Episode No. 137--MLK Day and why Jews should celebrate it

On Monday, we here in the United States and also in Israel will celebrate Martin Luther King Day. That we celebrate this day here is understandable and commendable. After all, he was a great warrior for equality and justice for all people. But why is this day marked in Israel, too? And why will many synagogues and Jewish organizations here hold their own celebrations this weekend and throughout Monday’s observance? 

Transcript

Episode No. 137--MLK Day and why Jews should celebrate it

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the bi-weekly podcast in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition.

On Monday, we here in the United States and also in Israel will celebrate Martin Luther King Day. That we celebrate this day here is understandable and commendable. After all, he was a great warrior for equality and justice for all people. But why is this day marked in Israel, too? And why will many synagogues and Jewish organizations here be holding their own celebrations over this weekend and throughout Monday’s observance?

And so, to answer those questions, the topic for this week is the Jewish role in the battle for civil rights in America, and why Martin Luther King Day is a holiday that Jews here and in Israel should celebrate.

That Dr. King was a great warrior for equality and justice for all people, Jews included, is reason enough for honoring him, of course, but he and the late Coretta Scott King were not only good friends to Jews here and who fought back against anti-Semitism in the black community, they championed the cause of Soviet Jewry during that struggle, and they were strong supporters of the State of Israel.

Dr. King, of course, didn’t invent the Civil Rights Movement, of which he arguably was its greatest champion. That movement got its greatest boost in 1909, long before Dr. King came into this world, with the founding of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was founded in significant part by Jews, who also helped fund it.

Among the NAACP’s founders was Sears president Julius Rosenwald, who had a lasting friendship with an earlier warrior for civil rights, Booker T. Washington.

In 1912, Rosenwald provided his friend’s Tuskegee Institute a grant to help build six schools in rural Alabama for black children who otherwise were being denied a proper education. Over the next 20 years, the Rosenwald Fund he established in 1917 helped build nearly 5,000 more such schools. These “Rosenwald schools,” as they are sometimes called, provided educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of black children. In doing so, they significantly improved literacy rates and empowered future generations. Maya Angelou and Rosa Parks, among others, were educated in Rosenwald schools.

Also among the NAACP’s founders were two Reform rabbis, Emil Hirsch and Stephen Wise, Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald, and the social and political activist, philanthropist, and communal leader Henry Moskowitz (who later helped found the League of New York Theaters and was its first chairman).

In 1914, five years after its founding, the NAACP elected a Jew to be its chairman: Columbia University Professor Joel Spingarn. After a later stint as treasurer, Spingarn also served a term as the NAACP’s president. He brought other Jews onto the NAACP board, including the banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff.

His brother, Arthur Spingarn, served as the NAACP’s vice president and also chaired its Legal Committee, and he was a member of its board of directors from 1911 to 1940. In the 1960s, he was made an honorary president of the NAACP.

Together these Jews and many others helped found and fund the Civil Rights movement because they saw the black struggle to be our struggle, as well. Today, we forget that in too many places in the South, and even in some places in the North, going all the way back to the founding of the Republic and up until the 1960s, there were signs throughout the United States that read: QUOTE No Jews, blacks or dogs allowed. UNQUOTE Jews always came first on such hateful signs.

We forget the time that the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, holding a black dog on a leash, paraded outside a Washington, D.C., nightclub where Sammy Davis Jr. was appearing. The dog wore a sign, QUOTE I may be black, but at least I’m not Jewish. UNQUOTE

We forget that the leading Jewish civil rights organization, the Anti-Defamation League, was founded in 1913 in part because Leo Frank, a Jew in Atlanta, Georgia, was falsely convicted of having raped and murdered a 13-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, and sentenced to death by hanging. Frank was lynched two years later, on the night of August 17, 1915, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The janitor whose testimony led to his conviction would never have been allowed to testify against a white man in any Southern courtroom, not in Atlanta, and not anywhere else in the old South because he was black. But Leo Frank wasn’t white. He was a Jew. So a Southern prosecutor, a Southern judge, and a Southern jury ignored the color of the janitor’s skin.

It apparently didn’t bother any of them that the janitor changed his testimony four times during the trial, itself a giveaway that he was lying. Convicting a Jew outweighed any Jim Crow considerations.

Leo Frank was lynched by a mob after Georgia’s governor at the time, John Slaton, after reviewing 10,000 pages of documents and personally visiting the scene of the crime, became convinced that Leo Frank was innocent. Slaton would have preferred to free Leo Frank, but he knew that was dangerous for several reasons. So instead he commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison in order to give Frank’s lawyers more time to file appeals.

Even the commutation proved dangerous, though. Frank was lynched the very next night. The lynching party reportedly included an ex-governor of Georgia, a superior court judge, several Georgia mayors, and the son of a U.S. senator. No one was ever charged for that crime.

As for Governor Slaton, whose term ended just a few days later, so angry were the people of Atlanta that he and his family had to be escorted out of the state by units of the Georgia National Guard. Slaton didn’t set foot in Georgia again for over a decade.

We don’t forget a woman named Esther Brown, but that’s because most people never even heard of her. That’s a pity, because she helped end so-called Separate But Equal education in America.

That outrage was effectively ended by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 in its historic decision in the case of Oliver Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Oliver Brown was one of 33 black plaintiffs in that historic case. His name is associated with the decision only because his name was the first one on the list. It was an accident of the alphabet, but it was a fortuitous accident because it was someone named Brown—Esther Brown—who started that ball rolling six years earlier.

In 1948, Esther Brown was an affluent 30-year-old Jewish housewife living in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam. She had a black maid whose child was a student in an all-black, two-room schoolhouse built in 1888 on Booker Street in Merriam. Known as the Walker School, it had eight grades that met in those two rooms, it only employed two teachers, and it had no principal. It also had no bathrooms; the children had to use an outhouse that was located on a dirt playground that itself was strewn with broken equipment parts.

One day, Esther Brown’s maid mentioned how upset she was by the disgusting conditions at the Walker School and by the poor education her child was getting there.

Esther Brown was appalled, and she immediately sprung into action by taking her case to the all-white Merriam school board. Among other suggestions she offered, she noted that a new school was being built in Merriam, and so the Walker School children could be moved to that new school.

That, of course, would have meant integrating that school. The board instead came up with its own solution. It ordered new light bulbs to be installed in the Walker School.

Esther later said she left the meeting feeling QUOTE nauseated. UNQUOTE

But she also left more than ever determined to keep fighting. After failing to organize both black and white parents to support her efforts, she went to the Kansas City chapter of the NAACP and asked it to file suit against the Merriam school board.

Then she hit the road to raise the money needed to pay for that lawsuit. She made appeals at any venue she thought would be responsive, including an appeal she made at a Billie Holliday concert.

She also helped organize a boycott of the Walker School and set up a new private school to educate the students instead.

For her efforts, Esther Brown’s life was threatened, a cross was burned on her front lawn, and her husband was fired from his job.

The more pressure Merriam’s white community put on her, though, the more determined she became.

Her first victory came in 1949, when the Kansas Supreme Court ordered the Merriam school board to do as Esther had proposed in the first place. It ordered that the Walker School’s students be integrated into that brand-new and, until then, all-white public school.

That was a local victory, but Esther, by then, had set her sights much higher. She wanted to end segregated schools everywhere in the United States. That’s when she joined the NAACP’s effort to end segregation in the Topeka, Kansas, school system. It was that effort that led to Brown v. Board of Education.

Her involvement in the Topeka case was pivotal, according to Lucinda Todd, who was secretary of the Topeka NAACP branch at the time. Said Ms. Todd, QUOTE Esther was very quiet, but she was a determined person. She knew what she wanted, and she wouldn't give up. UNQUOTE She added that QUOTE I don’t know if we could have done it without her. UNQUOTE

We may not know of Esther Brown or her role in bringing an end to segregated schools, but they do remember her in Merriam, Kansas, where it all began for her. In 1975, five years after her death, the City of Merriam dedicated a new 3 ½ acre public park in her honor—a park that was placed across Booker Street from where the Walker School had once stood.

Let’s return to why Jews should celebrate Dr. King’s memory on Monday and, frankly, every day.

Hatred of the Jews and hatred of the blacks have gone hand in hand in this country for a very long time.

Even today, “white,” at least as used by the haters, defines the white Christian. We saw that in the Leo Frank trial, for example. In that sense, then, the Jew is no whiter than someone who is black, brown, or yellow. Is it any wonder, then, that blacks and Jews found common cause in the battle for civil rights?

Dr. King understood all that. He was not a Jew-hater. He was a friend to the Jews.

