Amy Geller. Photo by Katherine Taylor

Journalism & Media

Podcast Looks at a Forgotten Chapter of the Civil Rights Struggle

In The Rabbis Go South, filmmaker Amy Geller (COM’16) examines Black-Jewish solidarity in 1964 Florida

Everyone knows about Selma and Birmingham, but what about St. Augustine? In the early 1960s, the racial climate in that Florida city was as bad as any of those more famous civil rights battlegrounds.

Now, Amy Geller (COM’16), a College of Communication assistant professor of film and television, has created a seven-part podcast to surface the story of the activist rabbis who joined Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) in the summer of 1964 to march for desegregation of St. Augustine. The Rabbis Go South is presented by the Hub & Spoke Expo and available wherever you get your podcasts.

Although little remembered now, the St. Augustine protest “became hugely important,’” Geller says. “And it was on the front of the New York Times, along with a headline that said the rabbis were arrested.”

The Rabbis Go South is produced, written, and hosted by Geller and her husband, Gerald Peary, award-winning filmmakers who codirected The Rabbi Goes West (2019). While they were shooting that documentary—about a Hasidic rabbi from Brooklyn who brought his brand of Judaism to Bozeman, Montana—they met Allen Secher, a Reform rabbi, who said he had another story they should tell.

“Secher was a real social activist, and he had done a lot in Montana to fight antisemitism and racism,” Geller says. “And so he told us about 60 years ago, when he was one of 16 rabbis to be called by Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to St. Augustine to help in the desegregation effort.

“It kind of blew our minds,” she says. “We had heard of Birmingham, we had heard of Selma, we knew about certain places in the South, but we had never heard that St. Augustine was kind of a hotbed of civil rights action.”

Secher had been jailed for marching with King in 1962 in Albany, Ga. Two years later, King was trying to help local activists raise the fight against segregation in St. Augustine, which was preparing for its 400th anniversary. “We will not be content until the sagging walls of segregation have been crushed all over this community by the battering rams of the forces of justices,” King says in a speech heard in the podcast.

From a jail cell in St. Augustine, King dictated a telegram to his friend Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner in New Jersey, asking for help. Dresner read King’s plea to a conference of 500 Reform rabbis (then all men) in Atlantic City.

“I immediately grabbed a clipboard and went around to get names,” Secher says. “I heard incredible excuses: ‘Oh, I’ve got a board meeting on Tuesday.’ ‘Oh, my wife’s birthday is on Tuesday.’” To Secher’s disappointment, only 16 rabbis and one lay activist agreed to leave the conference.

They were following the spirit of Tikkun Olam, which means “world repair” or “healing the world” in Hebrew, a phrase that has become synonymous with social justice in today’s Judaism.

On June 17, the rabbis flew to Jacksonville and were driven down the coast to St. Augustine by representatives of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Apparently they were under surveillance by the FBI—and the Ku Klux Klan. They went straight to a Black church where King was leading a service. 

“No matter when you heard King speak, you were ready to go to the battlements,” Secher says.

The rabbis then helped lead a march. What resulted, Geller says, was “the scariest night of their lives,” as they marched “hand-in-hand with African American activists down the streets of St. Augustine. When they were in the Black section, they were cheered. And when they were in the white section, there were the scariest-looking people—with bricks and stones and bottles—just sort of ready to pounce.”

The action continued for two more days, with the rabbis getting arrested on one side of a segregated motor lodge, while a group of white and Black activists ran around back and jumped into the segregated pool. The motel manager responded by pouring in muriatic acid.

Some historians believe that the actions of the rabbis in St. Augustine, publicized by the press and one Miami TV station, had an impact on the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Geller says. 

“But, it’s important—this is not a white savior story,” she says. “The rabbis were very much soldiers in a movement that was led and run by Martin Luther King, Jr., the local African American leadership, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They performed a really important duty. They were incredibly courageous to go there and put their bodies on the line, but they were not the real heroes, although they’re appreciated and valued by the St. Augustine community to this day.”

Geller and Peary at first thought it would make a good film, and they interviewed Secher and others during the pandemic. But Dresner was not well (he died in 2022), other principals had already passed away, and except for the Miami station’s report, video footage was hard to come by. Opting for the podcast made it easier to use recordings, like King’s speeches and recordings to Dresner from a 2014 St. Augustine rabbis reunion, provided by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. 

Geller and Peary narrate.

“Telling the story using our voices—I had no experience doing that,” Geller says. “So that was a big learning curve for me. And I actually really like it. And I’m enthusiastic to have others listen to it,” although doing it all with audio can be a challenge. “You have to work a little harder, because you can’t take it for granted that people are seeing this thing that you have in your head. So you really have to get more detail, describe what the experience was like for people.”

But switching formats, she says, is good in a world where COM students have to become proficient in all kinds of storytelling formats: “I have grown as a storyteller, and I’m enthusiastic and anxious to bring that into my work in the classroom.”