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00:13During the Civil Rights years, the Black-Jewish Alliance reached its peak.
00:19I was born in 1950, so I grew up watching it happen.
00:24In my house, we saw Jewish Americans as some of our strongest allies in the fight for racial justice.
00:34I think the Civil Rights Movement healed our souls after Nazi Germany.
00:39We are trying to remind the nation, now is the time, take real the promises of democracy.
00:46Rabbi Heschel was told he might not live, but he said, I'm marching right next to my brother, Martin King.
00:54Jewish children came in droves to the South to register Black people to vote.
01:00I'll never forget those students.
01:01I was recruiting people.
01:03And I was also telling them, you may go down there and you may die.
01:07And it turns out, I was right.
01:09The search for these Civil Rights activists takes on a different kind of intensity
01:16because two of them are white.
01:20We want Black power.
01:22At that moment, some Black activists weren't feeling allyship.
01:26What they were feeling was a degree of alienation.
01:29It laid bare some of the tensions underlying Black-Jewish relations
01:34because Blacks and Jews were not on the same page economically.
01:38The Six-Day Middle East War is a swift, smashing and total one.
01:42The Six-Day War was a watershed moment in terms of Black Americans' understanding
01:47of what was going on in Israel.
01:51The New York City school system was shut down again today
01:54by the third strike this term of the Teachers Union.
01:57In the Oceano-Brownsville school strike, you see the rupture between Blacks and Jews
02:01that eventually will rip the entire coalition apart.
02:04It wasn't a perfect partnership, but for a time, it stood as proof
02:09that people could bridge deep divides, an emblem of hope,
02:13and a lesson in the power of solidarity.
02:17There is a history that we need to regard and respect.
02:21We would not have got certain things done without those alliances.
02:25Jews and African Americans both see their interests
02:30as relying on the universal commitment to equality.
02:36Only when everyone is safe are we safe.
02:38We cannot go it alone.
02:53The first time I met a Jewish person was 1960.
02:58I was nine years old when my mother joined the board of the United Organizations,
03:05and one of the other board members was Mrs. Mamelin.
03:11Mrs. Mamelin invited my mother over to her house for tea.
03:17The fact that she had invited my mother to her house for a social event was a big deal.
03:23I don't think my mother was ever invited before to a white person's house.
03:28And the fact that she was Jewish was remarked upon by both my mother and my father.
03:33And that resonated with me.
03:35There was a liberal alliance between Jews and black people in the civil rights movement.
03:40And I began to realize that yes, Jews were white, but there were different kinds of white people.
03:45And that may be the reason that Mrs. Mamelin invited Mrs. Gates over for that symbolic gesture
03:51had to do with the fact that it was an expression of sympathy about shared oppression.
03:58And that struck me deeply.
04:03Thinking about my mother's tea with Mrs. Mamelin makes me realize that the so-called grand alliance between blacks and
04:10Jews
04:10wasn't solely forged by the leaders of our two communities.
04:14It was also built by ordinary people, just reaching out to each other in small gestures of friendship and solidarity.
04:23In fact, one of the unsung heroes of the early civil rights movement was a Jewish housewife named Esther Brown.
04:32When Esther realized that there was racial discrimination in her local school system, she vowed to fight it,
04:40lending her support to a battle that would go all the way to the Supreme Court.
04:51In the late 40s, Miriam was really a rural community on the outskirts of Kansas City.
04:58I think we were the only Jewish family.
05:02Susan's parents, Esther and Paul Brown, were children of Jewish immigrants.
05:08With the help of the GI Bill, they were able to buy a home in Miriam, where Paul worked at
05:15an auto shop and Esther as a homemaker.
05:19My mother wasn't a typical Jewish housewife.
05:23And it seemed like, compared to most of my friends' parents, mothers in particular, she was very engaged in the
05:31world.
05:31From an early age, she was always interested in equality and justice and disturbed by anti-Semitism, racism.
05:44Esther's transformation to civil rights activist began one day in 1947, after a conversation she had with her maid, a
05:54black woman named Helen Swan.
