Most Americans have some familiarity with the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, even in an era in which some school systems have restricted the topic of racism. Yet there are still lessons to be learned.
In the spring of 1964, for instance, Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference invited a group of 16 Reform rabbis to participate in protests against racial segregation in St. Augustine, Fla. They answered his call, but the act of solidarity was largely unknown, until now.
Arrested for “disturbing the peace,” the rabbis spent a night in jail, during which they used a pencil to write an eloquent open letter about their support of the civil rights movement — on the back of a leaflet for the Ku Klux Klan.
The circumstances surrounding this act of solidarity are recounted in a new seven-part podcast, “The Rabbis Go South,” from Boston documentary filmmakers Amy Geller and Gerald Peary. The limited-run series launched on Sept. 16, one episode each week, partnered with and produced by Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, a nonprofit storytelling platform sponsored by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston.
But before Geller and Peary could go South, they went West.
The filmmakers — Geller is an assistant professor of Film & Television for Boston University; Peary, a noted longtime film critic — first met Rabbi Allen Secher, a graduate of Brandeis University, while filming their 2019 documentary “The Rabbi Goes West.” The film, which debuted at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, follows Rabbi Chaim Bruk, a Hasidic Jew who moved from Brooklyn to Montana to share Judaism with the local community.
Secher, who led a different congregation in Whitefish, Mont., for more than 20 years, appeared in that film as a supporter of Bruk. After the film came out, Secher called Geller and Peary to urge them to tell another story, this one about he and his colleagues’ long-ago experience in Florida.
“He said something like, “I’ve got this story I want you to tell while I’m still on Earth,’” Peary recalls.
A few years later, Secher, now 89, had listened to the first three episodes of the podcast from Chicago, where he lives with his wife, Ina.
“I was surprised back in ‘64 that it wasn’t a major story,” Secher says. “I’ve been touting it ever since. Even the Reform movement didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
The story of the rabbis, including Secher, marching arm-in-arm with Black activists in St. Augustine — the oldest city in the US, founded in 1565 by Spanish explorers — merits a brief mention in Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy, “American in the King Years.” But the details of those few days have not been fully documented, Secher says, until now.
“The hour-and-a-half when we marched was the scariest hour and a half in my life,” he says.
The rabbis were arrested after being refused service alongside their Black fellow activists at the Monson Motor Lodge, where the owner, James Brock, was dead set against integration. Just minutes after the arrests, Brock ran around the building to the motel’s swimming pool, where Black and white demonstrators had jumped into the water together. In a moment captured in an infamous photograph, he poured two gallons of muriatic acid into the pool.
In 2014, six of the surviving rabbis traveled once again to St. Augustine for a 50th-year commemoration of their contribution to the civil rights movement. Today, only two of them — Secher and Rabbi Jerry Goldstein — are still alive.
With the help of a few dedicated St. Augustine locals, the city has quietly acknowledged its role in the civil rights era, including the dedication of a plaque honoring the rabbis. But Geller points out that the city still calls the 200-year-old site that once served its slave market the “Historic Public Market.”
“That’s actually how systemic racism gets perpetuated, right?” she said.
After conducting interviews with the surviving rabbis, Geller and Peary (who are married) concluded that there wasn’t enough material in the historical record to support even a short film.
“So we decided to jump into this very exciting format of audio storytelling,” Geller says. “It was a huge learning curve for us.”
Initially, they planned to have the project debut as an adjunct to the Black Lives Matter movement. Between the pandemic, fund-raising, and other professional delays, it took a lot longer to come out than the creators had hoped.
“The awareness of how important it is for white people to support the movement was a big part of this for us,” says Geller. “These rabbis aren’t ‘white saviors.’ They were foot soldiers supporting an African-American leadership that was very much in charge.”
Episodes are under 20 minutes each and feature the voices of experts and those surrounding the events, including Gayle Phillips, the director of the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center, and St. Augustine civil rights activist James Jackson. A new chapter debuts each Wednesday; this week will mark episode four. On the website for Hub & Spoke, the series is billed as “an inspiring tale of hope for a divided world.”
“One thing white supremacists do very well is they pit different groups against each other,” Geller says. “We really wanted to look at this model of solidarity.”
Find “Rabbis Go South” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcasts, and other podcast platforms; or hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.