Jews & Blacks
by Sam Jacoby
For what seems to me roughly 100 million years ago, though it really was only about 50 years ago, the US had a very different face then it has now. The history of the United States spans almost three and a half centuries. During its first century, through 1865 the US allowed slavery. For another 100 years, despite the fact this was a nation based on a philosophy of people’s rights to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the law treated whole groups of people like dirt, solely, because of the color of their skin.
Right up to the 1950’s and 60’s, in many parts of the country; Black children and white children didn’t play together on the streets or attend the same schools. We have all seen the pictures of the two water fountains, one large and refrigerated labeled white, the other, a small Spartan basin on which the word colored is engraved. At the park there are three bathrooms, one-labeled men, one woman, one colored. This is not ancient history, forgotten and overlooked, this is within the memory of my parents. In the heart of the South, still in the 1950’s, in Mississippi, in Alabama, the killing of a black person did not even merit a line in the newspaper. It was not uncommon for police officers to be members of the Ku Klux Klan, and to turn their head as mobs of white men knocked down the doors of black homes. Blacks who even showed a glimmer of independence or rebellion would often return home to find their houses burned, or, even worse, a lynch mob could be waiting outside. Blacks were forced to endure segregation in almost everything. Restaurants, hotels, buses, trains, bathrooms, schools, movie theatres, parks, even graveyards were segregated. Though blacks were not slaves, in the eyes of the South, they were little better. Even before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955 a change was apparent. Around this time the US, or rather the black community, had taken enough, and began shifting the country on a slow arduous trek back towards the Constitution.
What is now called the Civil Rights Movement was a broad attack on racial injustice. In it’s vanguard were Martin Luther King, Diane Nash, James Farmer, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Thurgood Marshall, and dozens of others. The Movement was fueled by blacks in all walks of life--passengers, tired of sitting in the back of the bus, students sick of going to school in buildings little more than shacks, workers tired of having to pack their lunches every day because they couldn’t eat at downtown restaurants, and millions of others. These people formed an awesome boiling mass of emotion, which propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Like a ball rolling down a hill, first slowly, then faster, the Movement crashed through the barriers of oppression and segregation.
I first really learned of the Civil Rights Movement while working on a school project earlier this year. I was inspired by the Movements ever-vigilant quest for good. There were no shades of gray, just black and white, one side was so good, the other so evil. It was upsetting to think that the American credo, "Land of the Free" was a misnomer. A more apt name would have been, "Land of the Free Whites". The Civil Rights Movement was a demonstration of the raw courage and passion of a people pushed to the limits of human endurance. The decision to march into the embrace of the racist South further showed the iron will of a people pushed to the brink. For my Bar Mitzvah project I decided to look more deeply into this hoping to find, locked somewhere in the Civil Rights Movement, what it means to be an American, and from there to what it means to be a Jew.
Most white Americans witnessed the injustices of the South and indeed the Civil Rights Movement from the sidelines. They were immobilized by the destructive disease of passivity. Of course not everyone was passive. There were millions of people who stood behind the slogan, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." This was the motto of once Governor of Mississippi Ross Barnett. However most significant to me was the minority of whites who threw their weight, along with their Black neighbors behind the movement. A large number of this group were Jews, Jews who knew all too well what it was like to be banished into the dark underbelly of society.
To take on the longstanding injustice of the South and shift the phlegmatic American mind was a very difficult task. Segregation, discrimination, and ignorance had to be beaten back inch by inch. To make the task still more difficult the Civil Rights Movement was much more than fighting for being served at lunch counters, or sitting anywhere one wants on a bus, it was about being Americans, not intruders, or visitors just passing through, but Americans. It was fighting for a future in which no American citizen was more American than any other. A future in which one would not be labeled inferior because of ones race. Everyone started out on the same line and was free to fly as high as they could. At the same time they were trying to keep their tenacious grip of their own culture, and assimilate into the American mainstream without it being swept out of their hands by the currents of uniformity.
Many Blacks and Jews realized they were both fighting for the same thing, perhaps Jews too much lesser degrees, but the same thing none the less. For the dignity of knowing that America belonged to you as much as anyone else, that you were equal to anyone, anything. This sounds pretty good, so why didn’t other minorities lend their help to the fledgling movement, I don’t really know?
But, it was obvious to see that there was something between Jews and Blacks. Jew and Blacks may have deeper connections than one would imagine; the first Blacks brought to America soon adopted the story of the ancient Israelites in Egypt. Numerous Old Testament stories were transformed into spirituals - long into the night strains of Go Down Moses would echo over the cotton field. Jews and Blacks were both tangential from the American mainstream, considered almost a completely different species. Somehow, this brought them closer. Blacks and Jews banded together, there was no one else.
In Europe Jews had often been at the very bottom of society. In America that spot was taken by blacks. In choosing to defend blacks, they were also choosing to defend themselves.