05:56Mrs. Swan was a charming lady, had five children.
06:02She lived in a little area known as South Park, and every now and then I'd take her home.
06:07And it was a very country-type community, dirt roads, kind of a poor section.
06:16Through Mrs. Swan, my mother learned about the Walker School, which was a two-room schoolhouse that the black kids
06:25went to.
06:26And there were two teachers who taught eight grades.
06:29And there were about 47 children in the school.
06:32The conditions were really horrific.
06:36It was almost unbelievable.
06:38Whenever there was a heavy rain, water would accumulate in the basement that would be two and a half to
06:44three or four feet high.
06:46Children in that school were always having the flu and the cold and the pneumonia.
06:50And this is the way these kids had gone to school for years.
06:54Then Mrs. Swan told Esther that the town had no plans to fix Walker.
06:59And in fact, they were raising money to build a new white school instead.
07:06I thought this was pretty crummy.
07:08And said, Mrs. Swan, maybe I ought to go to your school board and talk to them.
07:13Being white, they'd probably listen to me, or they don't to you.
07:19I think most immigrant parents felt like education was the way to get ahead in America.
07:25My mother just thought that the conditions were horrible, regardless of who went to the school.
07:31So it wasn't necessarily just a racial issue to begin with.
07:36But when Esther Brown attended a school board meeting to voice support for improving the Walker School,
07:43she learned that it was very much a racial issue.
07:46I have never had such a shock in my life.
07:50And for the first time, even became a little frightened.
07:53The five school board members looked like a bunch of lynchers from the south.
07:59A few days later, she got a call from a guy in town threatening her,
08:04saying she should mind her own business, which just made her more angry and determined.
08:11Esther joined forces with a black couple named Alfonso and Mary Webb, who were leading the charge to improve Walker.
08:19And together, they began rallying the community.
08:23They assembled the first local chapter of the NAACP, and then they hatched a plan to sue the school district.
08:32Dolores Locke Graves was a student at the Walker School.
08:36When her mother Lucille got involved with the lawsuit, she decided that Dolores should become one of the plaintiffs.
08:44My mother told me, we're going to do something, Dolores, that is not really heard of.
08:50And I know you can handle it because you're my child.
08:53When you think back to the black community, did you feel in danger?
08:57We did have a segment a couple of times where they came through our neighborhood and burned some crosses.
09:06The Ku Klux Klan did?
09:07Yes.
09:08But my mother, she says, we're going to try to do something about that school over there.
09:14Did your mom and Mrs. Brown become close?
09:18Mrs. Brown would come and they would kick off these shoes and they would just have a wonderful afternoon.
09:25It would have been unusual for a white lady to come to a black lady's house at that time.
09:29Yes, it was.
09:30Uh-huh.
09:31Mrs. Brown was the one who, I would say, gave her this grace and the mentality, get what you want,
09:38little self.
09:38Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
09:40Get it.
09:43As the lawsuit dragged on into the fall of 1948, Walker parents couldn't bear the thought of their children forced
09:53to sit day after day in that dismal space.
09:57So Lucille and another family offered up their homes as makeshift classrooms and staged a boycott.
10:06I call them the Walker walkouts.
10:09My mother reached out to two teachers who had previously worked at Walker, Corinthian Nutter and Hazel Weddington,
10:16and asked them if they would come and teach the children in the parents' homes.
10:21Two of the families offered up their living rooms for many, many months.
10:26While their children did their lessons in their neighbors' living rooms, the South Park parents threw themselves into the legal
10:34fight.
10:37Finally, in 1949, Webb v. School District 90 made it before the Kansas Supreme Court.
10:46And against all odds, they won.
10:50The Kansas Supreme Court ordered the school integrated.
10:54And that fall, the children were admitted to the school.
10:57Do you remember when the verdict was announced?
11:01Oh, it was just happy.
11:03I remember my cousins.
11:05We had a little band going through the park.
11:09Uh-huh.
11:10Celebrating that we were free.
11:16But for Esther Brown, the fight was far from over.
11:21Early on, she talked not only about integration of the South Park School, but integrating the schools throughout Kansas and
11:30the nation.
11:30She was very prescient and sort of had her eye on the prize from the get-go.
11:37Esther had begun working with the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, which had been fighting inequality in education since the 1930s,
11:46often with the help of Jewish allies.
11:50The leadership both of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund always included blacks and Jews working together on a
11:58strategy to improve conditions for African Americans.
12:03Famed civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall and his team ultimately took five related school segregation cases before the United States
12:13Supreme Court.
12:14Collectively, they were known as Brown v. Board of Education, named not for Esther Brown, but for a black plaintiff,
12:23Oliver Brown.
12:25Brown v. Board of Ed, in many ways, becomes the template for black Jewish cooperation during that period.
12:33African Americans at the front and strategizing, and then Jews providing legal support, scholarly support, and especially financial support.
12:43Marshall, aided by brilliant colleagues, including Robert L. Carter, Constance Baker Motley, and Jack Greenberg, successfully argued that racial segregation
12:54of public schools was unconstitutional.
12:59Separate but equal had never been equal.
13:03In 1954, after the Brown case was decided and there was a celebration in Topeka, my mother was one of
13:10the speakers.
13:11She talked about what a sacrifice the black families had made and how hard it was for people to take
13:19a stand.
13:20And she said something like, you know, like the lawyers have done a great job, but it's the little people
13:26like us who really made this happen.
13:29One of the things you often hear about black Jewish relations is that, well, it was just elite blacks and
13:34elite Jews.
13:35But here was literally a housewife in Kansas who felt moved by what she saw and got very involved with
13:42the black community.
13:43And I think that shows the way this alliance between blacks and Jews resonated among ordinary Jews.
13:54Like many watershed moments in the fight for civil rights, the Brown decision was greeted by heated backlash across the
14:02country.
14:04Negro students encountered violence in their attempt to register at a previously all-white school.
14:10You had governors in Arkansas and elsewhere who would say, you know, basically, we're just going to stand in front
14:18of federal troops and prevent folks from entering the schools.
14:22White supremacists across the South waged a violent campaign against integration.
14:31They bombed my parents' church.
14:35They bombed Bell Street Church, Mount Olive Church.
14:39They bombed my parents' home.
14:42I was born trembling literally for the first six months of my life.
14:48This violence didn't only target black people.
14:52It also targeted their Jewish allies and their places of worship.
14:58This claim takes hold in the South that Jews are running the civil rights movement.
15:02Because after all, we know black people are inferior, they couldn't possibly run it themselves.
15:07And so at the same time that you have increased racial violence, you also have antisemitism and increased violence against
15:14Jews and synagogues and Jewish individuals.
15:18Here you see the end result of bigotry and intolerance.
15:27When the big reform temple in Atlanta is bombed in 1958, it's the fourth in a string of at least
15:35five synagogue bombings since Brown versus Board of Ed.
15:39And the temple bombing is an example of precisely the tension for Jewish communities around how and whether to engage
15:48in the civil rights movement.
15:49This is a community that is very integrated for Jews into the Atlanta elite.
15:55They are not necessarily wanting to paint a target on themselves.
16:01Most of the southern Jewish community is really not active and in fact oppose northern Jewish involvement in civil rights
16:11activities.
16:11And some historians argue that they had no choice.
16:17They owned businesses in the South.
16:19They understood this antisemitism and felt endangered and they couldn't risk it.
16:25But Rabbi Jacob Rothschild preaches in support of civil rights from his pulpit.
16:31This is likely one of the factors that goes into the temple bombing.
16:37Rabbis in the South are often far more likely to take social justice stands than the congregations.
16:48We are trying to remind the nation now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.
16:56As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, rabbis came to be seen as crucial allies.
17:05Especially for Martin Luther King, who found a kindred spirit in famed rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
17:13When my father and Dr. King met, their souls met. It was an alliance of their souls.
