More than sixty years after the march from Selma to Montgomery, Americans returned to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Alabama State Capitol this weekend to walk again, pray again, and rally once again for the voting rights those marches secured. The American Jewish Congress stands with them today, just as we stood with them then.
In 1963, our then-president, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial moments before Dr. King delivered his dream. In 1965, our members marched from Selma to Montgomery. Through our Commission on Law and Social Action, our organization helped carry the Voting Rights Act to passage. That work is not a chapter we have closed.
Prinz, who served his congregation in Berlin under the Nazis before fleeing to America, told the crowd in 1963: “The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.” He spoke as a Jew who had seen the cost of silence firsthand.
The right to vote and political representation is a cornerstone of every other right. For a people whose history has been shaped by the experience of being denied a voice, we understand that defending hard-fought rights is a moral inheritance. The work of Selma and Montgomery is not finished. We honor those who marched this weekend, and we stand alongside them, reaffirming that the Black-Jewish partnership at the heart of America’s civil rights struggle remains one of the most consequential alliances in our nation’s history.
(Photo: American Jewish Congress members holding signs at Montgomery March, 1965)
