Freedom Summer was the name given to a 1964 campaign in the state of Mississippi. The aim was to encourage disenfranchised African-Americans to register on the electoral roll, and to oblige obstructive local officials to accept their registration. Volunteers from across the United States, mainly students and young people, went to Mississippi to take part. Around half of them were Jewish. In the course of a fractious and violent summer, two Jewish students, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer from New York, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with the local black activist, James Chaney.
The Jews who took part in Freedom Summer were following in a tradition of civil rights activism that stretched back over 100 years, to the 1850s. The issue in the 19th century was not voter registration, but the abolition of slavery. The controversial abolitionist John Brown (the man whose body lies a-mouldering in the grave), was fighting a local war against a pro-slavery group known as the Border Ruffians. Their fight was over the future status of the territory of Kansas which was voting to decide whether it should become a Free-State, or one which sanctioned slavery. The need to decide was caused by an 1854 Act that had created the States of Kansas and Nebraska. In so doing, it had effectively displaced the previously agreed boundary between those States where it was legal to own slaves, and those where it was forbidden.
Among the men who fought with John Brown were three Jewish immigrants: Theodore Weiner who had arrived in America from Posen, Jacob Benjamin, originally from somewhere in Bohemia and August Bondi. Of the three, Bondi is the best known, partly because he had a successful career after his fighting days were over, but mainly because he wrote an autobiography.
August Bondi was born in Vienna in 1833. The name Bondi, he said, had been adopted by an ancestor named Yomtov Landschreiber. The word Yomtov means good day and the ancestor, who had travelled in Italy, Italianised his name to Bondi.
August Bondi was 15 years old in 1848, when revolutions broke out across Europe. The students in Vienna had occupied the University and were now demonstrating around the Austrian Parliament. The young Bondi, disobeying his mother’s instructions, ran through the streets with his friends to watch. The demonstration turned ugly, students hurled stones and lumps of wood at the city guards and the general in command, Archduke Albrecht, ordered his troops to fire. Two young Jews were killed. Heinrich Spitzer was a student at the Jewish Polytechnik, an only child who has been described as a young man of extraordinary talent, Bernard Herschmann a 29 year old weaver, of whom little else seems to be known. They fell, according to August Bondi, directly on top of him so that he had to extricate himself from beneath their bodies to flee. As he crawled out, a soldier struck him twice with the butt of his musket. Another tried to drive his bayonet into his back, fortunately only grazing his skin. It was his first taste of violence.
Two days later August Bondi joined the revolutionary student group the Vienna Legion. On March 18, as the Austrian forces were preparing to fire their cannons on the protesters he ran into the nearest house where he “got a pick, borrowed a crowbar from the janitor and set to work at once to lift one of the square granite blocks off the pavement. . . . My children [he told his autobiography] it was your father, who not yet 15 years old, had lifted the first granite paving block to start the first barricade in Vienna.”
When, in July 1848, a revolution erupted in Budapest he told his parents that it was his intention to travel to Hungary to take part in the struggle. Quite understandably, his parents decided it was time to take their children and emigrate to America. They arrived in in St Louis on November 23.
As a teenager in St Louis, Bondi allied himself firmly with the opponents of slavery, though his stance seems to have been driven more by political commitment than morality. He explained that political involvement was important to him and his friends because, “we youngsters from the barricades and struggles of the revolutionary movements of Germany, Austria and Hungary” were keen to become politically involved in their new country. His anti-slavery stance, he said was not so much about sympathy with slaves as about opposition to the degrading conditions in which they worked. He seems to have approached the anti-slavery campaign from the perspective of a 19th century European revolutionary.
The opportunity to take part in the fight against slavery came for him in 1857 when he read an article in the New York Tribune. It was an appeal for freedom-loving people to rush to Kansas to help save it from being taken over by the pro-slavery faction. The anti-slavery lobby in Kansas was hugely outnumbered with pro-slavery activists flooding in from neighbouring Missouri. The opponents of slavery were desperate for new immigrants to help redress the balance.