17:20King and Heschel met in 1963 at a conference in Chicago on religion and race.
17:27They both were, I think, amazed by each other's speeches.
17:30Rabbi Heschel talked about this idea of racism as an evil.
17:33And he even argued that it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for
17:38many, quote, Negroes to enter into universities in this country.
17:42And I think for King, that was like a really powerful moment because here you have this immigrant who's actually
17:47acknowledging racism to his own peril in many respects.
17:51And then you have King really acknowledging the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as sort of the paradigm for understanding
17:58what freedom looks like.
18:00Their relationship reflects a kind of hope and dream that we all have around solidarity, around friendship.
18:06And yet, by all accounts, it was real.
18:09Negroes are more convinced than ever before that our destiny is tied up with the destiny of our Jewish brothers
18:17and vice versa, and we must work together.
18:19In 1965, we received a telegram asking my father to come to Selma for a march.
18:26And I remember my father kissing me goodbye.
18:29I held on to that moment because I thought this might be the last kiss I'll ever receive from him.
18:35There was a bloody Sunday a few weeks prior in which John Lewis and others were assaulted by state police
18:41officers.
18:43Rabbi Heschel was told he might not live.
18:45But he said, I'm marching right next to my brother, Martin King.
18:50My father said, I felt my legs were praying.
18:54I think the civil rights movement healed the Jews in very profound ways after Nazi Germany.
19:03During World War II, my dad served in the European theater.
19:08And my dad took us to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp, so that we would understand and we would know what
19:15Jewish people had gone through.
19:21Donzile Abernathy and Avi Dressner are the children of civil rights activists Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Rabbi Israel Dressner.
19:31Your dad and Dr. King were the generals.
19:33My dad was like a lieutenant.
19:37On my tie, I've got written tikkun olam, which means repairing the world.
19:43And that is part and parcel specifically of Reform Judaism.
19:47My dad was a Reform rabbi.
19:49And the Reform movement really emphasizes that social justice message.
19:54One of the big reasons that my dad and so many of the rabbis got involved was because of the
19:59Holocaust.
20:00My dad said to Dr. King, Jews were slaves 17 years ago in the death camps and concentration camps of
20:09Europe.
20:09So this is not ancient history for us.
20:13This is something that happened 17 years ago.
20:17And my dad said that really made an impression on Dr. King.
20:22In the early 60s, as King, Abernathy, and their fellow activists staged protests and sit-ins across the South, rabbis
20:32like Avi's father joined the fray.
20:36In June of 1964, Rabbi Dressner received a telegram from Dr. King, who was jailed in St. Augustine, Florida.
20:45He said, we need rabbis to come help us in St. Augustine, Florida, with a willingness to be arrested.
20:55Dr. King was a genius when it came to PR and using the media.
21:01He knew that if he got a mass group of white clergymen to get arrested, and the rabbis back then
21:08were all white, that's going to make the news.
21:11The late spring of 1964 was a critical moment in the civil rights movement.
21:17And all eyes were on the protest in St. Augustine.
21:21Negro homes in St. Augustine were shot at.
21:24The Negro leader was badly beaten at a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
21:27The white man was fatally shot.
21:30Protesters had targeted the Monson Motor Lodge, which refused to serve black people, and they had garnered the attention of
21:38the national news media.
21:40Rabbi Dressner and 15 other rabbis heeded Dr. King's call.
21:49The day's activities began with 70 integrationists, 16 of them white rabbis, gathering at the Monson Motor Hotel.
21:56They stood outside the restaurant and started to pray.
22:00The manager, whose patience has worn thin, came out to stop the praying.
22:04The private property.
22:05Hear it with a prayer.
22:06All right.
22:07We're all private property, and I'm ordering you to meet you.
22:09The prize that's still water.
22:10Give me a rabbit.
22:11Ultimately, the rabbis were arrested, and the incident made national headlines, which is exactly what Dr. King had intended.
22:20This kind of white involvement in the movement increased pressure on the federal government at a pivotal time.
22:28Less than one month after the St. Augustine protest, President Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Bill of
22:381964.
