freedom Schools”

Voter registration efforts—
canvassing and recruitment,
accompanying voters to the
Registrar, record keeping
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Creation of Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party
“My husband, Michael Schwerner, did not die in vain. If he
and Andrew Goodman had been Negroes, the world would
have taken little notice of their deaths. After all, the slaying
of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my
husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the
national alarm has been sounded.”
ABOUT THIS LESSON
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Role play
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Round robin
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Follow-up activities
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Why are you here?

What is motivating you to go or not to
go to Mississippi?
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Based on your skills/talents, which
project could you contribute to the
most?
STATION 1:
Jewish Participation
“…One of the strong things I grew up with as a kid
was some sense of fighting for social justice, and
without realizing it, that that was rooted somehow in
Jewish tradition. It was never specifically identified to
me as such, and I don’t even know that that was what
was driving people. But as I look back on it now, I
know that that was part of that Jewish secular tradition
of social justice.”
Vicki Gabriner, Tennessee Volunteer
STATION 1:
Jewish Participation
“I grew up in a family that had good social values,
reflected in our Jewish heritage, culture, and history.
When I was growing up, at one point I wanted to be a
rabbi, but was told (at that time) women couldn’t be
rabbis. I went to Israel when I graduated from high school
in 1963, and the experience of Yad Vashem (the
Holocaust museum) had a transforming effect on me: I
promised myself that in the face of injustice I would
struggle for justice.”
Heather Booth, Mississippi Volunteer
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

What values or experiences do Vicki Gabriner and Heather
Booth identify as influential?
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Where/how did they learn these values?
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What are some things you have learned within your family that
shape the way you see the world and/or act in the world?

Do you think Vicki Gabriner and Heather Booth were conscious
of their motivations at the time? Do you think it matters if you
know why you are doing something to help others or is it okay if
you just do it? Why?
STATION 2:
Goals and Purposes
1.
In breakout groups, read the documents.
2.
Then discuss:
a)
Which reasons given in these documents are most
resonant to you?
b)
Which sound like reasons you might decide to be a
volunteer in Freedom Summer?
STATION 3:
Community and Community Organizing

Play a game
1.
Could you have accomplished
your goal with only one person?
2.
What challenges did you face in
accomplishing your goal?
3.
At what point in the process did
it become easier to accomplish
your goal? What do you think
made it easier? What did
different people bring to the
process?
STATION 3:
Community and Community Organizing

Study a photo
1.
How do you think music helps
build community?
2.
What do you think can be
learned about music and
community from looking at a
photograph?
STATION 3:
Community and Community Organizing

Listen to an oral history
Discuss:
Vicki describes being in a church while
And I don’t
think I’m
romanticizing
it as I look
backtwo
on
another
group
is waiting outside.
These
it. I remember
there
were just
the most
groups are
divided
by color,
space, and
extraordinary
in community
that work. I do
remember
values.moments
With which
you think
times being
at
a
mass
meeting
inside
a
church
Vicki Gabriner most identifies?
and singing “We Shall Overcome” and knowing
2.
What does she have in common with each
that there were white people outside in their cars,
of the two communities?
in their trucks, probably with guns, and feeling as
3.
Based
onwere
these
similarities
andoffdifferences,
though
the roof
just
going to lift
the
do you
were
some
things
that
churchwhat
because
thethink
energy
of the
people
with
were
important
inwas
connecting
people
whom we
were
working
so intense.
Youand
know,
forming
communities
during the
the struggle
– they
were so involved
in Civil
the Rights
Movement?
struggle
that it was palpable. It was palpable…
1.
VOICES OF FREEDOM SUMMER
June 24
1.
Read the letter.
Dear Dad,
2.
Post a response in the lino board (link in chat window).
The mood up here [in Oxford, Ohio] is, of course, very strained with those three
guys who disappeared Sunday, dead, most likely. Saturday night, I ate dinner with
the wife of one of them. She was telling me about all the great things she and her
husband were working on. She looks younger than me. What does she do now?
Give up the movement? What a terrible rotten life this is! I feel that the only
meaningful type of work is the Movement but I don’t want myself or anyone I’ve
met to have to die. I’m so shook up that death just doesn’t seem so awful
anymore, though. I’m no different from anyone else and if they’re risking their lives,
then so must I. But I just can’t comprehend why people must die to achieve
something so basic and simple as Freedom…
Love, Sylvie
FREEDOM SUMMER
Online Learning for Jewish Educators
Jewish Women’s Archive