Charlotte Blacks and Jews Crossing Bridges in Selma & Beyond

By Judy Schindler and James Walker

It is 1965. Imagine you live in a county that is 81% Black and 19% white, and not one Black person is registered to vote. Fast forward 60 years and imagine convincing a group of Charlotte Black and Jewish young leaders to take a 1200-mile journey to retrace those steps, celebrate the partnerships of the past, and strategize for the future. This is what the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance was able to accomplish this past weekend. As a group we realized many more bridges need to be crossed, and our journeys are safer and more successful when we cross them together.

The United States just marked the 60th anniversary of the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing in Selma, Alabama. There were actually three bridge crossings. The first was Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, where John Lewis led approximately 600 civil right activists on a journey from Selma to Montgomery. They were stopped on the bridge by state troopers who violently prevented them from crossing. Two days later, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would lead a partial crossing. Midway across the bridge, he led a prayer session and fearing extreme violence turned the group back. A national call would go out and on March 21, 1965, thousands of people would come to Selma and successfully make the 54-mile journey to the state capital in Montgomery. Ultimately 25,000 people would stand together to protest the injustice at the seat of power.

We recreated the journey from Charlotte to Selma, visiting synagogues and Black churches along the way—in Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma—that supported, educated, inspired, and sheltered the protestors.

Our Deep South Pilgrimage took place in a time of deep polarization. We resolved to walk towards each other to have difficult conversations instead of walking away, and throughout the four days of traveling together, we learned how to converse in uplifting and respectful ways.

During the Civil Rights Era, Black and Jewish communities both rooted their actions in the legacy of Moses and his drive for liberation, and in the Hebrew Prophets’ demand for social justice. Our time together allowed both of us to consider how Black spirituality and modern Judaism can ground our identities and inspire our work in Charlotte today.

Both Black and Jewish communities were galvanized by the generational trauma of living under white supremacist power structures. We filled hours of time on our bus sharing our family stories of Nazi persecution and Jim Crow terror. Some of our family names and hometowns are literally engraved on the hanging steel monuments of the national lynching memorial.

On so many campuses and in so many cities, Black, whites, Jews, Muslims, and Christians are driven apart by intimidation campaigns masked as activism. The irony is that we had more productive discussions (including addressing October 7th and the Hamas-Israel War) in the Deep South than what took place in the heart of New York City last week. Disruptive protests in a classroom and in the library at Barnard College led to arrests and suspensions.

There is power in this work. Even our bus driver and documentarian became active participants and integral parts of our pilgrimage. The latter, who was fasting for Ramadan, officially joined our coalition.

On our return, we tried to figure out what made our Black/Jewish Alliance trip so successful. We hardly knew each other 84 hours before, and some people knew nothing about the other’s community. We had a policy of true freedom of speech. Anyone could ask anything without feeling shame or being offended. One Alliance member stated, “I was looking for the truth, and I had a lot of questions. I got all the answers I sought!”

We learned that knowledge and insight are acquired when judgment is suspended. We learned that relationships are built when we room together, when we eat together, and have others with intersecting identities (such as a Black rabbi) to emphasize commonalities. We learned that bridge crossings can happen with diverse coalitions, and that we are stronger and safer together.

Maybe we need to get off social media. Maybe we need to charter more Charlotte buses filled with diverse residents and drive 1200 miles down south to build a better future.

Rabbi James (Ya’aqov) Walker is Secretary of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis (BlackJews.org).