YOUNGSTOWN — Two factors were pivotal in Peter Geffen’s foray into the modern civil rights movement in the mid-1960s: the Holocaust a generation earlier, and a book he read years later.

“My motivation to go to the South was motivated by the Holocaust,” Geffen said.

In addition, he read “Night,” a 1960 memoir by Elie Weisel based on Weisel and his father’s experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Later, Geffen concluded that extreme hate and bigotry were not the worst problems that led to the extermination of millions of Jewish people, but silence from ordinary people who allowed the genocide of European Jews to continue.

Knowing that many blacks in the South were victims of oppression that included discriminatory Jim Crow laws, Geffen decided to travel to that part of the country to assist, he recalled.

“We could not stand by the blood of our (black) neighbors, period,” Geffen said.

Geffen shared that and other stories and observations in a one-hour talk he gave Monday at the Jewish Community Center on the Liberty border to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic 15-minute “I Have a Dream” speech at the end of the program.

More than 100 people registered for the presentation by Geffen, who was a civil rights worker for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the summers of 1965 and 1966, Geffen and others were assigned to Orangeburg, South Carolina, largely to help register to vote poor sharecroppers and people unable to read.

“Many issues mentioned in 1963 are still issues today,” Geffen, who also founded the Abraham J. Heschel School in New York City, said.

TWO PHILOSOPHIES

During much of his talk, Geffen discussed the many points of intersection at which Heschel’s and King’s philosophies regarding civil rights, theology and nonviolence aligned. The two men also were close friends until King’s assassination April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

“My life was blessed to work with Dr. Martin Luther King,” Geffen said.

Heschel was a Polish-American rabbi who is thought by many to be one of the 20th century’s leading Jewish theologians and philosophers. He also encouraged King to speak against the Vietnam War, the result of which was his “Beyond Vietnam” speech given April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City.

At the beginning of his presentation, Geffen quoted the lesser-known portions of King’s “Dream” speech in which King mentions President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, yet how, 100 years later, many blacks are “still crippled by the manacles of segregation, and the chains of discrimination.” King also used the metaphor of a bad check to say that America “defaulted” on its promise of democratic ideals “insofar as its citizens of color are concerned.”

Geffen praised the work of A. Philip Randolph, a longtime civil rights activist who was the march’s main architect, and Bayard Rustin, its chief strategist.

Geffen also talked about his time with the SCLC’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, which was a voter-registration effort in 1965 and 1966 in 120 counties in six southern states. King launched SCOPE in April 1965 at UCLA to recruit mainly white college students to get more blacks registered to vote.

During his presentation, Geffen also recalled having assisted during King’s funeral in Atlanta. Specifically, he and others were assigned to bring a mule to the gathering for a mule wagon to transport King’s body, as well as to walk with dignitaries during the procession. Geffen walked with Heschel and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, he remembered.

REGRESSION

Geffen also expressed his worries that, despite the long reach of the noble ideals espoused in King’s dream speech, societal progress is regressing on several key fronts, including race relations.

“It is a challenge to live in a time without a Heschel or a King to guide us,” he added.

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, King was not the March on Washington’s sole speaker. Those who preceded him were Eugene Carson Blake of the United Presbyterian Church of the USA; John Lewis, civil rights icon and future Georgia congressman; Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO; Whitney M. Young Jr., the National Urban League’s executive director; Matthew Ahmann, the National Conference for Interracial Justice’s executive director; Roy Wilkins, the NAACP’s executive secretary; and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress.