At a Glance
Massillon, Ohio, and the Shock of the Deep South
Chuck McDew grew up in Massillon, Ohio, a steel-mill town in the northeastern part of the state whose Black community occupied the familiar northern position: not subject to the formal legal segregation of the Jim Crow South, but subject to the informal segregation of northern housing markets, the discrimination of northern employers, and the various forms of exclusion that northern racism practised without the benefit of formal statutes. The racial dynamics of Massillon in the 1940s and 1950s were real and limiting, but they were different in kind from what McDew would encounter when he went south for college — different in the sense that the threat of violence for challenging them was less immediate, and the formal apparatus of legal segregation was absent.
His decision to enrol at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg in 1956 was, in retrospect, a collision course with the most comprehensive form of American apartheid available in the mid-twentieth century. South Carolina's racial order was enforced by law, by custom, by economic dependency, and by the always-present threat of violence that gave every interaction between Black and white southerners its undertone of potential consequence. For a young man from Massillon who had grown up with a different racial reality, however constrained, the encounter with South Carolina's system had the force of revelation — not about race, which he already understood as a fact of American life, but about the full depth and comprehensiveness of what legal segregation actually meant as a lived daily reality.
The radicalisation that followed was not gradual but rapid and total. McDew encountered a system that was not merely unfair in specific instances but systematically designed to prevent Black humanity from being recognised, Black intelligence from being valued, and Black political agency from being exercised. The response he developed — not the accommodation that the system demanded and not the individual career-focused navigation that many Black students in his position chose, but the collective political action that SNCC would eventually embody — was the response of someone who had understood the system clearly and decided that understanding it was insufficient.
Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and the Deepening of Political Consciousness
The most distinctive element of Chuck McDew's civil rights biography — the element that distinguished him from virtually every other major figure of the movement's early years — was his conversion to Judaism while a student at South Carolina State. The conversion was not a casual or unreflective act: McDew had been engaging seriously with the Hebrew Bible's tradition of liberation, particularly the Exodus narrative that had always been central to African American Christianity's understanding of its own situation. The story of a people held in slavery, of divine intervention on the side of the oppressed, of liberation from bondage into freedom — this was a narrative that Black Americans had read as their own story since the beginning of the slave trade, and McDew's engagement with its Jewish origins was a natural extension of that long tradition of identification.
But conversion in the Deep South in the late 1950s was not merely a spiritual act — it was a social and political one, and the response it generated from white southerners illuminated something important about the structure of oppression that McDew had been trying to understand. He encountered anti-Semitism from the same white southern communities that were subjecting him to racial discrimination — directed at him not for his Blackness alone, which had always been the target, but now for his Jewish identity as well. The experience of being the target of two distinct but structurally related forms of hatred simultaneously gave him a visceral, embodied understanding of what he had been abstractly developing as a political analysis: that racism and anti-Semitism were not separate phenomena that happened to coexist in the same communities, but expressions of the same fundamental impulse — the reduction of a human being to a group membership, and the use of that group membership to justify exclusion, degradation, and violence.
This insight shaped everything about McDew's subsequent political work. He was one of the clearest voices within SNCC for building genuine coalitions across racial and religious lines — for understanding the civil rights struggle not as a specifically Black struggle that others might support from the outside but as a human struggle against a form of oppression that targeted multiple groups and that required the solidarity of all oppressed people. His chairmanship of SNCC, during the organisation's most dangerous early years, was conducted with this understanding as a foundational premise.
SNCC's Formation and the Ella Baker Philosophy
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960, at a conference organised by Ella Baker — the veteran organiser who had spent decades working with the NAACP and then the SCLC and who understood, with a clarity born of long experience, that the student energy released by the Greensboro sit-ins needed an organisational form that would preserve rather than subordinate it. Baker's insistence that the students form their own organisation rather than becoming a youth arm of the SCLC was the decisive act that made SNCC what it became: an organisation committed to the development of local leadership, to the primacy of the people most affected by oppression in directing the movement for their liberation, and to a style of organising that was fundamentally different from the SCLC's charismatic-leader model.
McDew was one of the students at Shaw University who helped found SNCC, and he was elected the organisation's second chairman in 1961, succeeding Marion Barry, at the age of twenty-two. The chairmanship of SNCC in 1961 was not an honour — it was a responsibility of extraordinary danger and difficulty, taken on by a young man who understood exactly what it would require. SNCC was deploying field workers into the most violently hostile counties of Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama, and the organisation's chairman was responsible for coordinating, supporting, and sustaining that work while simultaneously managing SNCC's relationships with other civil rights organisations, with northern supporters, and with the federal government, which was simultaneously a potential ally and an institution deeply reluctant to provide the protection that SNCC's field workers needed.
McDew was arrested more than twenty times in five states during his time as SNCC chairman — a record of personal courage that supplemented the organisational leadership he was providing. He was not a chairman who directed operations from a safe distance; he was in the field, taking the same risks as the workers he was responsible for, demonstrating through his own conduct the standard of courage he was asking others to meet. He was imprisoned at Parchman Farm in Mississippi during the Freedom Rides — the same brutal prison farm where Bayard Rustin and other movement activists had been held — in conditions designed to break political prisoners' will to continue their organising.
