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Peter Jan Hoingsberg, a former civil rights activist in the 1960’s is now a professor of law at the University of San Francisco. Raised in New York, he was a child of two immigrant Jewish parents who fled Germany in the late 1930’s. He attended the City College of New York (CCNY) in the upper part of Harlem, where started his first involvement in a protest movement concerning the Vietnam war. After returning from a trip to Europe he enrolled at the NYU school of law where he began to participate in protests and sit ins. He later received an opportunity to volunteer in the south with a Law-Student Civil Rights group. He was assigned to volunteer in New Orleans with the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee and through this program he was able to connect with local black activists and learn from their struggles. He also participated in protests and sit-ins in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

Early Life
Peter Jan Hoinsberg was raised in New York with his immigrant parents and younger sister. He grew up in a Kosher household where his parents were very religious and observed shabbat. His parents fled Austria in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. When his parents arrived in the United States, they knew very little English and had only a high school level education. His father had aspirations of starting a chocolate and cookie business but didn’t want to take the risk since he was new to the U.S and was still raising a young family. His father settled for working in a costume jewelry factory where he worked long hours which resulted in limited time spent with his family. Eventually his father bought out a candy shop and lived his dream of owning his own business but even then he still spent little time with his family. His parents were very quiet about their political views but usually voted for the democratic party, which lead to Peter not being politically vocal in his early life. As a child Peter Jan Hoingsberg resisted identifying with his parent’s ancestry and avoided speaking German.

Education
Peter Jan Hoingsberg attended the City College of New York (CCNY) in the upper part of Harlem. The students and professors who were at the college were passionate and dedicated about their belief in justice and that ultimately influenced young Peter Jan Hoingsberg who wasn’t particularly political at the time. In the fall of 1964, he joined his first protest which was a teach in against the war in Vietnam and that lead to his first involvement with a protest movement. After he finished at CCNY he took a summer off to travel country to country through Europe where he ended up visiting the former Dachau concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. He returned from Europe in 1965 and enrolled in the New York University School of Law (NYU). During his first month at NYU he became friends with a few law students who had the same early activists’ leanings as he did. Within that first month him and his peers held their own sit-in at the school to protest the school dress code.

Getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement
Later on, in his first year of NYU he got the opportunity to volunteer to work with a law-student civil rights group. He got accepted as a volunteer and joined to go in the summer of 1966. While departing for the south and saying goodbye to his mother he wondered if she felt embarrassed or worried that her son was going to fight for other people’s freedom. In June 1966 he arrived in Jackson, Mississippi with forty other law students for orientation. The orientation was held in Jackson, Mississippi because Mississippi was at the time seen as the “embodiment of racist culture”. He often felt that he was joining the movement fairly late because the movement had already achieved major milestones such as the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the passage of the Voter’s Right Act in 1965. He also felt as though he was entering the movement with naïve views on the relations between black and whites. After seeing the state of the blacks in Mississippi along with what he learned during orientation, he was more dedicated to wanting to make a change although he later realized it wouldn’t be easy. After orientation he was assigned to volunteer at the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in New Orleans.

Organizations and Struggles
After orientation he was assigned to volunteer at the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in New Orleans. Although he worked for the committee in New Orleans, most of his required him to be in Bogalusa, Louisiana. While in Bogalusa, Hoingsberg began crossing Border Street with help of the Deacons for Defense and Justice as his escort to visit Gayle Jenkins. Gayle was a secretary for the Bogalusa Voters League and her home served as a central gathering place for the Bogalusa movement. He also responded to incidents that occurred between black protesters and whites in Bogalusa by taking statements of arrests and brutality. After a while he began questioning his role of taking down statements and listening to stories because he was tired of sitting on the sidelines while others were putting their lives on the line. He was invited to participate in his first protest at the Acme Café with mixed raced CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) members. After sitting in the Café for 20 minutes the waitress served the black CORE activists in the group in compliance to the Civil Rights Act but refused to serve the white ones because she said they were “worse than blacks”. After the sit-in Honigsberg wanted to become even more active in the movement. He began to attend the Bogalusa Voters League’s strategy and planning meetings. He also started to plan the testing of the integration of a public beach on Lake Pontchartrain in July 1966 alongside the president of the Deacons for Defense and Justice Charles Sims, his wife, and a CORE member Tyrell Collins. During their testing of the integration of the public beach they were questioned by a cop but Honigsberg impersonated a lawyer and eventually got the cop to walk away. He later got in trouble with his supervisor in the office for breaking the rules of his job by participating in demonstrations, but he felt that him participating in the demonstrations was a way to build a bond with the black community. He also worked with the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee to help integrate schools and decrease employment discrimination.

Impact of the movement on his life
Peter Jan Honigsberg took his experiences from the civil rights movement and used them to shape his view of the realities of the civil rights movement. He is still drawn to his idealistic image of working with the black community. His experience as a civil rights activist and a Vietnam war activist allowed him to gain a new view on social change and social issues. This ultimately helped him move on from activism and become a college law professor first at Berkeley University and now at the University of San Francisco. He also wrote a book; Crossing Border Street which is about his experience as a civil rights activist and the stories of the struggles of the black activists that he worked with.