Blacks And Jews In America: A Canadian’s View

In pre-Civil War days, Jews in the southern U.S. had their institutions fire-bombed when Jewish philanthropists and some Rabbis spoke up and supported efforts to correct the worst excesses of the slavery economy. Most southern Jews kept silent in the face of private and public intimidation but Jewish activism was unrelenting in the North in support of the elimination of slavery.

There are numerous anecdotal reports of American Jews reaching out to individuals in the Black community, over the decades, with the object of improving their situations. We know that Louie Armstrong wore a Star of David until the day he died, in commemoration of what the intervention of a Jewish family meant to him in his life. He was not alone. Yet today there is evidence of common cause by American Blacks with those whose histories go back to African slavery, and who indeed have an association with those who currently practice slavery in some countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

In the fifties, under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., Black activism led to some legislative progress. King was quoted as recounting that ninety percent of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish. The discovery of the bodies of three young Freedom Riders, murdered by the Ku Klux Clan, two of them Jewish, was thought to have led to the accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, The American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee, were active in the courts and in the court of public opinion, with money and people. Almost every synagogue had its civil rights committee.