Born in North Carolina in 1798, Levi Coffin was born into a Quaker family that had been deeply influenced by the antislavery teachings of John Woolman… teachings that had played an important role in Quakers taking on an abolitionist stance. In addition to being raised in an abolitionist household, Levi’s own antislavery commitment was also influenced by an interaction he had with an enslaved man when he was seven years old: passing by the man on a chain gang, the young Levi asked him why he was in chains, and the man replied “that it was to prevent him from escaping and returning to his wife and children.” The comment deeply troubled Levi, and stayed with him.
By the time Levi was a young teenager, his family had turned their barn into a hiding spot for escaped slaves heading north. Levi was given the task of making sure they had food, water and other supplies. During this era, however, a series of laws were passed cracking down on participants in what later became known as the Underground Railroad. By 1820, Quakers were being openly persecuted in North Carolina for their abolitionist beliefs. As this persecution escalated, Levi’s family relocated to Indiana, where their home became one of the early stops on the antislavery freedom routes developing in that region. One of the first things Levi did in Indiana was to build a relationship with the free Black community there: slaves often escaped to free Black communities in the North, but slave catchers expected this… and felt freer to abuse their power there. It was thus safer for escaping slaves to stay with White families such as Levi’s.
In Indiana, Levi Coffin developed a successful business. He leveraged his wealth and his network in the cause of abolition, buying stock in companies that did not use slave labor and marketing their products. He helped bring more people into the cause and helped develop a more formalized route in what he called the “mysterious road.” By 1833 he had become the director of a bank, and by 1838 was wealthy enough to build a large home with secret passages and hiding spaces. It was during the 1830s that the term “Underground Railroad” came into being… and Levi’s home became known within the underground network as “Grand Central Station.” Fugitive slaves would dress as maids and butlers of Grand Central, use the hiding spaces if necessary, and head north in the dead of night hidden on horse-drawn wagons carrying other commercial supplies. Historians estimate that over the course of his life, Levi Coffin probably assisted 4,000 enslaved people escape to freedom.
Born in 1720, John Woolman was an early abolitionist. He played a large role in pushing Quakerism into a strong antislavery commitment… a commitment that helped ignite a full-fledged abolitionist movement a century after his birth.
One of the formative spiritual moments in John Woolman’s life occurred during his childhood: coming across a bird’s nest, he starting throwing rocks at the mother bird to see if he could hit her. When he killed her with a stone, “he was filled with remorse, thinking of the baby birds who had no chance of survival without her. He got the nest down from the tree and quickly killed the hatchlings, believing it to be the most merciful thing to do. This experience weighed on his heart.” John became determined to show kindness towards all living things. He later became a vegetarian and refused to ride in horse-drawn carriages, given the regular abuse of the horses.
The spiritual inclinations that John experienced as a child were supported and deepened by his Quaker community, and guided him towards an antislavery position. As a successful trader in his mid-twenties who sometimes helped his customers write their wills, he refused to include slaves in the wills and tried to convince his customers to instead free their slaves upon their death. John Woolman soon gave up business completely, out of the feeling that the pursuit of profit was a distraction from his spiritual pursuits.
Freed from his business obligations, John travelled extensively, meeting with Quaker chapters hundreds of miles apart to express his concerns about slavery. He worked on a very personal, individual level with many Quakers, helping to guide them towards the decision to free their slaves. During his travels, when John stayed with slaveholders he modeled his antislavery stance in his interactions with slaves: for example, he always paid slaves for any work they did attending to him. He also “refused to be served with silver cups, plates, and utensils, as he believed that slaves in other regions were forced to dig such precious minerals and gems for the rich.” He also traveled to England to help Quaker communities take a stand against the slave-based cotton industry that flourished in that country.
Due to the efforts of John Woolman and others like him, by the end of the American Revolution almost all Quakers in North America had freed their slaves, and had ended any business involvements with the slave trade. In the decades to follow, the Quaker community remained a persistent antislavery voice that would play a vital role in the era of abolition.
