VOICES OF CONGREGANTS

Joan Geiger

Joan Geiger shared these reflections with our congregation at the 2009 Yom Kippur afternoon service.

I moved with my husband and young daughter to Mississippi in the early 1950’s where my husband opened a steel company. One day, two men came to our house and said that they represented the Jackson business community and were starting a new organization called the White Citizens Council. Their stated goal was to: “Preserve our Way of Life and Keep the Schools the Way They Are.” I politely said we weren’t interested. The men said, “You are either with us or against us. We’re determined to win.” I was shocked at the implied threat. It was then that I began to think about the inequalities in the black community and the resistance in the white community.

I began to talk to people about my concerns—first to my own Jewish group, of only 125 families, and then to the larger Jackson community. Slowly we found like-minded people…Whites, Blacks, Jews, Christians. There were not many of us with whom we met to explore ways to be involved.

The Civil Rights sit-ins and marches began in the early 60’s. Young people rallied to Mississippi from all over the country. Our Rabbi visited Jewish students who had been arrested and housed at the Fair Grounds. He counseled them and wrote to their parents. Years later, due to his continued interest in bi-racial issues, his home and our Temple were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. We lived in a climate of fear.

During this period, while attending a Temple conclave in Little Rock, Arkansas, I heard a program called “The Panel of American Women”. There were 4 white women: the moderator, a Jew, Catholic, and a Protestant, followed by a Black woman each discussing prejudice from their own backgrounds. The Protestant woman stated she did not experience prejudice while growing up. She was usually in a majority situation. The Jewish and Catholic women had experienced prejudice, but generously attributed it to ignorance about other’s religions. However, these women could go where they wanted…doors were not closed to them. The Black woman told a different story. She was not allowed to try on clothes in downtown stores, nor eat in many restaurants. The schools she attended were shabby and unequipped, and she had to drink from a separate water fountain and sit in the back of the bus. Afterwards, I spoke to the woman who developed the program, Esther Brown from Kansas City. We invited her to Jackson to help us form our own panel. Together we spoke to over 160 groups over 5 years: schools, men’s civic clubs, churches, women’s groups and conventions about the realities and effects of prejudice.

When President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, Kivie Kaplan, the honorary national head of the NAACP, called our home and asked us to help integrate the hotels in Mississippi.

One day the head of the Human Relations Council of Mississippi organized a meeting with the FBI and several Jewish business men, including my husband, to raise money to pay a Ku Klux Klan member to turn informant. Through this, we discovered a plan to bomb a Jewish man’s home in Meridian, Mississippi. The FBI and police ambushed two Klan members before the bombing, killing one, a woman who was a third grade teacher in Jackson, and arresting and convicting her male accomplice.

Around this time, some of our neighbors began to unrelentingly demand that our family stop having black people come to our house, afraid that their houses would be mistakenly bombed instead of ours. My daughter, Beverly, lost the friendship of a girl who also lived across the street when her parents insisted that she was not to associate with us.

The 1950’s and 1960’s were a moment in time for me when the world stood still, and I was searingly confronted with the inescapable necessity that we, as Jews, must always fight for human dignity and equality.

On Torah
Joan Geiger