New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodwin had their choice of ways to spend the summer of 1964, and touring the U.S. or traipsing through Europe were viable options.
However, after learning more about the growing Civil Rights Movement and the plight of Black Americans who were still being denied full citizenship in the U.S., the socially conscious college students independently volunteered for the Freedom Summer, a civil rights initiative to help Black residents of racially restrictive Mississippi exercise their right to vote.
Goodman, Schwerner and James Chaney, a Black volunteer from Mississippi, were brutally murdered for assisting Black Mississippians. Their main goal was getting eligible Blacks residents in the state registered and voting.
But even in death, Schwerner and Goodman were still at work — providing tangible comfort to Fannie Lee Chaney, the grieving mother of the 21-year-old Black volunteer who died with them. “If it had been my son alone, nothing would have been done. Two white boys were killed, so they did something about the killing of my child, who was with them,” Chaney said three years later.
These two white New Yorkers — in life and death — made memorable contributions to Black Americans’ ongoing struggle for justice and equality, and they are not alone.
Many of these white allies are well-known, but most remain unsung. Among them are fiery John Brown, who believed that he was on a divine mission, Quaker Levi Coffin of Underground Railroad fame, crusading newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, and American labor leader and activist Walter Reuther. Also among the allies are the countless, concerned whites who’ve peacefully protested in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
They and other white Americans appear throughout the long and painful timeline of the Black struggle in America. The white activists came from all walks of life, including organized labor, the church, the press and schools. Some were radical; some were idealistic and others were simply emphatic. They were allies who advocated, marched and even died for Black causes. Importantly, the deaths of these white allies also allowed mainstream America to ponder the loss of countless Black Americans who were murdered while seeking the civil rights promised by the U.S. Constitution.
A century after President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the South, a huge Washington, D.C. march attracted 250,000 people demanding jobs and freedom. Among them was Walter Reuther, the longtime president of the powerful United Auto Workers (UAW) union, who was a white national labor boss and civil rights activist. He was also a pivotal figure and speaker who spoke at the unprecedented March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.
Reuther — a longtime friend and ally of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had marched with the civil rights leader throughout the South and provided financial support for the civil rights struggle. In 1963, he helped plan and pay for the March on Washington.
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union leader A. Philip Randolph and activist Bayard Rustin crafted a powerful alliance of civil rights, labor and religious organizations for the march. The result was organized labor turning out in force, with an estimated 40,000 unionized workers for the march.
According to the 199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East’s 2023 article, “March on Washington Was Led by Labor Unions,” an “army of 1,000 members boarded a New York City train to D.C. in the wee hours of Aug. 28. Members donned blue and white 1199 paper caps as they then made their way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.” One of their banners read: “America’s Fastest Growing Union Marches for Jobs and Freedom Now.”
It was a transformative moment in the Civil Rights movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. captivated the massive audience in Washington and millions more on television with his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech calling for an end to racism and racial segregation.
In the following years, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) provided critical lobbying support and testimony for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Reuther, who died in a plane crash in May 1970, was eulogized by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. “Walter Reuther was to Black people the most widely known and respected white labor leader in the nation,” she said. “He was there when the storm clouds were thick. We remember him in Montgomery. He was in Birmingham. He marched with us in Selma, and Jackson, Mississippi and in Washington. … He was fighting the fight of the whole world.”
White support at the March on Washington was the response to more than a century of injustice suffered by Blacks. This white support has a long history. Let’s start with Levi Coffin, a Quaker.
Coffin, born in North Carolina in 1798, was convinced at an early age that slaveholding was incompatible with his faith. By age 15, Coffin was helping his family assist runaway slaves passing through their farm.
He moved to Indiana in 1826, where his house would become a key node in the Underground Railroad. Coffin helped more than 2,000 people escape slavery, and his home was called the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad.” As an adult, Coffin was nicknamed the “President of the Underground Railroad.”
Of course, there was also former slave Harriet Tubman, who broke free from her slave owners in 1849, and later began her famous work as a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad — a network of secret routes and safehouses used until the Emancipation Proclamation by enslaved Blacks to escape into free states and Canada.
Coffin lived to write his memoirs after the Civil War. John Brown, a fiery contemporary, did not.
Brown, the famously militant white abolitionist, believed in ending slavery by any means necessary. He led anti-slavery guerrillas in the pre-statehood Kansas Territory in 1855, a retaliatory raid on violent slavery sympathizers in the territory’s Pottawatomie Creek in 1856 and the attack on a federal armory in what was then Harpers Ferry, Va., in October 1859.
The Harper’s Ferry raid would end with his capture. Convicted of murder, slave insurrection and treason, he was hanged. Some experts credit Brown’s crusade for hastening the Civil War that would end slavery.
Brown’s efforts also had notable support. His friends included two of the most famous Black abolitionists of the day — Tubman and slave-turned-abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass. Brown and Tubman even had a working relationship — she helped him recruit volunteers for the assault on Harper’s Ferry. Tubman, who planned to take part in the attack, fell ill and could not participate.
Years later, after Brown’s execution, Douglass addressed an audience about the failed Harper’s Ferry incident and the actions of his friend. “The true question is: Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, ‘No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause,” Douglass said.
Of course, there were other white abolitionists — men and women — who were not as radical as Brown but were no less passionate about their cause.
New York City-born Julia Ward Howe, the noted author and poet renowned for writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was one. Crusading publisher William Lloyd Garrison was another abolition icon. Founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison’s newspaper, “The Liberator,” is credited for successfully leading the fight against slavery. Garrison was also a fierce critic of the U.S. Constitution for tolerating slavery. But he lived long enough to see the 14th Amendment attempt to remedy the situation in 1868 by granting citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized in the United States,” including formerly enslaved people, and providing all citizens with equal protection under the law.
