A Rich History
Over the past three centuries, American Jews have committed themselves to numerous political and social causes both at home and abroad. In the second half of the 20th century, American Jews were particularly active in the movements associated with civil rights at home, and Soviet Jewry abroad.
There was a time when blacks and Jews formed a close partnership to bring about racial equality. Jewish involvement was key to the founding of both the NAACP and the Urban League. Both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of the Religious Action Center (RAC) A Jewish sponsored forum in Washington, D.C. Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. Dubois and other civil rights leaders to form the NAACP. Kivie Kaplan, a vice-chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975. The relationship continues today with Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the RAC, who is currently the only non-African-American member of the NAACP board.
From 1910 to 1940, more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and twenty black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk Universities) were established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, then Chairman of Sears and Roebuck. In partnership with Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee University, Rosenwald created a fund which provided seed money for building 5,000 schools for black Americans, mostly in the rural South. At one time some forty percent of rural southern blacks were learning at Rosenwald elementary schools.
Jews were also foot soldiers during the Civil Rights Movement. Jewish activists made up over half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. That year, Jewish Leaders were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Florida after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. And most famously, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in his 1965 March on Selma.
In 1964, two young New Yorkers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, served as voter registration volunteers in Mississippi. One of their coworkers was a young black Mississippian named James Cheney. Together they were murdered by Klansmen and their bodies dumped in a secret grave. As much as any single factor, it was the nationwide attention given the discovery of their corpses that accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Black-Jewish Relations in the South
As far back as the 19th century, Jewish storekeepers were virtually the only Southern merchants who addressed black customers as "Mr." and "Mrs." and permitted them to try on clothing. But for Jews living in the south during the first half of the 20th century, the issue of racial integration posed unsettling questions. They constituted barely one percent of the region's total population. Among their white neighbors, they had long been accepted as "honorary white Protestants."
In 1954, that social order was challenged head-on. In the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court accepted the research of the black sociologist Kenneth Clark that segregation placed the stamp of inferiority on black children. Clark's study had been commissioned by the American Jewish Committee. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress also submitted amicus curiae briefs in behalf of the cause. Within the next dozen years, a series of federal laws and court orders shattered every legal support of racial segregation,
Many Southern Jews did not actively support the Civil Rights Movement. It was not that they believed segregation to be right, but they knew that actively supporting desegregation could be dangerous. It often meant the loss of jobs or customers and clients. It could also mean having crosses burned on their front lawns or the bombing of their synagogues.
Most southern Jews were merchants, dependent on the good will of their neighbors. In the Deep South, if they hesitated to join “White Citizens Councils”, they felt the pressure immediately. "The money dried up at the banks and loans were called in," recalled one Jewish storekeeper.
Northern Jews, who participated in the vanguard of the movement, would eventually leave the south, and southern Jews needed to live within the white southern community. They had done so for years by keeping a low profile. The Civil Rights Movement was not low profile, and the actions of Northern Jews reflected upon Southern Jews, exposing them to the wrath of southern whites.
When Rabbi, Arthur Lelyveld was caught demonstrating on behalf of voting rights, he was severely beaten in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A young physician, Edward Sachar, volunteering his medical services to the freedom marchers, nearly lost his life as his automobile was forced off a Mississippi back road by local rednecks
As a result of incidents like these, most local Jews tended to adopt a low profile on the race issue. At the express wish of their congregations, a majority of Southern Rabbis similarly agreed to be restrained. No more than six or seven of them in the entire South worked openly to promote the cause of civil rights. Of these, Rabbi Julian Feibelman of New Orleans opened the doors of his Temple Sinai in 1949 for a lecture by Ralph Bunche, the black United Nations Ambassador, permitting the first major integrated audience in New Orleans’s history.
Northern Jews
But in more than making up for their southern brethren’s timidity during these historic years, it was the participation of Northern Jews in the Civil Rights Movement that left Judaism’s stamp on the cause. Many of them were the earliest supporters of the movement. Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement far transcended institutional associations. One black leader in Mississippi estimated that in the 1960s, the critical decade of the voting-registration drives, "as many as 90 percent of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish."
The Jews had long since achieved their own political and economic breakthrough and rarely had any community gone to such lengths to share its painfully achieved status with others.
A Difficult Period
But as progress was made in the civil rights arena, relations between the black and Jewish communities frayed. The rise of the Black Power movement, critical of King's inclusive and nonviolent approach to ending racism, led to increased tensions. More recently, a riot in 1991 in the ethnically diverse Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., further eroded Jewish support. Twenty years later, Crown Heights residents continue to work on neighborhood relations.
Shared Dreams
Today, it is apparent that decades of dedicated effort, blood, sweat, and tears have paid off. While sadly, individuals will always live among us who cannot grow above their own ignorance, the institutional and systemic bigotry that festered throughout so much of this country for more than a hundred years after the Civil War is no longer seen in this nation. And to the great and everlasting credit of those that stood up to the machine of hatred that was the “old south”, the waves of south east Asian, eastern European, Russian, and more recently the tremendous influx of Mexicans finding their way to our shores have not had to contend with a society divided and stacked against them in their desire to join in the American dream.
While I did live through it, I was just a bit too young in the early sixties to have had an understanding then of why the bond between our peoples held together during those years with such strength and loyalty. Perhaps our common heritage of slavery had something to do with it.
B'nai B'rith Executive Vice President Dan Mariaschin says, "Jews and blacks worked together during some of the most tumultuous times this country has ever known. The positive nation-altering advances that partnership heralded can provide a useful roadmap to pick up the trail of dialogue and understanding." On this, the 25th anniversary of the Federal holiday dedicated to the late Dr. King, I suggest to you again, as it was so eloquently written by Mr. Thomas Jefferson over 235 years ago, that “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
May we soon live in a country where bigotry, segregation, and racial barriers or favoritism no longer play a role in our life as individuals or as a nation.
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