American Civil Rights Movement 1955-1968: Encyclopedia II - American Civil Rights Movement 1955-1968 - The American Jewish community and the civil rights movement

American Civil Rights Movement 1955-1968 - The American Jewish community and the civil rights movement

Most of the American Jewish community tacitly or actively supported the civil rights movement. Many of the co-founders of the NAACP were Jewish; many of its members and activists came from the Jewish community. The great majority of American Jews who were active in promoting civil rights were secular Jews, Reform Jews and Conservative Jews.

A large number of Jewish philanthropists actively supported the NAACP and various civil rights group, and schools for African-Americans. The Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded the creation of dozens of primary schools, secondary schools and colleges for disenfranchised black youth. He personally 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.

Jewish Americans were many times more likely to be actively involved in the civil rights movement than any other group in America, except the black community itself. Jews made up nearly half of the volunteers involved in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. While only making up 2% of the population, some 50% of the civil rights lawyers who worked in the south, sometimes risking their lives, were Jewish.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer, rabbi and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America was one of the most outspoken Jewish leaders on the subject; he marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King at Selma.

The PBS television show From Swastika to Jim Crow discusses Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement, demonstrating that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust came to teach at many American schools, and reached out to black students

The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League became active in promoting civil rights. Several people believe that Civil Rights was successful only because of Jewish participation and the anti-semitic attitudes that were displayed in the south during the movement. Feeling guilty about World War II, several Northern Whites began to see validity in ending segregation due to the anti-semitism displayed by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

The Jewish community however was not sparred from violence that Blacks acted reactively on. Jews owned many stores and businesses inside some African American neighborhoods in both northern and southern states. In some cities a number of black riots were blamed by some on the existence of Jewish business owners.

As Black Power and influence from the nascent Nation of Islam (NOI) grew, Anti-Semitism also grew. NOI leaders Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X openly preached not only anti-white racism, but also anti-Semitism. (In later years Malcom X renounced all racist teachings of the NOI, and was later murdered by NOI members.)

In 1966 in the San Quentin prison, Black Militants formed the Black Guerilla Family, a radical left-wing prison gang which preached hatred and murder of Whites, Jews, and prison and law enforcement officials. A white gang, the Aryan Brotherhood, also formed a year later also in San Quentin. Even though their formation was reactive to that of the Black Guerilla Family, their ideology follows white supremacist lines that are similar to those preached by the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler.

By the 1980s the Jewish community began to be perceived as abandoning its committment to rights by many in the African-American community, despite the broad alliance of social goals that continued to exist between these two communities. Both groups continuted to support civil rights, especially equality of education in public elementary, middle and high schools. Both groups continued to support increased black colleges, schoalrships for blacks in traditioanlly white colleges, and recruitment of black students for careers in which blacks were traditionally under-represented. Both communities continued to actively support government programs which reached out to the black community to bring blacks into business, government and industriy.

However, the existence of a disagreement on one issue, affirmative action in the form of racial hiring quotas, split the alliance. Most of the Jewish community is against establishing quotas based on a person's skin color. Even the most liberal Jewish groups held that the goal should be for both blacks and whites to have full protection of civil rights and equal opportunities in education, so that all Americans could fairly compete on a level playing field. Jewish groups generally regard affirmative actions programs as government-sanctioned racial discrimination. Such programs were inadvertently demeaning to members of minority groups, as it sent a condecending message to minorities that they are not capable enough to be considered on their own merits.

Many in the black community, however, felt that no level playing field would ever exist, and that the government must promote and institute racial quotas, commonly called affirmative action. The lack of Jewish support for this issue led to many in the African American community to accuse the Jewish people, en masse, of retreating from their committment to civil rights. Many leaders in the Jewish community report feeling distressed that the former Black-Jewish alliance has crumbled, and they feel that they are unfairly being attacked as abandoning civil rights.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The American Jewish community and the civil rights movement", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki