JWA - Jewish Women in Civil Rights - Roberta Galler

In Focus: Jewish Women in Civil Rights

			Civil Rights
		Interview
		Biography
		Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

Interview: Roberta Galler

Galler and Nichols at New University Thought

Roberta Galler and Ralph Nichols at the office of New University Thought, 1962.
Courtesy of Roberta Galler.

During February and March 1965, the lawyers and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) staff traveled the state, taking depositions from Blacks who had been threatened economically and physically, and blocked from attempting to vote. Attorneys compiled six hundred depositions-three thousand single-spaced pages -which they submitted to the House of Representatives as evidence that the 1964 congressional elections were unconstitutional. Despite this major achievement, the goals of Roberta Galler and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff centered much more on engaging Black participation in democratic experiment. Galler reminisces:

This was quite an extraordinary process. What we were doing was that the people themselves from around the state who had been subject to the most gross beatings and injustices were giving depositions and were taking form the various officials who had beaten them.

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Jewish Women's Archive. "JWA - Roberta Galler - Interview." <http://jwa.org/discover/infocus/civilrights/galler/index.html>.