The Hands of Peace

Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram fled Nazi Germany, only to find racism as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe.

Marione moved first to New York and then to Washington, D.C. where, in 1960, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality, protesting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and other aspects of life in the nation's capital, including the denial of voting rights.

In D.C., Marione made a name for herself as a freedom fighter. She was a volunteer for the March on Washington and an organizer of an extended sit-in to support the Mississippi Freedom Party. A year later, at the urging of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, Marione went south to Mississippi. She was part of a coalition to end segregation and extend civil rights to African Americans—and she was uncompromising in her demand for equality.

In Mississippi, Marione became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as well as an educator at one of the country’s most influential Freedom Schools. The school was one of the targets of the Ku Klux Klan. When they burned a cross in front of it, she painted the word "FREEDOM" in bold letters on the charred crossbar, creating an icon in the struggle for equal rights.

As a white woman and a Holocaust refugee, Marione was the most unlikely of heroes in the fight for civil rights for African Americans. This is her empowering story—a tale of courage, strength, and determination.