The history between blacks and Jews began long before the Civil Rights Movement. In 1855 three Jewish immigrants fought with John Brown’s band of abolitionists. Throughout the cities of the South rabbis preached against slavery and inequality. In 1859, in Missouri, Jewish abolitionist, Moritz Pinner founded an anti-slavery newspaper. In Alabama, Solomon Heydenfelt published and distributed through the state, a booklet condemning America’s injustices to blacks. After slavery was abolished, when discrimination still continued, Jews did not cease to work for racial equality. In cases against blacks, Jewish lawyers were often the only ones who would take their cases. Later, while African American attorneys like Thurgood Marshall, of the NAACP, were at the forefront of the Movements legal struggles, the defense teams of Civil Rights Leaders were often entirely comprised of Jewish lawyers.
The root of many of the Black communities problems, was that most of the South was based on power structure, that devoted itself to keeping Blacks down. How did it do this? In part, by with holding Blacks right to vote. Blacks had no power in their communities even though they often were the majority population. In a Mississippi county with over 20,000 blacks, you would probably find less than one hundred registered to vote. Blacks who tried to register were often cruelly beaten or killed, and even if they made it as far as the courthouse, their requests were undoubtedly turned down. This was the problem that the Mississippi Freedom Summer was created to amend. Orchestrated by SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other Civil Rights organizations, thousands of trained Civil Rights workers were sent into the heart of the South. They swarmed through Mississippi, a state that was steeped in hundreds of years of violently racist tradition; in battered old fords, buses, trains; they visited the deepest backwaters of the state leaving a trail of meetings, leaflets, and seminars in their wake.
It was during this key campaign that Jews flocked to the South in droves. The symbols of Black and Jewish solidarity in the Civil Rights Movement were three young men who were murdered together by Mississippi Klansmen wearing the badges of sherriff's deputies: Michael Schwerner and Andy Goodman, Jewish students from New York, and James Cheney, a Mississippi Black.
I spoke with several Jewish activists who went down South in the Movement. Stuart Ewen, who had been a SNCC staff member during the campaign for almost a year, said that from his experience he thought that the reason why so many Jews joined the Civil Rights Movement was the way they were raised. When he joined the movement he felt it was only the natural thing to do in accordance to his upbringing. So did the many others who were with him. It was expected of them as a Jew, to go down and help another people fighting for justice. Also, he mentioned, Jews and Blacks have long identified with each other. This is especially apparent through Black’s adoption of the Old Testament and Jews sense of obligation to get involved in the problems that touch an especially sensitive spot in their history. All this holds true in the situation with Civil Rights Movement. I also spoke with my Uncle, Paul Breines, who rode in the Freedom Rides through the South in 1961. He said that though there were some Jews, they all seemed, along with him, to be going down South to just be decent people, working against injustices in this nation.
In addition to everything else the Civil Rights workers opened and manned dozens of Freedom schools where blacks were taught the fundamentals of the Constitution and how their rights as Americans were being denied. Gradually, the southern black began to take on a new face, not of crushed worker, but the fresh face of an American, looking skyward.
The movement brought about in the next few years the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965, sealing all that thousands had fought for. The bulk of the movement was over, yes, the struggle continued and still does. I look at the world and it is clear that racism and prejudice are still alive and well.
Perhaps the reason why the Movement fascinated me so strongly was that it seems so distant from my own life experiences. I attended an elementary school filled with students dozens of different of races and ethnicities. There was no sign of the racial hatred and discrimination that filled the world. Then, to learn what it was like a mere 50 years ago, it was like another universe.
The Sholem community, in my 8 odd years of attendance, has prepared me well for the onslaught of tumultuous emotions whirling around when one once faces humanity. It has done this by giving me no biases or prejudices ideas whatsoever to obscure my view of humankind, just a clean slate, easily written on and easily wiped clean. Being a secular Jew is almost as if choosing your own belief, one can mold and form it to your own discretion. Carving it through your own eyes, like an abstract statue, until it forms a shape to your liking. Some peoples statues resemble crouched gargoyles, bitter and twisted, looking out through slits at the world, narrow and fixed. Others are David’s; tall and strong, open faced with an aura of kindness. My statue is still a block of marble, the first chisel blows are falling, and I hope I choose them well.
I ask myself if Jews today would aid a new Civil Rights Movement. There are two answers to this, the first and more optimistic, is one in which Jews and in fact, all people would go as one to help fight injustice once again. The other and perhaps more realistic view, would be one in which a few people become actively involved, while the rest watch on TV, too busy to do more than dash off letters to the editor. But, if a Movement as monumental as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s arose once again, I believe many people would unite behind it. To overcome injustice and break through the iron bands of prejudice. Does this mean that people now are better than in the 1960’s or 50’s? I doubt it. Instead, as a nation we are perhaps more socially responsible, after all, we live in an age where any event across the globe is instantly available. In the 1960’s Southern Newspapers often would not even acknowledge the existence of a "Civil Rights Movement", to avoid public outcry. Now, such events would be flashing across every television screen in the nation, splashed across newspaper headlines, and discussed endlessly on radio talk shows, in this day and time one can’t just sweep something under the rug. So perhaps we aren’t a better people, just a more informed one.
As a Jew, looking back at the Civil Rights Movement I don’t feel that I see it in any different light or angle. I see it as a monument to justice, a shining pillar of evidence that there is hope for the future - a future in which something like the Civil Rights Movement isn’t necessary. Why? Because every person will have common human decency imprinted indelibly in his or her mind.
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