“I am Southern and White – as southern as the red clay of Georgia, as southern as Lee’s mansion overlooking the Potomac.” Such are the roots of Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, pictured here with American Nazis lurking in the background during the sit-in movement. For her activism, Joan was disowned by her family, attacked, shot at, incarcerated in America’s most notorious prison, and hunted (unsuccessfully) by the Klan for execution.
Joan was 13 when the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling ordered schools to be desegregated. As a young teenager, she experienced the rage that was unleashed throughout the White South as disturbing and ugly: “I knew something was terribly wrong . . We [White] southerners needed to put our OWN house in order.” The feeling grew over time, prompting her to join the sit-in movement as a student at Duke University, in 1960. By the time Joan was 23, she had participated in over 50 sit-ins and demonstrations. Under pressure from Duke University to cease her activism, Joan instead dropped out. She was embraced by Mississippi’s historically Black Tougaloo College, however, and continued there as one of the college’s first White students.
During a sit-in in Mississippi, a White man approached one of the Black sit-in students holding a knife. Joan was participating as an observer, taking notes and watching for safety concerns. Spotting the knife, however, she intervened… and then took a seat at the lunch counter. When the crowd saw a White woman suddenly join the sit-in, they went wild. With screams of “race traitor!”, the demonstration descended into one of the most violent sit-ins of the civil rights movement. Demonstrators were beaten with brass knuckles, burned with cigarettes, and sliced with the glass of broken condiment containers. “We knew we were going to die,” Joan later said. “My spirit had left my body and was hovering somewhere above, protecting me.”
In 1961, when the first freedom riders were firebombed and beaten, Joan volunteered to continue the rides. Her group of freedom riders – which included Stokely Carmichael – were thrown into the notoriously violent Parchman Penitentiary of Mississippi, where Joan was held in the death row unit for two months. Although Parchman was a brutal jail, there was a continuous flow of freedom riders into the cells, and the prisoners filled their days and nights with freedom songs and worship services.
During the build-up to the 1964 Freedom Summer, Joan was placed on the Klan’s death list. The Klan hoped that killing a White civil rights worker would prevent White students from travelling to Mississippi to support the voting rights effort. One night the car Joan and her movement comrades were in was followed, and then blocked by other cars from the front. The driver of Joan’s car was a Pakistani professor named Hamid Kizilbash, and when he was pulled out of the car and beaten, one of the other riders was able to convince the mob that Hamid was a foreigner… and that if a foreigner was killed it would cause international problems (especially during the Cold War) and bring State Department attention to the Klan. The argument worked, and the lynch mob dispersed.
The infamous murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner took place a mere three weeks later, but by that time Freedom Summer was in full swing. Just days earlier, Joan had given Michael Schwerner his orientation… about what he needed to know to survive as a White civil rights worker in Mississippi. She recalls, “Because we weren’t killed, our friends were.”
Few people know that an anti-Nazi dissident, who was expelled from Germany by the Gestapo, spoke right before Martin Luther King at the March on Washington… and that King’s own mentor, Bayard Rustin, considered it one of the most powerful moments of the day. This is the story of a Nazi-fighting rabbi who stood in solidarity with the civil rights movement: Joachim Prinz.
Born in Germany in 1902, Joachim Prinz served as a rabbi for the Berlin Jewish community. In the 1930s, he travelled extensively throughout Germany speaking against Nazism, and was arrested numerous times by the Gestapo. As Nazism grew in strength, he feared the worst, and urged German Jews to migrate en masse to Palestine. When he was expelled from Germany in 1937, Jewish leaders in the U.S. invited to him to resettle. Joachim soon became the rabbi of a historical synagogue in Newark, New Jersey: the Temple B’nai Abraham. From this position, Joachim continued to mobilize against Nazism in his homeland… and later, to support Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.
Joachim Prinz was troubled by the racial dynamics he witnessed in the United States. Shortly after his arrival, he began criticizing American Jewish communities for being indifferent to the plight of segregated Black communities. His message was a forceful one: Jews who had fled the terror of Nazism, and who knew firsthand the poverty and stigma of the segregated ghetto, could not look at racial segregation in the U.S. without being reminded of their own lives under Nazism. American Jews, the rabbi argued, had a responsibility to fight White supremacy in all its forms.
