South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

by Imani Perry

In a certain sense, Southern Jewish life, historically, provides an example of the outer limits of Whiteness. That is to say, Jewish people became “White” in a way that was at that time largely impossible in Europe, but a latent otherness, particularly in the Bible belt, also characterized their social position. To the extent that Jewish people were overrepresented in leftist politics in the early twentieth century, anti-Jewish skepticism was heightened. And in the context of the civil rights movement, when significant numbers of the White students who joined Freedom Summer were Jewish, the alliance with Black people placed their Whiteness in further jeopardy. My father, who arrived in Birmingham to teach at a historically Black college, with a strong Brooklyn accent and wiry, curly hair, was acutely aware of the venom directed at him. When he was living, he would tell me the story of traveling to Atmore, Alabama, late one night for activist work around prisons. He’d always cry, recalling how when he left that evening, he worried that it might be the last time he’d see me and my mother. Being killed was a real possibility. This was a decade after the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, three civil rights workers, two of them Jewish. Even after all of the legislative and social change, he was aware of being an outside agitator.