Jews in the Civil Rights Movement

By Joshua Muravchik

The relationship between blacks and Jews has deteriorated since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Although black anti-Semitism was present before that time, it has grown in recent decades. The Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan, is one source of this anti-Semitism. Various factors contribute to black anti-Semitism, including the fact that Jews are more vulnerable than white gentiles to verbal attacks, making them a preferred target for blacks’ anger.

As the controversy surrounding the role of Louis Farrakhan in the Million Man March underscored once again, the greatest story of unrequited love in American political life may be the relationship between blacks and Jews.

Jews in the civil-rights movement

When the civil-rights revolution broke out in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, the front-line troops in the Montgomery bus boycott and then in the lunch-counter sit-ins were all blacks, but among the whites who soon rallied to the cause, a large share—a disproportionate share—were Jews. The Freedom Riders rode in integrated detachments; among the whites, Murray Friedman notes in his recent book, What Went Wrong": The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance, two-thirds were Jews. A few years later came the “Mississippi Summer,” a project dreamed up and organized by a Jew, Allard Lowenstein; according to Friedman’s estimate, Jews made up from one-third to one-half of the white volunteers who took part. Of the three martyrs of the Mississippi Summer, two, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were Jews; James Chaney, the local activist who shared their fate, was black.

In another new book, Blacks and Jews, Paul Berman reports that Jews contributed one-half to three-quarters of the financial support received by civil-rights groups in that era. The organizational support they provided was equally pronounced. The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, the lobbying coalition that helped muscle all modern civil-rights legislation through Congress, was chaired by Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP, but its director was Arnold Aronson, seconded from the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council. This pattern was by no means confined to the upper echelons of the movement; all over the country, Jewish organizations assigned staffers to work on civil rights. In those days, writes Berman, “it was almost as if to be Jewish and liberal were, by definition, to fly a flag for black America.”

http://www.bookrags.com/researchtopics/anti-semitism/05.html


The American Jewish community and the Civil Rights movement

Many in the American Jewish community supported the Civil Rights Movement. The Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded dozens of primary schools, secondary schools and colleges for black youth. He gave, and led the Jewish community in giving to, some 2,000 schools for black Americans. This list includes Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities. At one time some forty percent of southern blacks were learning at these schools.[citation needed] Fifty percent of the civil rights lawyers who worked in the south were Jewish.[citation needed]
Jewish leaders were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer, rabbi and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America was outspoken on the subject of civil rights and marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in the 1965 March on Selma.

Brandeis University, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college university in the world, created the Transitional Year Program in 1968, in part response to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. The Transitional Year Program (TYP) at Brandeis was founded in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, this event compelled members of the faculty to find a means for renewing the University's commitment to social justice. Recognizing Brandeis as a university with a commitment to academic excellence, these faculty members thought it only right to extend the opportunity to participate in an empowering educational experience to students from communities that offered limited educational options.

It began by only admitting 20 black males to ensue the obvious disenfranchisement of the African American Community in the United States. The progam has developed into The TYP selects students from two broad categories with respect to background that in many cases overlap. The first group is comprised of students whose secondary schooling experiences and/or home communities may have lacked the resources to foster adequate preparation for success at elite colleges like Brandeis. Many times, their high schools do not offer AP or honors courses nor high quality laboratory experiences. Despite the absence of such opportunities, students have excelled in the curricula offered by their schools.

The second group of students contains those whose life circumstances have created formidable challenges that required focus, energy, and skills that otherwise would have been devoted to academic pursuits. Some have served as heads of their households, others have worked full-time while attending high school full-time, and others have shown leadership in other ways.
The PBS television show From Swastika to Jim Crow explores Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. Jewish professors, refugees from the Holocaust came to teach at Southern Black Colleges in the 1930s and '40s. There came to be empathy and collaboration between Blacks and Jews. Professor Ernst Borinski organized dinners at which blacks and whites sat next to each other, a simple act that challenged segregation. Black students empathized with the cruelty these scholars had endured in Europe.

The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League actively promoted civil rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1955-1968)