Jewish Activists in the Albany Movement: A Gendered Experience

Following the horrors of the Holocaust, many members of the American Jewish community became troubled by the ongoing discrimination against African Americans in the United States. In 1964, members of the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress joined Black civil rights organizations to form a volunteer corps of lawyers, who would travel to the South to protect the rights of citizens participating in anti-Jim Crow demonstrations. Many of these volunteers found themselves in Albany, Georgia, where African Americans were fighting for desegregation and the right to vote in the early 1960s. This project explores the relationships between African Americans from the deep South and Jewish activists during the Albany Movement. Using archival materials, this paper will argue that the legacy of the Holocaust allowed Jewish men and women to cross racial boundaries to help prevent another Holocaust, this time at home. This paper will be divided into three sections. I will first examine the reasons that many Jewish activists travelled to the South to participate in the movement. Then, I will explore how these activists participated in the movement. Finally, I will examine how the men’s and women’s work in the movement was a gendered experience