Joachim Prinz was soon protesting segregated housing, schooling, economic inequality, and other forms of racial injustice. He was the first rabbi to reach out to Martin Luther King in the early civil rights years, and invited King to speak at his synagogue… as well as to be a keynote speaker for a gathering of Jews in the South, which was the first time King ever spoke to a primarily White audience in that region.
As the president of the American Jewish Congress from 1958–1966, Joachim was in a major leadership position for much of the civil rights era. In 1963, he represented the Jewish community as an organizer of the March on Washington. The Nazi-fighting rabbi spoke just before Martin Luther King on that momentous day. Just minutes before some of the most famous words in American history were spoken by King, Joachim Prinz urged the country to act with these words: “When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I’ve learned in my life, and under those tragic circumstances, is that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is… SILENCE!”
During the Black Power era, many White American Jews became less supportive of the struggle for Black civil rights. Joachim Prinz, however, found that his experiences under Hitler’s regime helped him relate to this new phase in the Black Freedom Movement. In Nazi Germany, the sense of powerlessness could be crippling for Jews. Lifting up a Jewish version of “Black is Beautiful” had been essential for maintaining a sense of self-love, and a Jewish version of “Black Power” had been an important antidote to pushing back on the wide range of ways that Jews were made to be, and feel, powerless. The Black Power era, however, saw an increasing amount of anti-Semitism in the Black Freedom Movement that troubled Joachim.
By the late 1960s, many of the Jews in Joachim Prinz’s synagogue were more fully assimilating into Whiteness, participating in White flight, and distancing themselves from the Black Freedom Struggle. Joachim not only believed this was wrong: he worried about the ugly power of anti-Semitism to rear its head again and again throughout history – regardless of the advances that Jews made – and did not believe that Jews could find true safety by assimilating into Whiteness. They needed to build a strong, multiracial democracy, based on multiracial unity and common cause. It was a cause he continued to fight for throughout the remainder of his life.
One of the strangest and also least-known tales from the chronicles of abolitionism is the story of Jean-Charles Houzeau, a Belgian astronomer born in 1820. When revolutions swept across Europe in 1848, Houzeau’s revolutionary sympathies cost him his position running the royal observatory… and put his life in danger. In order to disappear, he relocated to the Texas frontier, just before the Civil War. The European revolutionary was horrified by the slavery he witnessed there, and Houzeau participated in an underground movement to help fugitive slaves escape south to Mexico. During the Civil War, he helped Union sympathizers who were being hunted by Confederates escape as well. Soon, Houzeau had to flee himself. He had become fascinated by the plant and animal life of the Texan deserts, and his skin had browned from his extensive time conducting biological research under the desert sun. The scientist disguised himself as a Mexican laborer, and crossed the border into Mexico.
When New Orleans was liberated even as the Civil War raged on, Houzeau crossed back across the border to live there. He was soon submitting articles to the local Black newspaper, The New Orleans Tribune, sharing his ideas for how greater degrees of Black freedom could be attained and how Black unity across regional and class differences could be strengthened. Because Houzeau spoke French and had a light brown complexion, the owners of the paper – who were light-skinned Black men who spoke French and had even studied in Paris – at first assumed that Houzeau was a light skinned Creole man, until he told them otherwise. When they asked Houzeau to become the editor of the paper, however, they did not disclose his race… in fact, the Tribune instead emphasized that it was “edited by men of color” and that it would never be “controlled by any white man.” The Belgian scientist and revolutionary did not dispute this, and began passing for Black… perhaps because the Tribune leadership had decided it was in the paper’s best interest for him to do so. This arrangement continued for three and a half years, when Houzeau left the paper, and moved to Jamaica.
