[2] His involvement in the movement earned McDew the title, "black by birth, a Jew by choice and a revolutionary by necessity" stated by fellow SNCC activist Bob Moses.

[4] Mcdew's mother worked as a nurse and his father, who had been a chemistry teacher in South Carolina, had become a steel worker after Ohio schools refused to hire him.

[5] According to McDew's autobiography, he believed that his birth date was notable because he was born on the day that boxer Joe Louis defeated Max Schmeling for the heavyweight championship of the world.

[7] As he got older, McDew hoped to avoid going to work in the steel mills by winning a football scholarship to college.

Due to an auto accident he was no longer able to play football so his father requested that McDew go to the South to experience his "own culture" to expand his ideas of what work he could do.

Being told he was to go sit in the luggage carriage,[1] he refused, which led to the second arrest of Charles McDew.

[1] The third arrest occurred when he and a fellow Massillon resident, Mike Hershberger, went to play handball at the YMCA in Columbia, S.C.

Being unfamiliar with segregation, the park McDew walked through happened to only be open to white people on this particular day, which led to another arrest.

[9] The marchers were brutally attacked by firemen and police officers, who turned firehoses on the students and arrested close to 400, confining many of them outdoors in a stockade used to hold cattle.

[11] The next month, McDew received a letter from Martin Luther King Jr. inviting him to a meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina to discuss the student sit ins, and as a representative for South Carolina State University, This meeting talked about student involvement all over the South, along with King trying to persuade everyone to join the SCLC.

[12] Feeling that the real value to the movement would ultimately be the black voters, McDew and the organization went on to promote registration in the "blackest" parts of the country.

[7] He, and eleven others, were once arrested for "disrupting racial harmony" and were placed into a cold Mississippi cell described as an "iceberg.

[15] McDew died on April 3, 2018, of a heart attack while visiting his longtime partner in Massachusetts.