22:42Yet even as Johnson was signing the bill, the movement didn't let up.
22:47Hundreds of young people were flooding the South, determined to maintain the momentum.
22:54Young people working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC as we call it, are characterized by restless energy.
23:04They seek radical change in race relations in the United States.
23:09But while Dr. King had welcomed white allies with open arms, some leaders in the younger generation weren't convinced that
23:17white involvement was a good idea.
23:19There were those who said that to bring these outsiders in would mean the death and destruction of carefully built
23:29local organizations.
23:32But the level of danger kept rising exponentially.
23:35There have been five church burnings in the past dozen days. All the churches were Negro churches.
23:42It was clear that if we didn't do something dramatic, the movement would falter.
23:48Bob Moses felt that we had to do something to shake things up, and that would mean bringing in white
23:54youngsters as security.
23:58Bob Moses' idea was that wherever the white people went, the press would follow.
24:04Wherever the press followed, then the government might get interested.
24:07Dorothy Zalder was just one of the many young Jewish people drawn to the movement.
24:14I remember exactly where I was sitting when I opened up the Times in February 1960,
24:20talking about a demonstration where these four young black college guys sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North
24:28Carolina.
24:29And when they were refused service, they wouldn't get up.
24:33I remember sitting there like lightning had struck me.
24:36Whoa.
24:37I said, I have to get down there.
24:39In Judaism and in Jewish culture, you do not stand idly by, especially because what had happened to us in
24:47the Holocaust.
24:48Jews are very rightly proud of the fact that Jews are disproportionately represented among the white participants in civil rights
24:58movements like Freedom Riding.
25:00Many of these kids going down were the children of these immigrants who had come as socialists, come as communists,
25:08come as union members.
25:11Some of them are absolutely motivated by their religion.
25:15But I would say a large majority of those white Jews were doing so out of a political conviction that
25:22also came from their Jewishness, but not a religious Jewishness.
25:25They were taught how to react when confronted with hostile segregationists.
25:30Staff workers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, along with the National Council of Churches, conducted the training.
25:37The SNCC people were the greatest people I ever met.
25:41They were beyond smart, courageous.
25:44But what people don't realize is funny.
25:48Chuck McDew, who was the chairman of SNCC, was actually Jewish.
25:52Jewish by choice.
25:54And Chuck was also one of the funniest people who ever lived.
25:58All of them managed, out of these really terrible, terrible experiences, to extract this wild sense of humor.
26:07This was one of the few times where an interracial group of people really had the racial animus and the
26:15racial stereotypes lifted away from them.
26:18Because we had to work so closely together.
26:21We had to depend on each other so much.
26:27During Freedom Summer of 1964, civil rights activists descended upon the state of Mississippi, where black voter registration was the
26:38lowest in the country.
26:40Freedom Summer really is a huge high point of a very visible black Jewish alliance during the civil rights movement.
26:50Jewish children came in droves to the south to register black people to vote so that we would get our
26:57right to vote.
26:58I'll never forget those students.
26:59My dad's church was like a headquarter and they were going, you know, door to door.
27:05Getting black people to register and then meeting in churches to get everybody to understand what you needed to do
27:12in order to vote.
27:14About 55 Negroes walked into the LaFleur County Courthouse to line up for registration.
27:19In the complicated process, about four were registered.
27:24I was recruiting people and I was also telling them, you may go down there and you may die.
27:31I was terrified the whole time and it turns out I was right.
27:36Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
27:40These three young men, two Jewish and one black, would come to symbolize black Jewish cooperation at its most noble.
27:49Not because of their success, but because of their tragic sacrifice.
28:00Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman go down south together to register voters and where they're going has already had a lot
28:05of problems.
28:06It's genuinely dangerous.
28:09They're trying to drive to a church to investigate an arson.
28:13Their car is stopped by the sheriff.
28:17Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price says he stopped the car.
28:19Price says it was going 65 in a 30 mile an hour zone.
28:24The reputation of local officials, like Sheriff Price, was known to be lethal.
28:30Some white people were meaner than others.
28:34And he was one of those.
28:36The three were taken to jail and released a few hours later.
28:40But by that time, at least eight Klansmen had assembled near the jailhouse.
28:47Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were never heard from again.
28:50This is unbelievably sick and sad and grotesque, but the search for these civil rights activists takes on a different
29:01kind of intensity because two of them are white.
29:06The FBI gets involved.
29:09President Johnson orders sailors from a nearby base to join the search.
29:14A lot of the blacks in the civil rights movement are wondering why now black civil rights workers have been
29:21murdered and buried and no one has taken any notice.
29:25While they were searching for them, they find the bodies of other black Mississippians, including headless torsos in rivers that
29:35they drag in Mississippi.
29:39Eventually, they find the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in an earthen dam in Mississippi on August 4th, 1964.
29:49The white people couldn't come to grips with it.
29:52I was one of them.
29:53Oh, this can't be true.
29:54This can't be true.
29:55And the black people that I was working with said, it's true.
29:59Get used to it.
30:00They died.
30:01The widow of Mickey Schwerner had a press all over her and they wanted her to cry.
30:09I personally suspect that if Mr. Chaney, who is a native Mississippian Negro,
30:17had been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others that have come before,
30:25would have gone completely unnoticed.
30:28Rather than crying, what she said was symbolic of what white people could do in situations like that.
30:37Mrs. Chaney, the wife of one of the missing white men said that the only reason this case has attracted
30:42national attention is because there are two white northerners involved.
30:47That's right.
30:48How do you feel about that?
30:49Well, that's what I feel too, because if he was by himself, I doubt that we would ever know.
30:56When you have the murders of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, you have black activists saying, what will it take for
31:01a black life to matter?
31:03Where when we raise issues, the virtue of the fact that we're American citizens and human beings is sufficient to
31:09move people to action.
31:10That there doesn't have to be a white person by our side to be able to do it.
31:15At Chaney's funeral, Dave Dennis, who's a civil rights organizer, gets up and gives this blistering sermon.
31:22I know what they're going to say, not guilty.
31:25Don't you want to stalling for a traitor?
31:30I'm tired of that.
31:31And he says to the crowd, if you don't do something, if you don't fight back, then bring your souls
31:36to hell.
31:37And it's really the first sign you can see of the emerging black power movement, of this anger that is
31:43boiling up.
31:44That despite Martin Luther King's success in kind of holding things calm and having nonviolent protests, people are reaching their
31:53limit.
31:59Don't be afraid.
32:00Don't be ashamed.
32:02What do you want?
32:03What do you want?
32:05What do you want?
32:05What do you want?
32:06Stokely Carmichael, a 25-year-old revolutionary born in the West Indies, educated at the best high school in New
32:13York, a college graduate with a degree in philosophy.
32:18Stokely Carmichael popularized the electric phrase black power in 1966.
32:26Soon it became a movement, pushing for a more radical political agenda than Dr. King's.
32:32The black power movement is really a movement for radical social, political, economic, cultural self-determination.
32:40It was also a turn away from white people, even white allies.
32:45We have to move into a position where we can define terms for what we want them to be, not
32:53what racist white society wants it to be.
32:57At that moment in the 1960s, particularly in SNCC, some black activists weren't feeling allyship.
33:03What they were feeling was a degree of alienation, a degree of exploitation.
33:08They had many, many, many staff people became very disturbed.
33:12They had been working in these little communities for the past three years.
33:17They had all the little attention of being geared toward the white students coming from New York to California.
33:25Jews, as white people, were doing better than African Americans.
33:29And that brought a certain amount of paternalism.
33:32We know better than you what you should do.
33:34Which, of course, was resented by black leaders.
33:40Unfortunately, black power was immediately defined by the media as being anti-white.
33:45But it started as a way to redefine how black people felt about themselves.
33:51And when some black people said that we must control our own communities,
33:56it didn't mean putting white people out. It just meant that we were in charge.