Houzeau’s experiences with revolution and revolutionary thinking in Europe gave him a unique analysis of American power dynamics and race relations that the Tribune valued, and which helped it become a leading Black newspaper in the U.S. Under Houzeau’s editorship, The Tribune’s reach soon extended to Black communities across the country, and even into the halls of Congress, where it was read widely by abolitionists and later by supporters of Radical Reconstruction. Half a century later, W.E.B. Du Bois quoted extensively from the Tribune in his masterful book Black Reconstruction, hailing the newspaper during the time it was run by Houzeau as “an unusually effective organ” during the era of emancipation.
In 1970, the Black Panther International Section – based out of Algeria, where prominent Panthers-in-exile had fled – approached the controversial French literary giant Jean Genet, who was a fierce critic of French neocolonial oppression in Algeria and elsewhere. The Panthers asked Genet if he would issue statements of support for the Panthers from France. The situation for the BPP was dire at the time: COINTELPRO was decimating the party, cofounders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were both in jail along with hundreds of other leading Panthers, and finances were in shambles. The BPP International hoped that Genet, as one of the world’s most famous authors, could help generate support from abroad.
Instead of issuing statements from France, Genet got on a plane. Banned from the U.S. as an outspoken radical gay man with a criminal record, Genet flew to Montreal, where the BPP Deputy of Information for New York State, Zayd Malik Shakur (later arrested alongside Assata Shakur), met him and smuggled Genet into New York. In the words of scholar Robert Sandarg, “With his illegal status, he would of necessity lead a shadowy existence, emerging from Panther sanctuaries to address audiences, then disappearing again.” Although Genet often addressed multiple audiences a day, at one point he went underground for two entire weeks… time that he spent actively strategizing with the Black Panthers. Genet spent two months travelling the U.S. He focused especially on mobilizing White youth from privileged economic backgrounds, speaking everywhere from Yale to MIT to Stanford, in an effort to leverage the resources and networks these students had in the cause of the Black Panther Party… and to move them into action. During his talks Genet discussed concepts central to the BPP: the right to self-defense, escalating police brutality and surveillance as a form of American fascism, and solidarity between Black Americans and colonized people in the shared struggle against White supremacy as it played out on the global stage.
Genet urged these students to mobilize their communities to financially support the Black Panther Party Legal Defense Fund, but he also expressed that he was sick of watching White intellectuals do nothing BUT donate and talk about the issues. For Genet, White radical good conscience was impoverished. As he put it: “You must face life and no longer live in the comfortable aquariums of the California universities, like goldfish only capable of making bubbles . . . I can only relate to people by their practices and actions . . . not by their words.” In an article titled “Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers, and Us White People” published in the Black Panther newspaper, Genet wrote to White youth: “When the Black Panthers contacted me in France, I came right away to the United States to put myself at their disposal. Your youth, your intellect and physical agility, your moral imperatives are capable of making you act faster than I, and with greater efficiency. This is why I am counting on you to help the Black Panther Party.”
Eventually Immigration Services tracked Jean Genet down. He crossed back into Canada rather than submit to them. From there he flew back to France, which he soon left to spend six months working in Palestinian refugee camps. Genet continued his support for the Black Panther Party from overseas, giving large portions of his personal fortune to the BPP, anticolonial freedom struggles, and to immigrant’s rights groups in France. Angela Davis had assisted Genet with interpretation during his tour, and Genet later contributed to the Free Angela Davis Movement, writing articles that lambasted the American news media for their unwillingness to forthrightly discuss her case. Genet also threw his support to George Jackson: the introduction to Jackson’s famous book “Soledad Brother” is written by Jean Genet.
Born in 1938, freedom rider James Zwerg was raised in Wisconsin. He didn’t have a single Black classmate until he attended college, to study sociology. That first Black classmate, Robert Carter, became a close friend. As James recalls, “I witnessed prejudice against him . . . we’d go to a lunch counter or cafeteria and people would get up and leave the table. I had pledged a particular fraternity and then found out that he was not allowed in the fraternity house. I decided that his friendship was more important than that particular fraternity, so I depledged.”
