Rabbi George Driesen is the senior scholar at the Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland and the founder of The Institute for Science and Judaism. Before becoming a rabbi at age 66, he worked for more than 30 years as a labor attorney, representing individuals and unions in the fight for fair working conditions. He has taught labor law as a guest professor at Yale, Georgetown, and other law schools. Raised in a liberal Jewish household in New York City, he developed a commitment to fighting racial hatred and discrimination from a young age, and served as vice-president of the Inter-Racial Fellowship Chorus, a group of white and Black New Yorkers who sang together in churches and synagogues. In 1966, he took a leave from his job as a supervisory attorney with the National Labor Relations Board to volunteer with the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC), an organization that provided free legal assistance to the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South. He was sent to Louisiana, where he worked out of the offices of the New Orleans civil rights law firm, Collins, Douglas and Elie. He provided legal assistance with the Jenkins v. City of Bogalusa School Board desegregation case, as well as the Hicks v. Crown Zellerbach employment discrimination case.

The collection contains Rabbi Driesen’s memoir, “A Volunteer for Justice: Working for Civil Rights in Louisiana, 1966” (with an appended letter that he sent to the Louisiana Attorney General, detailing incidents of racial violence in the Bogalusa schools); legal documents from the Jenkins v. City of Bogalusa case; and a 1966 voice memo in which Driesen chronicles his work with LCDC and his meetings with local activists in Bogalusa and Vidalia, La.