"Historical accounts of the civil rights movement obscure the role of women--especially Jewish women, who were a significant presence in the cadre of activists who went South during the Freedom Summers," says Susan Weidman Schneider, editor-in-chief of Lilith. An article in the Fall 1999 issue of Lilith, the independent Jewish women's magazine, attempts to fill in these gaps. Historian Debra Schultz has brought forward the previously untold stories of women in the American civil rights movement.

In a unique oral history, Schultz interviews fifteen women activists, focusing on how even the most secular Jews among them linked something about their Jewishness with an overwhelming obligation to fight for "what is right." "When it comes to the civil rights movement, most people know that two Jewish men--Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman--and their black colleague James Chaney were murdered in Mississippi in 1964," says Schultz. "What most do not know is that Andrew Goodman had been in Mississippi for one day when he was killed. Rita Schwerner had been there for six months when her husband was murdered by a white supremacist gangS§Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman are mythologized as Jewish civil rights martyrs. But what happened to the woman who risked her life, did the hard daily work of organizing in black communities for six months, faced her husband1s murder, who managed in her grief to point out to the media that the only reason that they noted James Chaney1s death was because he was murdered with two white men?"

Although Rita Schwerner1s name may ring a familiar note, the fifteen women Schultz interviews have been nearly written out of contemporary American history. Lilith, the independent Jewish women1s quarterly which has covered feminist issues across the spectrum of Jewish affiliation for 23 years, has developed a reputation for honoring and bringing to public awareness the activism of women elided from history. Uncovering the moral and ethical motivations of the women involved in the civil rights movement, and the impact their early activism had on their lives, this article goes beyond filtered nostalgia to provide flesh and blood role models for young women today.

The women profiled in this article, including Jacqueline Levine, past president of the national community relations organization now known as the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, are now doctors, teachers, attorneys and community leaders. Their later choices were shaped in part by doing time in Southern jails, living with nonviolent resistance (often at odds with their own post-Holocaust desire to "fight back"), and feeling grateful for the chance to experience more than "being a housewife in the suburbs," which was the fate several of them yearned to avert when they joined the Freedom Rides.

An indication of how history has erased these female civil rights activists is the difficulty Lilith had in tracking down photographic documentation of their experiences. The women did not think they were making history, and took no photographs of themselves. "One of the largest commercial photo agencies, Magnum, could find only six photographs of white women, none identified by name, in their extensive files on the civil rights movement," notes Schneider. In publishing the article,"Unsung Heroines of the '60s: Jewish Women Who Went South," the oral histories of fifteen Jewish women civil right activists, Lilith has "restored to the history of the 1960s some of its under-recognized and very courageous young justice-seekers."

Sample copies of the Fall issue are available by calling Lilith toll-free at 1-888-2-LILITH. In the same issue of Lilith: