Lore May Rasmussen

Lore May Rasmussen was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who became an American civil rights activist and pioneer in mathematics education. She described herself as “a nonconformist and a rebel,” even at a very young age. Simply accepting things as they were was not an option for Lore; she would spend her whole life fighting against unfairness.

Born in Lampertheim-am-Rhein, Germany in 1920, Lore was always a model student who enjoyed learning. At age 10, she transferred to a public school in nearby Worms that specialized in modern languages. Even before Hitler’s malignant rhetoric spread across the continent, the Jewish students at her school were not allowed to eat on the property; they had to go to eat in the Jewish section of town — humiliated, but with no choice.

 In 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, Lore remembered watching his inauguration and feeling the safety of her childhood slip away. The family watched as a torch-lit parade of uniformed storm troopers marched through town and stopped in front of their house shouting “Jude, Jude” (“Jew, Jew”) and painted swastikas on their wall.

Lore was arrested for the first time when she was only 13 years old. She had loaned her geometry book to a non-Jewish student. Inside was the copy of a program that Lore was to perform at her synagogue. It had to do with the hateful acts against Jews in Russia dating back to the First World War. The chorus ended, “We pledge to break the chains that so shamefully hold us bound. We are the youth of the New World.” When discovered, the speech was determined to be subversive, and the Gestapo searched Lore’s house for evidence of conspiracy. They also came to her school to bring her in for questioning. Fortunately, the principal insisted that Lore be questioned at school. After this, Lore was on everyone’s radar. 

When Lore was almost 15, she began to attend a school in Mannheim where the antisemitism continued. She had to listen to teachers claim that Jewish students had smaller, less developed brains— more like apes than humans. The teacher even went around the room and measured all of the students’ heads. Without telling her parents, Lore left school and never went back. She started visiting museums and libraries in Mannheim while her parents thought she was at school. She would read about interesting subjects and commit them to memory. Surely, her years of educating herself had something to do with her future success.

Lore’s rebelliousness was making life unsafe for her family, but her parents were unable to leave because of their elderly parents and a handicapped uncle that were dependent on them. Lore wanted to go to Palestine to live on a kibbutz, but her parents wanted their children to be together. It was decided that Lore would join her older sister, Erna, in New York City.

Even Lore’s exit in January 1938 was not without drama. She traveled by train via Strasbourg, Paris, and Le Havre, staying with family along the way. After boarding the train in Germany, Lore’s passport was confiscated by the German police. Then when the German border police checked passports at the French border, she had no papers. Lore was removed from the train and searched. If not for her fellow passengers alerting French officials that Lore was not on the train, Lore would have been left in Germany.

Many immigrants fleeing to the US saw it as a beacon of hope; they saw a land of fairness and opportunity and hoped to be a part of it. Lore, however, was under no such illusion. In fact, she believed quite the opposite. She imagined the US as a land overridden by capitalism and greed.

Once on American soil, Lore began studying immediately. She first attended a training school run by the Ethical Culture Society to be a kindergarten teacher, but Lore wanted more. She took matters into her own hands and ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, where she met her future husband, sociologist Donald Rasmussen. They married in 1940.

While Lore was beginning her education as a New Yorker, her family back in Germany struggled for survival during the Nazi regime. In April 1938, three months after Lore escaped, her father was forced to sell his business for a pittance, and in June the family fled to the relative safety of an apartment in Mannheim owned by a Jewish man who was a British citizen. Desperate to leave Germany, a friend of Lore’s father who had emigrated to Chile helped the family get visas. When war broke out in 1939, Lore’s father, stepmother, and younger brother were en route to Chile, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

In 1942, Lore and Don moved to Alabama to join the faculty at Talladega College, a historically Black school. Lore had grown up fighting against racism and discrimination in Germany, and both she and Don had been active in the NAACP in Illinois where they had campaigned to de-segregate off-campus housing. They welcomed the opportunity to work in the South and contribute to the fight for equality and against racism.