Bondi set off for Kansas with his friend Jacob Benjamin, for whom he had briefly worked as a clerk, and the two men staked their claims on adjoining pieces of land at the Pottawatomie Creek. They intended both to farm the land and to go into business by opening a merchandise store and by buying and selling cattle. They were joined by Theodore Weiner, who they had known in St Louis, Weiner had made a substantial investment in the business.
One afternoon Bondi and Benjamin found 30 Devon cows that had wandered from an adjoining farm, grazing on their land. A short while later two men came across to retrieve them. They introduced themselves as Jason and Owen Brown, they said they were Free-State men, in other words opponents of the pro-slavery faction. They were the sons of John Brown. Bondi told them they might need their help in the future as they feared trouble from the pro-slavery settlers. The Brown brothers said that all they needed to do was to tell them if they needed help and they would come to their assistance. “We are four brothers, all well-armed.”
It was not long before they needed the Brown brothers’ help. Bondi had returned to St Louis to buy provisions for a merchandise store that he and Benjamin had opened. While he was away another settler squatted on his land. Theodore Weiner called on the Brown brothers and together they evicted the squatter. It was the beginning of a lengthy bond between John Brown’s family and the Yiddish speaking settlers, Bondi, Weiner and Benjamin.
In May 1856, a pro-slavery force, calling themselves Border Ruffians, attacked the abolitionists’ settlement of Lawrence. John Brown raised a militia to respond. Bondi and Weiner enlisted themselves under John Brown’s command, Weiner donating all the provisions that Brown’s men needed for their retaliation against the Border Ruffians.
Shortly after Brown and his men set off, a messenger arrived at their camp telling him that their settlements were being threatened by the Border Ruffians; that the women who had been left alone while their husbands were marching to war were being insulted and abused. Brown turned around, taking Weiner and six others with him. His brutal response to the Border Ruffians has gone down in history as the Pottawatomie Massacre. Weiner, it is said, did not take part in the massacre, having been assigned with one of Brown’s sons to guard duty.
August Bondi fought with John Brown’s forces throughout the summer of 1856, from May to September, taking part in the battles of Black Jack and Osawatomie. Both battles contributed to the eruption of the American Civil War. Bondi fought in the Civil War too, where he was badly wounded and briefly taken prisoner by the Confederate Army.
The army discharged him because of his wounds and his career took a more conventional turn. He joined the Freemasons, worked in Life Insurance, was active in the Democratic party and was three times elected as a magistrate. He had married Henrietta Einstein in 1860, by 1879 they had ten children, all of whom seem to have survived them.
Bondi studied to become an attorney and at the age of 63 was admitted to the bar. In 1898 he went back on a visit to Europe. He travelled by himself because his wife refused to accompany him. He paid $46 for a ticket from New York to Antwerp, travelled through Germany, Austria and Hungary, looking up old friends and family as he went, turning back when he reached Prague, returning home eleven weeks later.
August Bondi died of a heart attack on the corner on Fourth and Walnut Streets in St Louis, on August 30th 2007. He told his children that it was wish that,
When I shall pass into the great Beyond, my funeral shall be plain. No flowers, no cards, a cheap coffin which should not exceed $10.00. My pall-bearers should consist of my sons, sons-in-law, and grandsons . . and Masonic brethren. If not enough of the above can be present, my children may employ a Rabbi . . . Kaddish to be said by my children at the grave after the Masonic burial service.
During the burial service I wish that mention be made of my being in the front March 13th, 1848; likewise in Kansas in 1856, actively participated June 2nd and August 30th, 1856, at Blackjack and Osawatomie and did my full duty in military service of the U. S. for over three years, leaving the same with two ounces of lead in my body.
August Bondi left his Judaism behind long ago, he wanted a Masonic funeral, with a rabbi present only in extremis. But he insisted that his children say Kaddish.