Leading SNCC Through Its Most Dangerous Years
The period of McDew's chairmanship — 1961 to 1963 — was the period during which SNCC was doing its most dangerous and its most foundational work. The organisation was deploying field workers like Bob Moses and Charles Sherrod and Bernard Lafayette into rural Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama counties where voter registration organising was a potentially lethal activity, where the local law enforcement was indistinguishable from the Klan in many jurisdictions, and where the federal government's protection was essentially nonexistent. Field workers were being beaten, arrested, and occasionally killed; local people who cooperated with them were facing economic retaliation and physical danger; and the organisational task of sustaining this work — keeping the field workers supplied, supported, and connected to the broader movement while managing the political relationships that kept SNCC's northern funding alive — fell to McDew's chairmanship.
He managed this while also navigating the complex internal politics of an organisation that was itself in the process of defining its own identity. SNCC in 1961 and 1962 was simultaneously a direct action organisation conducting sit-ins and Freedom Rides, a voter registration organisation deploying field workers to rural communities, and an emerging political organisation developing analyses of American racism and its structural foundations that were becoming increasingly sophisticated and increasingly radical. The tensions between these different organisational identities — between nonviolent direct action and voter registration, between integration and Black self-determination, between coalition politics with white liberals and the development of autonomous Black political power — were present throughout McDew's chairmanship and would become more acute in the years that followed.
His chairmanship ended in 1963 when John Lewis was elected to succeed him — a transition that reflected the movement's development rather than any failure on McDew's part. Lewis was a younger figure whose profile had been raised by the Freedom Rides and whose personal courage and moral authority had made him one of SNCC's most prominent faces. McDew's two years of leadership had built the organisation's field operation and sustained its survival through the most dangerous period of its history; Lewis inherited an organisation that was, despite everything it had been through, stronger and more effective than the one McDew had taken over.
The Theology of Liberation and the Politics of Solidarity
McDew's intellectual contribution to the civil rights movement — less celebrated than his organisational contribution but equally important — was his articulation of a theology and politics of solidarity that connected the African American freedom struggle to the broader tradition of liberation theology and to the specific history of Jewish resistance to oppression. His conversion to Judaism was not incidental to his politics but central to it: it gave him a personal stake in understanding the connection between different forms of oppression and a lived experience of that connection that no abstract analysis could have provided.
The Hebrew Bible's Exodus narrative — the founding story of a people's liberation from slavery that had been central to African American Christianity since the earliest days of the slave trade — took on additional dimensions when McDew engaged with it as a Jew rather than simply as a Black Christian drawing on the tradition. The continuity between ancient and modern forms of oppression, the persistence of the impulse to reduce people to categories and deny their full humanity, the necessity of collective action and solidarity across different communities of the oppressed — these were themes that McDew developed in his speeches and his teaching, drawing on his double experience of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism to make arguments about the structure of oppression that had a specificity and an authority that purely theoretical analysis could not achieve.
His insistence on the importance of Jewish-Black solidarity within the civil rights movement — at a time when the relationship between Jewish and Black Americans was both close (Jewish Americans were disproportionately represented among the movement's white allies) and sometimes fraught — was grounded in this theological and experiential understanding. He was not arguing for solidarity as a political convenience but as a moral necessity: if the different forms of oppression were structurally related, then the liberation of any one group was incomplete without the liberation of all, and the solidarity between communities of the oppressed was not merely useful but required by the logic of what they were fighting.
After SNCC: Teaching, Organising, and Keeping Memory Alive
After his SNCC chairmanship ended in 1963, McDew continued to work as an organiser and became increasingly involved in education as a vehicle for social change. He taught at several universities over the following decades — bringing to the classroom the kind of direct engagement with the movement's history that only a participant could provide, and using the educational space to continue the work of building the political consciousness and the historical understanding that the movement had depended on and that he believed was still necessary.
He eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, where he was associated with Lewis and Clark College and where he continued to speak, organise, and teach. His later years were shaped by the recognition that the victories the movement had won — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the formal dismantling of legal segregation — were necessary but insufficient, and that the economic structures of inequality that the movement had identified but not fully addressed remained the primary obstacle to the genuine freedom that the movement had been fighting for. His understanding of the movement's unfinished work was informed by his theological formation: liberation, in the tradition he had drawn from, was not a moment but a process, not an event but a journey, and the work of it was never complete.
Chuck McDew died on Valentine's Day 2018, at seventy-nine, in the city where he had spent his later decades. His death came at a moment when the Voting Rights Act whose passage his SNCC chairmanship had contributed to was being systematically weakened by the Supreme Court and state legislatures across the South, and when the economic inequalities he had always insisted must be addressed alongside formal political rights were, by most measures, as severe as they had been when he led SNCC into the most dangerous counties of the Deep South in 1961. The work, as he had always understood, was not finished.