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1942, Lore and Don left the Talladega campus for the first time since the semester had begun, on a mission to buy a Thanksgiving turkey and much-needed clothes with their first paycheck. They knew that Alabama was riddled with segregation and racism, but as Lore described Birmingham, “It proved to be a different world than the integrated campus.” Once they had finished their errands, they met up with an acquaintance, Louis Burnham, the director of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. After they had all commiserated over their hunger, they decided to stop at a Black-owned restaurant to eat. Halfway through their fried chicken dinner, two policemen with drawn clubs arrived and took them to police headquarters. The three were processed, then escorted to a patrol wagon to be taken to the Birmingham jail. One of the officers gestured to the open back door and said, “Gentleman, get in.” Since Louis was closest to the door, he started to climb in. The officer quickly and forcefully grabbed him by the collar of his coat and threw him to the ground while shouting, “You’re not a gentleman. You’re a boy! And don’t you ever forget it!” Then he waived Don in and closed the door after him. Don found himself in the company of a fellow gentleman—an unkempt drunken white. Next the policeman driver removed a back panel from the cab of the wagon, motioned Louis into a dark compartment the shape of a body, replaced the panel, and made Lore sit in front of it, next to the driver. According to Lore, “Bull Connor’s Birmingham police did things right—they even segregated patrol wagons according to race and gender!”

After several miserable hours and a lengthy interrogation, they were allowed to leave on bail, posted by the Black physician who had recommended Nancy’s Cafe. There were charges of disorderly conduct against them, but no white lawyer would take their case— considering it career suicide. Lore and Don had no choice but to go to court without counsel, and just their college president at their side. Luckily, the judge decided that they had not been deliberately unlawful. The judge lectured them on democracy:

If we in the South make it illegal for a colored to eat in a white restaurant and let a white eat in a colored restaurant, then we are discriminating. If we make it illegal for a white to eat in a colored restaurant and let a colored eat in a white restaurant, then we are discriminating. But if we make it illegal both ways, then we have equality. 

The judgement for each party involved was a fine of $20 or ten days in jail. Don and Lore considered returning to jail to challenge the ordinance, but they were advised against it. The couple’s experiences in Alabama were recounted in From Swastika to Jim Crow, a 2001 PBS documentary about Holocaust refugees in the US civil rights movement. 

In 2003, Talladega College awarded Lore Rasmussen an honorary degree.

The Rasmussens remained at Talladega College until moving to Miquon, Pennsylvania in 1956, where Don was appointed principal, and Lore joined the faculty of The Miquon School, a private elementary school. Here, Lore discovered that mathematics bored many of the most creative students. Dispensing with rote memorization and using visual aids such as pieces of wood, nails, and rubber bands, she soon had students excited about decimals and fractions. Eventually her 10-year-old pupils were solving algebraic equations normally reserved for ninth graders. Lore developed a series of workbooks and teaching guides, and Reader’s Digest published an article about her work in 1961.

One evening in 1963, Lore’s career path changed. Don and Lore were driving north of Philadelphia, listening to the news, when they heard about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four Black girls were killed. After a long period of silence between the two, Lore spoke. Don said, “I will never forget her words.” She announced that she was going to leave her job in Miquon to begin working in the slums of Philadelphia to improve education. She continued her innovative teaching techniques, creating “Learning Centers” in schools across Philadelphia. In 1976, she received the John B. Patterson Award for Excellence in Education for her work on behalf of public education in Philadelphia.

After retiring in the mid-1980s, Lore and Don moved to Berkeley, California for the nicer weather and to be closer to their sons and their families. They traveled often and participated in their community, even going to local peace marches together. Lore was enamored with her grandchildren, encouraging them to explore and follow their curiosity. Lore dedicated her life to making the world a better place for others, and that is exactly what she did. She challenged the ways of society and showed the world its potential.