Robert was from Alabama, where the Montgomery bus boycott had just taken place. He gave James a copy of Martin Luther King’s first book, “Stride Towards Freedom: the Montgomery Story.” James Zwerg was hooked: the book (which talks at length about revolutionary Love) spoke to James as a philosophically minded, devout Christian, who was feeling angry about the treatment of his friend. Watching Robert navigate all-White spaces as a young Black man made James wonder what it would be like for him to navigate all Black spaces. He decided to find out, and in 1961 enrolled at Fisk University. Fisk was a primarily Black university in Nashville, where James Lawson – a Black pastor who had studied nonviolent resistance in India prior to the civil rights movement – was leading some of the nation’s deepest civil rights trainings. At Fisk, James Zwerg befriended John Lewis, who trained with Lawson. Soon, James was training with Lawson as well.
In their nonviolent resistance role-plays, James typically took the role of the angry bigot. His first real-life test was to walk into a movie theatre with a Black man, for which he was knocked unconscious with a monkey wrench. Shortly afterwards, the Congress of Racial Equality launched the first freedom ride. When that bus was firebombed, the Nashville group James was training with launched reinforcement rides. The group was ambushed at a bus stop in Montgomery. James Zwerg was the only White man on board, and volunteered to be the first to exit and face the mob. He recalls stepping off the bus vividly: “In that instant, I had the most incredible religious experience of my life . . . I felt a presence with me. A peace. Calmness. It was just like I was surrounded by kindness, love. I knew in that instance that whether I lived or died, I would be OK.”
Although many of the participants were beaten badly, James Zwerg was given special treatment for being a “traitor to his race”: after being beaten unconscious, freedom rider Lucretia Collins recalls that his body was held up “while white women clawed his face with their nails. And they held up their little children – children who couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old – to claw his face.” After it was over James returned to a state of semi-consciousness and tried to use the handrails to the loading platform to pull himself to his feet. Instead, he was tossed over the railing, landing on his head on the ground below.
At first James was denied medical treatment. When he was finally hospitalized, he lay unconscious in the hospital for two days. Photos of his badly beaten body spread rapidly around the country. When he did wake up, the speech he gave from his hospital bed became a sensation: “Segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us on the Freedom Rides will continue…. We’re dedicated to this, we’ll take hitting, we’ll take beating. We’re willing to accept death. But we’re going to keep coming.” He was still barely conscious, and has no recollection of speaking the most famous words of his life.
Shortly afterwards, James Zwerg had a conversation with Martin Luther King that convinced him to enroll in theological seminary. What struck him most about the meeting was not something King said, but King’s incredible presence as a listener… a profound presence that James Zwerg perhaps aspired to. James had three broken vertebrae, which made it difficult to continue in the movement. He went on to become a minister working with rural communities in his home state of Wisconsin, although for decades he was racked with guilt for not continuing with the movement. After finally confessing these feelings to old movement comrades who told him they had nothing but profound gratitude for him, James released the guilt. He retired in 1993, moved to rural New Mexico, and built a cozy A-frame cabin with his wife. According to a USA Today article published in 2013, “Zwerg and his wife Carrie — married 48 years — find peace most days watching wildlife outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. They look out on a pine forest and a red-and-white-striped mesa.”
Born in 1927, James Reeb attended Princeton Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1953. Soon afterwards, he began working at the Philadelphia General Hospital as a chaplain. In this position, James offered prayer and spiritual comfort… but he also considered the concrete needs of those he was serving, and what could be done to support them.
Because the sufferings of those he served were often rooted in social disparities, James Reeb’s own spirituality increasingly prioritized taking action to combat those disparities. He wanted to get to the roots of systemic inequities, before harm had been done in the first place. In 1957, his evolving spiritual orientation led him to take a job as youth director of Philadelphia’s West Branch YMCA. The new position allowed him to work directly with poor, primarily Black youth. He moved his family into the neighborhood, abolished the program’s racial quota system, and integrated the busing system that brought youth to and from the program.
During this time, James Reeb’s action-oriented spirituality led him away from Presbyterianism, and to embrace Unitarian Universalism. In 1959, he accepted a position as assistant minister at the Unitarian All Souls Church, in Washington D.C. The Unitarians at All Souls were looking specifically to hire someone who would be the right fit to work on the racial justice issues alive in D.C., and James was soon in the thick of community organizing, especially around housing inequities.
