In 1963, Ron Ginsburg, a Korean War Veteran and a newly minted lawyer from the Department of Justice (DOJ), flew from his home in Washington, D.C., to Memphis, where he rented a car and then drove to Mississippi. The DOJ favored rental vehicles from Tennessee as they were not easily identifiable as rental vehicles, unlike cars from other Southern states. His DOJ assignment was simply to register Black voters in Mississippi and in Alabama.
Ginsburg dressed in a suit and tie and headed to a county seat office. Ginsburg, who is a white man, introduced himself and his assignment to the office’s clerk—also a white man—and asked pleasantly for the voting record papers. When the clerk returned a few minutes later, he did not have the papers in his hands. Instead, he pressed a shotgun against Ginsburg’s chest.
“That was my introduction to the white attitude towards the civil rights lawyers from Washington,” Ginsburg told students on a recent day in an LSA class taught by Scott Ellsworth, a faculty member in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS).
To the white establishment in Alabama and Mississippi, “we [civil rights attorneys] were pariahs. We weren’t doing God’s work of separating the races. Jim Clark was the sheriff of Selma, Alabama,” Ginsburg told the class, “and the biggest thug I ever ran into. The police were not our friends. They were the members of the Golden Knights of the KKK.”
His experience in that county office in Mississippi was not the only time Ginsburg put his life on the line in the name of civil rights.
The class visit in October came to be, in part, because of a book. Ellsworth’s Midnight on the Potomac, a history of the final year of the Civil War, was published last summer, and Ginsburg picked up a copy. He was moved—so moved, in fact, that he reached out to Ellsworth. The two began a correspondence, which drew out the connections between the political and social strife the book depicts during the end of the Civil War and Ginsburg’s life experiences about a century later, as a DOJ trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division under John Doar and Bobby Kennedy.
Ellsworth teaches a class on the Civil Rights Movement called “Nonviolence: From Montgomery to the World,” and he asked Ginsburg if he might be willing to visit to discuss his work for racial justice in Alabama and Mississippi from 1963 to 1965.
The class visit in October came to be, in part, because of a book. Ellsworth’s Midnight on the Potomac, a history of the final year of the Civil War, was published last summer, and Ginsburg picked up a copy. He was moved—so moved, in fact, that he reached out to Ellsworth. The two began a correspondence, which drew out the connections between the political and social strife the book depicts during the end of the Civil War and Ginsburg’s life experiences about a century later, as a DOJ trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division under John Doar and Bobby Kennedy.
Ellsworth teaches a class on the Civil Rights Movement called “Nonviolence: From Montgomery to the World,” and he asked Ginsburg if he might be willing to visit to discuss his work for racial justice in Alabama and Mississippi from 1963 to 1965.
The class visit in October came to be, in part, because of a book. Ellsworth’s Midnight on the Potomac, a history of the final year of the Civil War, was published last summer, and Ginsburg picked up a copy. He was moved—so moved, in fact, that he reached out to Ellsworth.
The two began a correspondence, which drew out the connections between the political and social strife the book depicts during the end of the Civil War and Ginsburg’s life experiences about a century later, as a DOJ trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division under John Doar and Bobby Kennedy.
Ellsworth teaches a class on the Civil Rights Movement called “Nonviolence: From Montgomery to the World,” and he asked Ginsburg if he might be willing to visit to discuss his work for racial justice in Alabama and Mississippi from 1963 to 1965.
Ginsburg, now an Albuquerque resident, accepted the invitation immediately. He wanted to share the lessons of his years in the Civil Rights Movement with a new generation of students, and he also has deep connections to Michigan, LSA in particular. His late wife, Sandy Berman Ginsburg, was a three-time LSA alum in English. His daughter, Sarah Ginsburg, is a U-M Law School alum; his son-in-law, Craig Labovitz, is a two-time EECS computer engineering alum; and his grandchild, Mark Labovitz, is a current LSA junior in English.
In the fall of 2025, Ginsburg and his daughter Sarah traveled to Ann Arbor. He presented Ellsworth’s students with something more than a simple lesson. In that room, Ginsburg’s vivid, wise recollections brought civil rights history—its infamous and heroic figures, its solidarity and grief, its slow triumphs, and his brave role within this history—to life.
As Ginsburg described it, during the years he spent in Alabama and Mississippi, death was all around him. Black people were being murdered by Klansmen and law enforcement alike. Civil rights workers of all backgrounds and vocations who had answered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for “people of good faith” to come to the South to help were killed in daylight. Violent mobs collaborated with city officials and their crimes were met with impunity.
Meanwhile, Ginsburg told Ellsworth’s class, “Trying to register voters felt like we were at the spear point. We had to get this done, and we couldn’t get it done.”
—Ron Ginsburg
Ginsburg made long drives through Alabama and Mississippi to visit the dirt-floored homes of sharecroppers, houses without refrigeration or electricity, to talk face-to-face with people about registering to vote.
“I spoke in churches,” he said. “I spoke at a high school. I spoke with individuals.” But Black people were afraid to register, Ginsburg said, because racist anti-voting legislation made them more vulnerable to violence if they did.