Unfortunately, “Jim Crow” laws were passed in reaction to the benefits of citizenship that the 14th Amendment and the amenities the post-Civil War reconstruction era offered Blacks. Jim Crow laws disenfranchised Blacks, stripped them of political and economic gains they had been granted and reinforced racial segregation in the South. A new battle in the war against segregation, discrimination and injustice would ensue and carry on into the 20th century.
Among the white allies aiding those efforts was lone protestor William Lewis Moore, a white postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member who staged solo protests against segregation — sometimes wearing a sandwich sign that read: “End segregation in America: Black or White, Eat at Joe’s.”
While walking alone along the highway in April 1963 to deliver a letter to Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, Moore was fatally shot. He would be immortalized by folk singer Pete Seeger in his song “William Moore, the Mailman.”
The following year, another violent crime captured the attention of the nation: the kidnappings and killings in Mississippi of young Civil Rights Movement volunteers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Schwerner had just enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Social Work, and Goodman was a Queens College student. Independently, the two White students chose to get more actively involved by joining the frontline grassroots “Freedom Summer” initiative.
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) — the Mississippi branches of CORE, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) — created the “Freedom Summer” initiative, manned by nonviolence-practicing volunteers from Mississippi and other states with the goal of educating and registering Black voters in Mississippi.
The prerequisite for Freedom Summer were training sessions that could have been called “Racism 101” or “Advanced Hatred.” At Ohio’s Western College for Women, the Freedom Summer volunteers were taught how to nonviolently cope with the verbal and physical abuse they would likely encounter in Mississippi. This is where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner first met.
Once in Mississippi, Schwerner was immediately targeted by local Klu Klux Klan officials for his activities, which included organizing local boycotts of biased businesses, helping people register to vote, setting up a community center, organizing their headquarters, and “planning on using the Mt. Zion Methodist Church (in nearby Philadelphia, Miss.) as a Freedom School,” according to FBI and the U.S. Justice Department records. When the church was burned and churchgoers were beaten, the trio drove to investigate the incident — beginning their death spiral.
The three men were kidnapped and murdered on June 21 by Mississippi Klansmen, with help from a local police deputy sheriff. An anonymous tip led to their remains being found buried beneath an earthen dam. Their disappearance made national news, sparking a massive search involving the FBI and the National Guard. This tragic chapter of the Civil Rights Movement would inspire the Hollywood movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Mrs. Chaney’s profound quote — referring to lack of faith in local law enforcement — was proven accurate when Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price was among the 18 defendants found guilty of the crimes. Ultimately, public pressure spurred by the missing white college students led to massive investigations by the FBI, and other federal authorities. However, the killings continued.
The murder of a Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in February of 1965 was the motivation for the now famous Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, march. After “Bloody Sunday,” when the first attempt to advance to the state Capitol, Montgomery, was met with brutal attacks by law enforcement, King issued a clarion call a clarion call to clergy for help. Thousands responded; James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, and white Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo were among those who answered King’s plea.
Both were killed: Reeb was fatally beaten on March 11, 1965, by a gang of white supremacists; Liuzzo, a mother of five who came to Alabama to ferry protestors between Selma and Montgomery, was fatally shot by Klansmen on March 25, 1965.
However, their deaths — and the murders of countless Black freedom seekers — were not in vain. The momentum from the March on Washington and pressures from Alabama events would lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President Lyndon Johnson would invoke Reeb’s memory when presenting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Congress.
Unfortunately, legislation did not end the discrimination and inequality many African-Americans continued to experience. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Black Americans’ frustrations were dramatically expressed by fist-clinched Black Power salutes by Black American athletes — 200-meter dash gold medalist Tommie Smith and bronze medalist John Carlos — on the podium during their medal ceremony as America’s National Anthem played.
On the podium, Smith and Carlos had an unlikely ally in White 200-meter silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia. In solidarity, Norman and the Black Olympians wore the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which organized the protest. Norman’s action was not entirely appreciated by his countrymen, and he was not allowed to compete in another Olympic Games for Australia despite qualifying. When Norman died in 2006, Smith and Carlos flew to Australia to be pallbearers at his funeral.
“He was a lone soldier in Australia,” Carlos told the Associated Press. “Many people in Australia didn’t particularly understand. Why would that young white fella go over and stand with those black individuals?” In August 2012, the Australian House of Representatives offered Norman a posthumous apology.
In April of 1968, before the Olympics Games and after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., white Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliot devised an exercise to teach her third-grade class about racism. “You are not born racist. You are born into a racist society,” said the creator of the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise on prejudice. “And like anything else, if you can learn it, you can unlearn it. But some people choose not to unlearn it, because they’re afraid they’ll lose power if they share it with other people. We are afraid of sharing power. That’s what it’s all about.”
Today, Elliot is a lecturer and diversity trainer. Aided by her daughter Mary Elliott Gasteiger, the pioneering educator hosts a website, janelliot.com, that provides invaluable information on prejudice, including “Commitment to Combat Racism” questions from Judith Katz, author of “White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training.”
Even in the often disrespectful world of social media, there are some respectable outlets from white allies that provide direction and perspectives on race, such as RacialBeginners.com. On a website and several social media platforms, the outlet offers a free “Racial Beginners 101” course designed to “educate and encourage total beginners to start their racial journey and help them start building a practice of anti-racism.”
