Miyuki Kita, “Bringing ‘Tikkun Olam’ to the South: New York Jews in the Civil Rights Movement”

Miyuki Kita will examine an unknown, unacknowledged episode of the commitment of New York Jews to the Civil Rights Movement and its impact outside of New York City. During the summer of 1963, 16 Queens College students—14 of whom were Jewish—traveled as far as the Prince Edward County, Virginia, to tutor local African American children who had not received any formal education since the shutdown of the county’s public schools to avoid the state’s integration order in 1959. These “Freedom Schools” eventually became an important model for Mississippi Freedom Schools in the following year. Additionally, as a backdrop to the students’ visit to Virginia, more than 200 students started to serve as tutors and recreational leaders for underprivileged children in South Jamaica, Queens, every Saturday in April 1963. In such circumstances emerged Andrew Goodman, a Queens College student at the time of his death in Mississippi and gave his life to the civil rights movement.

Miyuki Kita is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Kitakyushu, Japan. Her studies have focused on antisemitism in the U.S., Black-Jewish relations, and Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar affiliated with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University from 2012-2013. She also served as a visiting scholar at Queens College, City University of New York in 2018-2019. Her works include “Breaking the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’: Jews and the 1945 New York Fair Employment Practices Act,” in Fruma Mohrer and Ettie Goldwasser eds., New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2013) and “Foot Soldier in the Civil Rights Movement: Lynn Goldsmith with SCLC–SCOPE, Summer 1965,” Southern JewishHistory, vol.22, 2019, pp.151-188.