By Randy Furst

Minneapolis Star Tribune

It was 50 years ago this week that Jerry Von Korff, then of Minneapolis, helped organize a civil rights project that captured the nation’s attention.

The civil rights struggle was raging across the southern United States, with Mississippi at the epicenter, as blacks organized to desegregate schools and public accommodations and to win the right to vote.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was challenging the traditional Democratic Party, which had terrorized blacks who tried to register to vote. Forty churches that hosted civil rights rallies in Mississippi were bombed or burned.

Von Korff was 19 at the time and attending Oberlin College in Ohio. Over the Christmas break, Von Korff helped lead a group of Oberlin students — including me — to rebuild the Antioch Baptist Church in Ripley, Miss. The project was called “Carpenters for Christmas.”

“The idea,” Von Korff says, “was to send the message to the country that, ‘Hey, they’re burning churches and let’s do something about it.’”

The students “fell quickly to work shoveling mud, rubble and rain-sodden ashes of the church foundation,” Newsweek magazine reported. They were aided by an Oberlin professor, a black Oberlin contractor and people in Ripley’s black community.

The project drew huge national attention, with a series of stories by the Associated Press and New York Times and reports on NBC and CBS TV.

Townspeople were “upset that white students are living with Negro families,” the local sheriff told the Times. A white man fired a handgun at Von Korff, but did not hit him.

Von Korff returned to Mississippi in 1965 to work on other civil rights projects.

Now 69, he is an attorney in St. Cloud and is chairman of the St. Cloud school board. He goes into classrooms, showing a slide show of the burned churches and telling students they can make a difference.

Southern blacks who worked for civil rights are the true heroes of that era, he says. “We came down and went home. They were taking the real risks. They lived there.”

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