Freedom Riders at the Newseum to discuss Civil Rights movement

Paula Stern has vivid memories of the two storms that swept through Memphis on April 4, 1968: a midnight tornado that left part of the city in a shambles and a firestorm that erupted there 18 hours later, after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot.

Stern was a Harvard graduate student visiting home when riots broke out in Memphis and dozens of other cities that night, 43 years ago this week. She and two siblings had grown up as children of the Jim Crow South and gained a perspective on the civil rights struggle, as members of a Jewish family, that many white people didn’t have.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

(Jonathan Ernst/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - From left, Gerald, Paula and Margot Stern gather at Paula's home in December. Their parents, Lloyd and Fannye Stern, owned a furniture store in a majority-black area of Memphis.

Their parents, Lloyd and Fannye Stern, owned a furniture store in a majority-black area of Memphis. They counted blacks among their friends and openly supported King’s efforts.

Stern, a longtime resident of Northwest Washington, rose to prominence as chairman of the International Trade Commission in the Reagan administration. Her brother, Gerald Stern, who also lives in the District, gained renown as a civil rights attorney in the Justice Department and, later, as a crusading litigator in private practice.

Sunday, Paula Stern will attend a forum at the Newseum honoring the Freedom Riders, who traveled by bus throughout the South testing antidiscrimination policy. Gerald Stern will be on the panel, having worked in the Justice Department to make sure there was no interference in their efforts. The forum is sponsored by an educational organization, Facing History and Ourselves. Its founder: their sister, Margot Stern Strom of Boston.

“Our whole life,” said Strom, “has been bookended by the civil rights movement.”

The Sterns faced prejudice themselves. Once in high school, Paula Stern was told that she couldn’t try out for cheerleading because the squad “already had a Jew.”

Racists left death threats in the family’s mailbox after a newspaper story was published about Gerald Stern’s work as a young attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“We were just devastated about Dr. King because he was a hero in our house,” said Paula Stern, 66.

King had traveled to Memphis on April 3 to help organize a march by thousands of black sanitation workers. That night, more than 2,000 people braved a driving rainstorm to see King deliver his “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple. Less than 24 hours later, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel preparing to go to dinner at the home of a local minister, King was fatally shot by prison escapee James Earl Ray.

Demonstrators took to the streets. The Sterns followed developments on TV and radio. Lloyd Stern was so agitated that his heart beat erratically. When the family finally reached his doctor, Fannye Stern, his wife, was ordered to take the 65-year-old merchant to the emergency room.

The next morning, Lloyd Stern returned to the family’s furniture store to find that it had been looted, despite his efforts to save it.

He had covered the plate-glass windows with plywood and the plywood with copies of news stories about Gerald Stern advising James Meredith as he became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.