By 1964, James was feeling restless in his role as then associate-minister. He was craving greater leadership opportunities, and found it through a Quaker-run fair housing program in Boston. James was to take on “the complex task of helping the poor to become their own spokesmen, leaders, and representatives, with a special regard for housing for the very poor.” He and his family once again moved into the neighborhood that James would be serving, and his four children enrolled in the public schools. It was a poor, primarily Black and Latino neighborhood… and rife with all manner of housing abuses by slum lords.
As one of his colleagues recalls: “Many of us who worked with him toured the wracked and broken streets . . . gazed at the houses with broken windows, peeling paint, falling porches, and, invisible from the outside, the lack of heat, or hot water, of rubbish removal, of decent sanitation and who knows how many infractions…” James quickly got to work building relationships with the community, learning about people’s needs, and working with them to fight for their rights to humane housing conditions.
Amongst the infractions that ran rampant in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods were fire-code violations. James Reeb had only been in his position for a few months when a fire broke out in an apartment, killing four people. James threw all of his energy into building a case that would show how the local government’s refusal to enforce safety codes was killing people. He hoped that building a strong case around the recent tragedy would lead to the enforcement of codes that could improve living conditions for many residents… and save lives.
But then, Selma happened. After the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday”, Martin Luther King urged clergy across the country to rush to Selma. James Reeb was torn. On the one hand, he felt a sense of urgency around the call to support the civil rights movement in the South. What was happening in Selma was clearly a turning point… and one that would effect the whole nation. On the other hand, if he left for Selma, James risked losing momentum and influence during a crucial stage of the campaign for fire safety. He spent the day talking the decision over with his wife and colleagues. He boarded a plane at 11PM.
James Reeb arrived in Selma on Monday, March 8, 1965. A major march was planned for the following day. However, on what became known as “Turnaround Tuesday,” after crossing the bridge, Martin Luther King directed the crowd to retreat. King had his reasons: he was worried about lack of federal protection, and inadequate preparation to meet the needs of a full five-day march. Mostly, King was worried about a federal court order blocking the march: ignoring a federal order might damage federal support for the march, and for the cause of voting rights. King believed the order would soon be rescinded, and decided to wait. However, his decision angered many Selma organizers… and confused and frustrated the hundreds of clergy and other supporters who had travelled to Selma after his urgent call. King assured them that the time would soon come.
Many clergy boarded planes that evening and headed back home, but James Reeb decided to stay. He walked to downtown Selma for dinner with two other Unitarian ministers, Orloff W. Miller and Clark Olsen. They stopped to ask a local for a recommendation of where to eat, and were led to a place called Walkers Café, which was teeming with civil rights organizers. It took a while to get a table, and by the time the three White ministers had finished their dinner, the crowd had dispersed. It was dark when the three left, and walked up the deserted sidewalk. Four White men approached them from behind, and Clark Olsen turned around just in time to see one of them swinging a pipe, as if it were a baseball bat, into James Reeb’s head. Then, Clark and Orloff Miller were pummeled with fists, shoved to ground, and kicked.
Then the assailants ran away. Clark and Orloff were able to pull themselves together, but James’s eyes were glazed, and his speech incoherent. Because White hospitals would refuse to take a civil rights worker, James Reeb was rushed to a small Black hospital, which was ill equipped to handle his injury. He regained some consciousness, and expressed that there was an increasingly horrifying pain in his head. Clark Olsen recalled that James “knew something was seriously wrong; his face showed great anxiety and worry. When the doctor came, Jim took hold of my hand with both hands and squeezed as if to keep in contact with the world he knew.”
James was rushed to a hospital in Birmingham to see a neurosurgeon… one willing to treat a civil rights worker. Birmingham was a full 90 miles away. At one point, the makeshift ambulance – a hearse from a Black funeral home – got a flat tire. Cars passed by slowly, circling back and shining their lights into the integrated vehicle. When police arrived, they refused to escort the group to safety.
