Henry Schwarzschild (November 2, 1925 – June 1, 1996) was an activist for civil rights and human rights. He joined the Civil Rights Movement and became involved in the fight against capital punishment. He founded the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) and the Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee and headed the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project.
Early life
Schwarzschild was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. At 13, he moved to New York City in 1939 with his parents, right before World War II. After serving in the army in the war as a member of the Counterintelligence Corps from 1944 to 1946, he went to the City College of New York, where he received a bachelor's degree and then did graduate work in political theory at Columbia University After serving in the army, it is said that he had the "appearance of a durable veteran from ancient wars, penetrating eyes intolerant of bombast and passivity, facial lines that mobilize easily to express by turns infectious good humor, remembered pain, resignation, impatience."
He married Kathleen Jett, and the couple had two daughters, Miriam and Hannah. In the 1950s, he worked as an executive of the International Rescue Committee, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
Work with civil rights
In 1960, he and his wife were in Lexington, Kentucky, and he overheard people talking about a sit-in at a lunch counter on the campus of Berea College. He decided to join in the sit-in and ended up being the only white person involved. It was the beginning of his fight for civil rights. Soon after he began his fight for black civil rights, he was arrested on June 21, 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi for his participation in the Freedom Rides. Once he was released, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote on his imprisonment forms, "your courageous willingness to go to jail for freedom has brought us closer to our nation's bright tomorrow." From that point on, he and King attended many events together, with both of them speaking and making movements towards civil rights. In 1961, Schwarzschild embarked on his own speaking tour across America to try to recruit people to their cause. He went on to make many public statements on civil liberties, capital punishment, racial justice, and many other issues.
In 1964, he created the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee of civil rights lawyers. In the first year, he convinced 300 lawyers to take their vacation time and go down to the South to help with the cause of black civil rights.
Work with capital punishment
In 1972, he was appointed to head up the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project. From 1972 to 1990, he worked as the leader of this project and fought to get legislation passed to help with the opposition to the death penalty. For the first five years, he ran the project completely on his own. Afterward, it finally began to get both funding and more volunteers into the program. He also worked to create the National Coalition for Universal and Unconditional Amnesty to pressure Gerald Ford to pardon those who had left the United States to avoid conscription.
In 1976, while he was still working with the Capital Punishment Project, he led the creation of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) in response to the Supreme Court decision Gregg v. Georgia, which permitted executions to resume in the United States. Schwarzschild organized it in New York and then transferred its headquarters to Washington, D.C., where he could do more with the legislation process. The NCADP consists of several dozen state and national affiliates, including Mainline Protestant groups and others. They created public policy campaigns and served as a resource for activists working to create change on a state by state basis.
Opposition to Israel
Following the summer siege of Beirut in the 1982 Lebanon War by Israel, he wrote a public letter of resignation from the editorial advisory board of the journal Sh'ma: