June Finer, 1965 Southern Coordinator of MCHR

From interviews by Debra L. Schultz in 1993. Debra L. Schultz. Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Introduction, p. 12

During her internship at a Jewish hospital in Chicago, British-born physician June Finer (b. 1935) began to understand American racism. "I began to be really upset by the level of illness of the Black people who would come in at death's door. Their health would be neglected until they were really, really, really sick. It became increasingly clear that the differences in class and income were making a big difference in their health status." Finer's relationship with Jewish activist and physician Quentin Young reinforced her perceptions and opened up a world of radical activism in Chicago. She became part of a long-standing interracial organization called the Committee to End Discrimination in Chicago Medical Institutions (CED). Finer headed south for the first time on a CED-cartered train to the 1963 March on Washington.

Providing care (a traditional women's role) in a nontraditional career for women at that time, Finer worked with the medical staff during the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. She returned in the spring of 1965 to serve for five months as southern coordinator for the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). Finer managed and dispatched the many volunteer medical professionals who came south. MCHR literally bound up the wounds of SNCC activists on the front lines.

Mississippi Summer, p. 73-74

In addition to teaching, other Jewish women brought specific expertise with them down south. Among the relatively small number of women professionals was physician June Finer. She went south as part of the Medical Committee for Human Rights' (MCHR) work in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. She was one of approximately one hundred physicians, nurses, and psychologists MCHR sent out in teams to COFO centers. Finer spent two weeks at SNCC headquarters in Greenwood and returned to the North to finish her residency.

We did educational stuff with the SNCC people who I think probably resented us to some degree. We would try to do public health teaching about not sharing cups and spoons, and stuff that isn't that popular. I think the white northern students who went South to work in the civil rights movement had no patience for that. They felt we were being patronizing. Maybe we were.

Selma Movement, p. 82-84

After the Mississippi Summer Project, the Selma movement of 1965 was one of the last large interracial initiatives of the civil rights movement. Designed to engage federal protection of voting rights, it was multifaceted and had a large educational dimension. But as violence and repression increased in Selma, the movement inevitably became more confrontational. Prior to the Selma march in 1965, there had been relatively few white civil rights workers in Alabama. Among them were ... Dr. June Finer, who spent five months as southern coordinator for the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).

As the Selma movement was heating up, Dr. June Finer arrived as a paid southern coordinator for the Medical Committee for Human Rights, setting up MCHR-funded offices in Baton Rouge, Montgomery, and Selma. In quieter times, she sought to contribute to local public health needs. For example, Finer interviewed some of the Selma doctors to ascertain their attitudes toward Black patients. She and her medical colleagues visited the hospitals and talked to public health officials, trying to improve the treatment of Black patients. They also taught about health matters and first aid to a variety of groups, including church groups, which were often centers of movement support.

Primarily, however, Finer focused on emergency medical needs that arose during demonstrations, dispatching incoming medical teams from the North to places where they were most needed.

We were always on standby for demonstrations. We wore red cross symbols---a white armband with a little red cross to identify us. It was felt that our presence at demonstrations was of some importance although in fact there's not much you could do [for tear gas].

During the larger demonstrations, when people were jailed, Finer and her colleagues would "go to the jail and demand to see them, thinking this might perhaps prevent them from being beaten up because a medical person had viewed them at some point. If subsequently they appeared to be damaged in any way, one could make a testimony about that."

Southern Jews, p. 98-99

June Finer had an experience that exemplifies poignantly the bind in which civil rights protests placed the southern Jewish community. During the summer of 1965, there were several Jewish medical people from the Medical Committee for Human Rights assigned to Selma for one- or two-week periods. Finer recalls:

With a couple of Jewish kids who were in the group at that time, we decided to put on our proper clothes and go to shul [synagogue] on Friday. In Selma there was a small Jewish congregation probably of no more than 50 or 60 people. The main shul had been closed off, and they had the services in a smaller assembly room. After the service they had coffee and cake. It was very strange meeting this group of Southern Jews who were very fearful of us because they were trying to keep a low profile. They were clearly worried that our presence might label them as radicals and revolutionaries.

Only one family reached out to the Jewish civil rights workers and invited them to their home. Given the family's own hardships due to civil rights work in Selma, they were certainly going out on a limb to do so. As Finer remembers it, the Bartons---mother and daughter---explained

that a lot of people were very, very worried about our presence there. The mother was not so southern. She still retained all of her Jewish qualities. The daughter, who was probably my age, was called Betty Faye---Betty Faye Barton. She was like a southern belle but very conscious that she was Jewish. And the father was actually in a mental hospital. He had suffered a severe depression because his shoe store was closed because of the very successful boycott of downtown Selma. It was very strange because here we were as symbol [of what] had in fact demolished this family. The mother was a kindly Jewish lady and she made rugelach [a traditional Jewish pastry]. It was a very, very surreal sort of meeting. They were taking huge risks by having us over to their house. They [might] get labeled as "nigger lovers" and they would be even less likely to be able to make a living. I don't know what they were living on with the store bankrupt and the father away. I don't know how they were making ends meet.