“One of the things they did in Alabama,” Ginsburg said, “was take the name of the person who voted and publish that name in the paper.”
People had every reason to believe that “Jim [Clark] and his buddies would come after them” if their names were printed in the newspaper as a consequence of voting, Ginsburg said.
Ginsburg risked personal peril on a daily basis by sleeping in cheap motels and traveling unpaved roads in rural areas, unarmed, alone, and monitored by local officials.
“They called us ‘Jew boys’ down there while we were working,” he said. “None of us guys who were working ever complained or said anything about it—it didn’t occur to us. We were just doing our jobs.”
Ginsburg says he was afraid sometimes. But he was undeterred.
Ginsburg was committed to the cause of civil rights from an early age, and these principled roots kept him steady in Sheriff Jim Clark’s Selma. Growing up in a Jewish family that moved all around the East Coast during the Great Depression but spent a significant amount of time in Philadelphia, Ginsburg remembers the city as a “Black and white space.” When he was a teenager, his family moved to Washington, D.C., and he noticed things were different. He recalls asking a school classmate why there weren’t any Black kids in their school. Segregation disturbed Ginsburg, and he felt a responsibility to work toward justice.
After high school, Ginsburg went into the Navy and served in Korea. Fluent in Russian, he worked as a codebreaker.
“In bootcamp we had one Black sailor in a company of 250 guys. President Truman had desegregated the troops, so it should have been more integrated, but it wasn’t. It hit me really personally,” he said. And he was in the service when he learned about the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.
He describes his four years in Korea as the most challenging of his life. “I was scared stiff,” he said. But when he returned home, he said that he was no longer afraid; war abroad prepared Ginsburg for the struggle at home.
“I should have been afraid,” he smiled. “But I wasn’t. I was calm.” Now, he was ready to face any danger on the path toward equality.
Ginsburg studied history and journalism after returning from Korea, and these disciplines honed his desire to understand the past and record the present, to think critically about injustice. He followed this desire to a career as a civil rights lawyer.
—Ron Ginsburg
—Ron Ginsburg
During his time in Alabama and Mississippi, Ginsburg did not succeed in registering any Black voters. He never once considered backing down, though, and his work in the movement grew.
Over the summer of 1964, Klansmen burned 20 Black churches in the state of Mississippi. On June 21 of that same summer in Mississippi, three civil rights workers from the Congress of Racial Equality—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—went missing.
Two days later, their car was found in a ditch, burned out and smoldering. Ginsburg remembers searching for the men in woods, swamps, riversides, and fields, through the remainder of June and then July, with the help of 500 sailors from a nearby base. The bodies were found in August, miles from where the car had been left to burn. They had been shot, bulldozed, and half-buried in an earthen dam.
At the end of 1964 Ginsburg began serving as a prosecutor before a federal grand jury on the Klan killings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, though it would be decades before Edgar Ray Killen, who directed the murders, was charged and sentenced in 2005.
And Ginsburg was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, when 600 Alabama state troopers savagely beat peaceful marchers who were led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“There were something like 3,000 people there for the march to Montgomery,” Ginsburg told Ellsworth’s students. “And then the state and county troopers and the police started the riot. They released dogs on people, just tearing them up. They beat people with their batons.”
Ginsburg remembers helping a young girl who was getting beaten up by a white guy. “I went to get her out,” he recalled, “And her skin was smoking—she had been burned by a cattle prod that had been jammed to her chest. There was blood on that bridge.”
One of Ellsworth’s students, Grace Bori, asked Ginsburg how he continued to have hope in the face of so much violence and injustice.
“It was the right thing to do,” Ginsburg said. “From life to death, you have to keep the faith.”
Ginsburg’s words bring to mind one of his more famous contemporaries, Dr. King. In his speech “The Quest for Peace and Justice,” given on the occasion of accepting the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King said:
But before we reach the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness ahead. We must still face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and firm determination, we will press on …
King’s words, and Ginsburg’s civil rights work, are not ancient history. Ginsburg is grandfather to a current LSA student; the generational gap between him and Ellsworth’s students is a familiar distance. And if Dr. King had not been killed, he’d be 97, only a few years older than Ginsburg.
At 91 years old, Ginsburg’s voice is strong as he uses it to inspire a room full of young people. Despite the bewildering wilderness, he presses on.
LSA is the place where creative thinkers engage with a complex, diverse, and changing world. See how your support can make an impact on what’s next, for a better tomorrow. Learn more.
From spacetime to the science of dance, from quantum mechanics to quarks, from wavelengths to watts—this popular series makes science accessible to viewers near and far.
One fruit rules the world—and its demise is destabilizing for growers and consumers around the globe.
LSA is a major feeder to top medical schools around the country, thanks to a liberal arts and sciences education that offers rigor, flexibility, and human connection.
A bright future shouldn’t be limited by financial barriers. Donor support makes LSA scholarships possible—creating access while supporting tomorrow’s leaders, thinkers, and doers in their hopes to make a difference in the world.
| Release Date: | 05/19/2026 |
|---|---|
| Tags: | LSA |