By the time James Reeb arrived in Birmingham, it was too late. He lapsed into a coma, and passed away from a massive brain injury two days later. Unlike the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson – the Black man murdered by police during a peaceful protest for voting rights, and whose murder helped ignite the Selma movement – James Reeb’s death gained huge media attention, caused a national outcry, and may have even helped pave the way for the swift passage of the Voting Rights Act. Clearly, some lives mattered more than others… a fact that had long created bitter feelings within the Black Freedom Movement. Meanwhile, the men suspected of murdering James Reeb were, unsurprisingly, acquitted within 90 minutes by an all-White jury.
James Reeb’s old spiritual home prior to his Boston move – the Unitarian All Souls Church in D.C. – eulogized him with these words:
“His life can speak to us. It says: come in out of the suburbs and revive the dying city. It says: don’t flee from the sinking schools—get in them and work on them. It says: don’t settle for nice houses in the suburbs and rotten houses in the ghetto—change it through every appropriate way: community organization, legislation, code enforcement, and I think he might say, if he were here: There is a killer in the dark and racist streets of the South. But there is a killer in the North too, one which strikes Negro and white in the bright light of the day, every day; and the killer’s name is non-involvement; it is apathy and lack of interest; it is self-concern. This is the killer James Reeb was stalking and when he found him, he was going to wrap him around with righteousness and justice and love.”
Martin Luther King declined a meeting with the President of the United States to offer James Reeb a proper eulogy in Selma. He opened by quoting Shakespeare:
“And, if he should die, Take his body and cut it into little stars. He will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night.”
Despite being born into a wealthy New York City family in 1914, James Peck was always something of an outsider. His Jewish family had converted to Christianity, but their conversion was never accepted: and as a young person, the already independently-minded James was never accepted either. This didn’t change when he entered Harvard in 1933… especially not after he brought a young Black woman to a school dance during his freshman year. For that action James was ostracized by both school and family, and his alienation from “the American establishment” became complete. He escaped by becoming a seaman for several years, where he joined striking ship workers, developed a lifelong commitment to unionization efforts, and experienced his first beatings and arrests. During the buildup to World War II, James Peck attended ant-Nazi rallies, and adopted a stance of radical antiwar pacifism and a commitment to nonviolent resistance. He was incarcerated for over two years during the war as a conscientious objector.
After James Peck was released, he joined anti-nuclear proliferation and other antiwar efforts, which he would continue for the rest of his life. He also joined the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE was dedicated to adapting Gandhian principles to the Black freedom struggle, and in the 1940s waged sit-in campaigns to desegregate the North. Amongst CORE’s leadership were luminaries such as James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, (who had also been imprisoned during the war for conscientious objection). James Peck was beaten during some of CORE’s northern sit-ins, including into unconsciousness by a police officer. He was arrested alongside Bayard Rustin during the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an integrated bus ride through the upper South that was a precursor to the Freedom Rides of 1961. Although these original freedom rides were far less violent than those of the 1960s, James Peck’s comrade Bayard Rustin was thrown on a chain gain doing hard labor. During the Montgomery bus boycott, Bayard emerged as Martin Luther King’s mentor, and James Peck, working as CORE’s publicist, worked to generate northern support for the bus boycott, writing: “By encouraging and supporting actions such as that in Montgomery, we who adhere to the principles of nonviolence hope to hasten complete abolition of segregation within our social system”.
James was the only member of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation to also participate in the much more famous freedom rides of 1961. He was on the second of the two original buses. The first was firebombed, seriously injuring the passengers. The bus that James was on was attacked by Klansmen, who beat James unconscious and left him with gashes across his head that took 53 stitches to close. As John Lewis describes, he was “knocked down at my feet by twelve of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.” After a hospital refused to treat him, James was taken to civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworths’ home, where he stumbled out of the car looking “as bloody as a slaughtered hog”. Shuttlesworth was finally able to find a hospital willing to treat a White civil rights worker, where James underwent emergency treatment.