This story of Betty Faye Barton is one of the few accounts of southern Jewish women reaching out directly to civil rights workers during the movement. It underscores the economic and social vulnerability of the large sector of the southern Jewish community who survived as small scale merchants.

The Klan, p. 100-101

Although [June Finer] and others did not think of their civil rights activism in terms of their being Jewish, other members of southern society---including the Klan---certainly did. In the South, however, Jewish women feared the Klan more as civil rights workers than as Jews.

After the Selma to Montgomery march, June finer and her colleagues

basically got run out of town in Lowndes County after the priest Jonathan Daniels was killed. Some of the civil rights workers had been arrested and we went there to make a doctor visit at the jail, [but] as we stood near the courthouse asking where the sheriff's office was, we were surrounded by these guys looking very evil, and we were told that the sheriff was out of town and we'd better get out of town quickly. We were sort of shuffled back to our car and then basically chased out of town. At one point they had one car alongside and one car right behind us and they would keep trying to cut us off. Apparently what they were doing was quite dangerous, and the driver of our car---I think he was a dentist from San Francisco---really kept his head and got us out of there.

Finer notes that many of the medical and professional volunteers, including the dentist and a psychologist in the car, were Jewish, as is she. When surrounded by men who were very likely members of the Klan, Finer didn't think about he own or her colleagues' Jewishness---either as a comforting bond or a potential liability.

I asked Finer how, despite not being attuned to her Jewishness in such moments, she knew that "many, many, many of the medical and related professional volunteers were in fact Jewish.... I would say the vast majority were Jewish." She replied: "Just culturally. I had lived in Chicago with the Jewish community to a large degree since 1960, so I had a pretty good sense of who was and wasn't Jewish. A lot of the nurses perhaps were not Jewish, but most of the doctors and psychologists were. Most of the doctors were either Black or Jewish."

Family Legacies, p. 141, 144, 150, 175

A daughter of a professional father, June Finer was born in London, England, in 1935, the eldest of three sisters. Her paternal grandparents sold men's clothes from a cart in the East End. Her father became a physician and maintained his practice long after he could have retired. Finer's maternal grandfather, an artist who had a glass-cutting business, managed to send his daughter to college for two years. Finer's mother dropped out of college to help her husband in his practice. It was clear to Finer that her parents were middle class because "we lived in a working-class neighborhood," in which all the row houses were small and subsidized, and "the doctor's house was the one individually designed house," with a driveway, a garage, and "a garden about three times the size of everybody else's."

Nevertheless, the war and two bouts of tuberculosis made Finer's childhood far from idyllic. Despide her family's high-class status in their community, the bombing of London and the experience of severe illness showed Finer that money did not provide security. Her own physical vulnerability as a child enhanced her sensitivity to others who were vulnerable, and eventually led to her activist medical career.

June Finer said she "never felt terribly fond or admiring of my mother."

[S]he is an ambitious woman and wanted to see my father recognized for his skills. I think she had a certain amount of envy for a couple of relatives who had made it more in a materialistic sort of way. Her values were somewhat materialistic. My father is much more of a humanitarian and is just a very decent man who is fond of his patients and lets them talk. Even though now his eyesight is very, very poor, his patients still come to him even though they know his limitations.

June Finer attributes her radicalization to "the times we lived in," to her exposure to the effects of racism in Chicago, and "to meeting very political people." Nevertheless, she also believes

I would have slid into civil rights activity anyway even if I hadn't met them because one thing my parents did instill in me was this tremendous sense of fair play.... [H]aving a sister close in age, everything had to be divided absolutely equally. And things were not fair. That was such a common thing. I have a big sense of equality and things not being fair. I'm sure that's a whole lot of why I ended up doing the things I did---The inequalities were so outrageous. It just wasn't right.

During her internship and residency in Chicago in the early 1960s, June Finer became politicized through the "very focused" Dr. Quentin Young and his friends and contacts:

(more on pp. 151, 169)

During the bombing of London, June Finer and her sister experienced anti-Semitism when they were sent to the country to live with their nanny's family. Finer overheard her nanny criticizing a neighbor who made remarks about the nanny's parents' "harboring these two Jewish children": "[W]hat does she think, they have forked tails?" Finer was unsure what that meant and comments, "[T]here was nothing else really overt that I saw in the way of anti-Semitism." She does, however, recount their discomfort at having to attend church services at boarding school in the country.