Middle Passage and my Jewish journey into racial justice
After I retired in 2012, I strongly felt the desire and need to “give back.” I had lived a life of privilege. I had benefitted from an excellent education, did not know poverty, lived comfortably, and reached a very high level of professional responsibility and accomplishment. During the turbulent 1960s, I had stayed very much on the sidelines of the Civil Rights struggle. No, I was absent. That omission had weighed on my conscience for decades.
The breakthrough opportunity and moment came for me in September 2015. There was a civil rights march in support of voting rights called “America’s Journey for Justice” organized by the NAACP and Reform Judaism. The objective was to lobby in Washington, DC for renewal of the Voting Rights Act. (It didn’t happen, of course.) The march started in Selma, Alabama and ended in Washington, DC. There were a few hardy souls who did the entire march. One of them was a Black Vietnam vet of my age who carried the flag all the way from Selma, who called himself “Middle Passage.” (If you don’t know that term, “Middle Passage,” click here to look it up.)
There’s Middle Passage on the left in the orange shirt and the NAACP white cowboy hat, carrying the flag. (I’m barely visible in the back.)
Embarrasingly, I had never heard the term “Middle Passage.” I had to look it up on Wikipedia and then learned much more about it from my first visit to the Museum of African-American History and Culture in DC. Even his name was an education for me.
I’ll return to Middle Passage at the end of this essay.
I marched with a few members of my shul led by my amazing Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, along with national and local NAACP members, including then-NAACP President Cornell Brooks. We tackled one eleven-mile segment, in three-mile installments, on a blazingly hot day north of Richmond, Virginia on the tarmac of US Route 1. (I had undergone back surgery a few months before, but trained specifically for this event.) We took turns carrying the Torah from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and handing it off to my Black and White fellow marchers. Try marching with a Torah in 90-degree heat someday.
I learned many things on that march, for example about mass incarceration, about cruel laws for minor offenses, like Virginia’s ridiculously low Grand Larceny Felony Threshold, leading to major prison terms especially for people of color, including children, and more. While I knew about “discrimination,” I learned that this word was but a mild euphemism for a systemic structure of injustice based on race and poverty. I met an AME minister who has become a lifelong friend as well as an NAACP member who introduced me to the organization and its mission. I continue to be an active NAACP member to this day.
That was three days before Rosh Hashanah. And on Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Schwartzman gave a sermon that no one in our congregation will ever forget. It was about White Privilege.
She said from the pulpit what had probably never before been said in a synagogue: When our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents came to this country, they became White. They. Became. White.
Well. Talk about Revelation. That hit me and many others between the eyeballs. And for many, it was not welcome news. In fact, a friend, a senior official at a major Jewish organization, said to me afterwards that “she has no right to make me feel guilty.” On Erev Rosh Hashanah, mind you. It was a watershed moment.
For me, that moment was transformative. I joined the NAACP and shortly afterward was elected Secretary of the Fairfax County, Virginia branch.
Then along came the Rev. Dr. William Barber and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theohardis and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
It was a reincarnation of the Poor People’s Campaign begun by Dr. King fifty years earlier, shortly before his assassination, and which probably precipitated his assassination.
Why? Because Dr. King understood, after the victories of the Civil Rights movement, that there was more to the task of “bending the arc of the universe toward justice” than liberation for people of color. He understood that racism was just one systemic symptom of a warped social, economic, and political system.
All that deeply offended many people and threatened them and their way of life. It was not just about equal rights for African-Americans. It was about calling out how the White male power structure in this country pitted poor Whites against Black people, about the economic system that required it and the political and legal system that perpetuated it. On the day Dr. King was killed by an assassin’s bullet, the forces of reaction set in, just as they did after the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.
This was effectively the end of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Shortly before his assassination, the movement split in two when he spoke against violence as a tool, diverging from his co-leader Stokeley Carmichael, who challenged the philosophy of nonviolence advocated by Dr. King and interracial alliances that had come to define the modern civil rights movement, called instead for “Black Power.” (For more information, click on these two links.) With Dr. King’s untimely death, the Black Power movement became a dominant trend. Many Jewish people who had participated actively in the civil rights movement, some of them giving their lives, felt deeply hurt and betrayed. The partnership between Blacks and Jews was broken for at least one generation.
As a Jew joining the modern Poor People’s Campaign fifty years later, I was strongly attracted to its message that poverty, and less so race, is the root of evil in American society and that it is a ”fusion movement” of White, Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Peoples; of people of all faiths and no faith; of poor people and wealthy people of conscience, all of whom are united around deep moral, faith-based principles. It holds that the injustices called out by Dr. King — systemic racism, poverty, militarism, false moral narratives of religious nationalism — are foundational to the ills of modern American society in a deeply intersectional way. It is committed to nonviolence, but it is also committed to action.
To me, these goals and values were and are fully consistent our Jewish tradition, and especially of progressive or Reform Judaism, which informs us that only through deeds of lovingkindness and justice, in addition to prayer and study, can we redeem ourselves and our world.
Through my membership, and even local leadership for a while, of the Poor People’s Campaign, I began to feel comfortable in a multiracial, multifaith environment, though it was not easy and I had to be extremely careful about my speech, my attitude, and my expectations. Anyone contemplating diving into the pool of racial justice should think about this and whether they’re ready for it. It’s a life-changing experience.
It seems now like a long journey, but in fact, it began in earnest only in 2015, with that sweltering march north of Richmond and Rabbi Schwartzman’s bold and transformational Rosh Hashanah sermon. I know it will never be complete. In the words of Pirke avot 2:21, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Back to Middle Passage. He was a quiet man, an injured Vietnam vet who lost a brother in that unjust, immoral, and unnecessary war that was transformational for my generation, a kind man, a contemporary of mine, who had marched at the head of the procession nearly 1,000 miles from Alabama through the Deep South and to Northern Virginia. He proudly carried his beloved American flag the whole way. To me, he humanized the experience and the deep injustice of the particular brand of American racism in the most personal way.
Middle Passage never made it to DC. The day after I marched, he had a sudden, massive heart attack and tragically died on the blacktop of U.S. Route 1, in scorching heat, just short of Fredericksburg, Virginia, with his beloved American flag still in his hands.
May the memory of Middle Passage — both the man and the four hundred-year-old story of the forced voyage of millions of enslaved Africans to North America and the Caribbean, the four centuries of pain, suffering, and oppression it created, the false narratives about slavery and people of color, the doctrine of White supremacy and the enduring power structure it created — be a blessing to all humanity. zTz”l.