Dr. King once said, QUOTE My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility. UNQUOTE

In May 1958, he spoke at an American Jewish Congress convention. Said Dr. King, QUOTE There are Hitlers loose in America today, both in high and low places….As the tensions and bewilderment of economic problems become more severe, history’s scapegoats, the Jews, will be joined by new scapegoats, the Negroes. The Hitlers will seek to divert people’s minds and turn their frustration and anger to the helpless, to the outnumbered. Then whether the Negro and Jew shall live in peace will depend upon how firmly they resist, how effectively they reach the minds of the decent Americans to halt this deadly diversion…. UNQUOTE

In 1963, Dr. King helped set up a conference to call attention to the plight of Soviet Jews. During a Soviet Jewry event in 1966, Dr. King said, QUOTE We cannot sit complacently by the wayside while our Jewish brothers in the Soviet Union face the possible extinction of their cultural and spiritual life. UNQUOTE He then pointedly added, QUOTE The denial of human rights anywhere is a threat to the affirmation of human rights everywhere. UNQUOTE

Dr. King was a close friend of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched arm in arm with him in the great march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. In 1967, the two of them co-authored a formal protest published in the New York Times decrying Egypt’s blockade in the Straits of Tiran, which cut Israel off from access to shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba. That blockade led to the Six-Day War in June 1967.

Dr. King was a friend of the Jewish state. That’s why the State of Israel annually marks Martin Luther King Day, as well, and why there’s a Martin Luther King Forest in the Galilee and a Martin Luther King Street in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city. There’s also a Coretta Scott King Forest in the Galilee, named for Dr. King’s late wife.

In a letter he wrote in September 1967, three months after the Six-Day War, Dr. King made it QUOTE crystal clear UNQUOTE that he rejected efforts by black groups to condemn Israel and to support Arab calls for its demise. No doubt, Dr. King would be appalled today by the number of blacks who want to see Israel disappear. Very likely, he wouldn’t have supported how Israel is conducting its war against Hamas, but his support for Israel would have remained strong.

As Dr. King said in 1967, QUOTE Israel’s right to exist as a state is incontestable. UNQUOTE

In a 1968 speech I’m about to mention, Dr. King also said this: QUOTE Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world and a marvelous example of what can be done and how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality. UNQUOTE

As for that speech, it was delivered on March 25, 1968, just 19 days before he was assassinated on April 4, and it was the keynote address at the 68th Rabbinical Assembly of America convention. The Rabbinical Assembly is the umbrella organization of Conservative rabbis. The convention was held at a Catskills hotel that year in part to celebrate Rabbi Heschel’s birthday.

In introducing Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel said, QUOTE Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us. His presence is the hope of America. His mission is sacred, his leadership of supreme importance to every one of us. UNQUOTE

King, by the way, had accepted Rabbi Heschel’s invitation to attend his Passover seder that year on April 12th, but that was not to be.

After Dr. King’s death, Coretta Scott King asked Rabbi Heschel to speak at the funeral, which, of course, he did.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., deserved our respect while he lived, and his memory deserves to be honored by us today.

The black-Jewish relationship has been somewhat strained over the last few decades, that’s true. It’s even more strained today because many blacks identify with the Palestinians and have bought into the falsehood that Israel is an apartheid state. We still have a common cause, though, and we still face a common enemy. We and the black community need to remember that, and we need to act on that by reinvigorating our partnership in the pursuit of justice.

Our mutual enemy has been very busy trying to divide blacks and Jews.

We see it almost every day on social media. White Supremacists disguise themselves on social media as Jews making racist comments about blacks and disguise themselves as blacks making racist comments about Jews.

As Agudath Israel’s Avi Shafran wrote some years ago, such postings are, as he termed them, social media incendiary devices that, he said, are the work of white supremacists seeking to turn blacks and Jews against each other.

We can’t allow ourselves to forget that. We dare not forget that. And we dare not give in to that.

And one positive thing we can do in this regard comes this Monday. Take a few moments with your family and friends, your children especially, to remember Dr. King and to discuss his legacy. Then, take a few more moments to discuss how—and especially why—Jews were not only a part of the Civil Rights movement but were among its founders and major supporters.

Jews and blacks both tend to forget that we once marched side by side in that struggle for equality—not just because it was the correct course to take, a good enough reason by itself, but because we were among those most discriminated against.

During the 1960s, nearly half the country’s civil rights lawyers were Jewish; more than half the white civil rights workers were Jewish. And, of course, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two of the three people killed in Mississippi during 1964’s Freedom Summer, were Jewish. The third, James Chaney, was black.

The Civil Rights movement worked for us a lot quicker than it did for blacks, not because the white world liked Jews better (to this day White Supremacists don’t include Jews in their definition of white), but because most of us could pass for white.

Reflect on that on Monday, as well.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email, please.

Shabbat Shalom, stay healthy, and above all stay safe.