James Peck was soon released, and many of the freedom riders assumed their journey was over… or at the very least was over for James. However: “I said that for the most severely beaten rider to quit could be interpreted as meaning that violence had triumphed over nonviolence. It might convince the ultrasegregationists that by violence they could stop the freedom riders. My point was accepted.” James Peck reboarded the bus and continued the freedom ride. The moment turned James into a nationally recognized figure, a status he leveraged by travelling the country raising funds for the movement. James Peck continued his civil rights, antiwar, and labor organizing until a stroke in 1983 made organizing difficult.
Born in 1930, Father James Groppi was raised by working-class Italian immigrant parents on the south side of Milwaukee. As immigrants, his parents suffered from anti-Italian prejudices. Unlike some European immigrants who responded to anti-immigrant sentiments by embracing racism as a way to assimilate into American Whiteness, Groppi’s parents responded by expressing sympathy for the experiences of Black Americans.
Groppi credits his parents with raising him to sympathize with the struggles of other peoples… a concern that led him into the ministry. During his last three years as a seminary student in the 1950s, he ran a youth program in a segregated and impoverished Black neighborhood. Groppi’s direct witnessing of racial inequities – especially in a very personal way through caring for children impacted by those inequities – guided him beyond mere sympathy, and into a passionate, active concern for racial justice.
As the civil rights movement began to unfold, Groppi followed events closely. Ordained as a Catholic priest in 1959, he was originally assigned to a White working-class church. There, Father Groppi offered sermons on the need to stand up for racial justice, but was dismayed by his congregation’s disinterest in the subject… and by their unwillingness to wrestle with their own racial prejudices. In 1963, he was reassigned to lead a Black Catholic church. When the church members marched against the arch-segregationist George Wallace’s visit to Milwaukee, Groppi drove some of them to the rally… but just dropped them off, rather than participating himself. After the demonstration, his congregants challenged him: why didn’t he march alongside them? Father Groppi replied that if he got too active in the movement, his bishop might transfer him. When it became clear that building trust and confidence with the congregation meant being on the ground with them, Groppi took a deep look inward. He realized he had been operating from fear when he didn’t join them, and that his choice was between operating from fear, or out of love for his congregation. From then on he threw himself fully into the movement.
He began by strengthening ties between his church and the local NAACP. Soon, the NAACP Youth Council – which was engaged in intense school desegregation efforts – invited him to be their chaplain and advisor. In 1966, the Youth Council took on a segregated social club for the city elite. They argued that since the judges belonging to a segregated club could not be impartial, they needed to either resign from the club, or be removed from their judgeship. When protests outside of the elite club gained little attention, the Youth Council took their demonstrations directly to the homes of the judges. A week of protests drew thousands of angry Whites, who hurled hard objects at the protestors. When it became clear that the police would offer little protection, the Youth Council organized a security team called The Commandos. They were tasked with protecting the protestors… and James Groppi, who was a special target of the crowd’s ire. These young men – who wore black berets, black boots, and Commando insignia – would later be an important influence on Fred Hampton.
In 1967, Groppi led a campaign for fair housing in Milwaukee. He started by working with city council members, but when that went nowhere, he turned to protests. For 200 days, Groppi led daily marches that drew thousands of people. They also drew violent crowds who, in the words of Steven Avella, “hurled cherry bombs, bricks, bottles, feces and urine at the demonstrators. Groppi himself received death threats and saw himself hanged in effigy.” By this time, Martin Luther King had turned his attention towards fighting unequal housing and racialized poverty, and threw his support to Groppi. In the wake of King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which contained watered-down versions of the legislation James Groppi had fought for in Milwaukee.
In 1969, James Groppi helped organize a Mother’s Welfare March, during which 1,000 mother’s marched into Wisconsin’s State Assembly chamber, which they held for 11 hours. However, church superiors were unhappy with Groppi’s activism, and as he had initially feared, transferred him. Soon afterwards he became disillusioned with the church and eventually abandoned his priesthood, got married, and spent his remaining years continuing to organize while working as a bus driver.