34:01The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee engaged in heated debates about expelling all white people from the organization.
34:09If you speak to Jewish activists at that moment, they had, strangely, no idea this was coming.
34:16They had established deep relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and they were blindsided.
34:26In December of 1966, it's decided that the last remaining white organizers should organize in white communities.
34:38This was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
34:42Because I had intended to, this was the rest of my life.
34:46I mean, I had made my commitments.
34:49Just like some people are going to be doctors, this is what I was going to do.
34:54Part of the message from SNCC is, if we're ultimately going to build the foundation for a national movement that
35:00completes the work,
35:00it can't just be about you coming south to help us.
35:04It's got to be about you helping yourselves by dealing with the racism that exists in the communities you come
35:09from.
35:15The black power movement was about much more than radical politics.
35:20It was also a cultural revolution.
35:24A newfound embrace of the concept that black is beautiful.
35:29It also led to the creation of black studies in colleges and universities.
35:36And by the late 1960s, something similar was happening among Jewish Americans.
35:42At the same time that this alliance appeared to be fracturing, and it was, there was an emulation, a copying,
35:53a taking a page from the black power handbook by American Jewish leaders,
35:57who saw in the black power movement a model for reinforcing Jewish identity in America.
36:06Jewish college students begin calls for Jewish studies programs.
36:10They'll wear a head covering, a yarmulke or kippah.
36:13They will engage in public protests, and they will don religious garb.
36:17They'll adopt their Jewish name, their Hebrew name, as their regular everyday name.
36:30This embrace of Jewish identity took on new meaning and new urgency.
36:35With the emerging threat of war in the Middle East in 1967.
36:41Tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors were rising through the mid-1960s.
36:48There was a lot of support in the Arab world for a war that would liberate Palestine.
36:54The Egyptian leader, Gamla Abdel Nasser, formed an alliance with Jordan and with Syria.
36:59And Israel was on the verge of being attacked and possibly destroyed.
37:06American Jews were terrified.
37:09I was terrified.
37:10Everybody felt that Israel was under threat.
37:15And that, in fact, when Nasser said, I'm going to throw Israel into the Mediterranean, that he could do it.
37:21Because he had Soviet backing, after all.
37:24At the time, Israel didn't have the kind of intense U.S. support that it has today.
37:30American Jews, like Jews the world over, including Israel, really feared a second Holocaust.
37:35It had been only 20 years since the end of the Second World War.
37:39That's a blink of an eye.
37:41For American Jews, the conflict in the Middle East inspired a heightened sense of connection to the State of Israel.
37:49There was a reaction among American Jews, and especially among young American Jews, that surprised even the Jewish leadership of
37:58the country.
37:59In New York City, there was a luncheon that raised millions of dollars in one hour.
38:077,500 Jewish college students flew to Israel so that they could work and create an opportunity then for the
38:15Israelis to go and fight.
38:17I remember volunteering here and there to try to raise funds, and there was a sense that we were on
38:23the eve of destruction.
38:26After weeks of rising tensions, on June 5, 1967, war broke out between Israel and a coalition of Arab states.
38:38Within just a few hours, Israel destroyed almost the entirety of the Egyptian Air Force.
38:44They conquered the Sinai Peninsula, eastern Jerusalem.
38:47They conquered Jordanian territory west of the Jordan River, known as the West Bank.
38:52And they also conquered the Golan Heights, which was an area in Syria.
38:58So Israel came out of that war having tripled its territory, and then a state of military dominance.
39:04And we have the beginning of what comes to be known as the occupation, which is to say the imposition
39:11of military and in some places civilian rule over a Palestinian population without any grant of rights of citizenship or
39:20equality.
39:22Although it was happening thousands of miles away, the outcome of the Six Day War, as it was called, would
39:30have a profound impact on black Jewish relations in America.
39:39When Israel was established in 1948, many black activists, Du Bois, others were very excited and supported that a group
39:49of oppressed people now had a homeland.
39:53But I think the Six Day War was a watershed moment in terms of black Americans' understanding of what was
40:00going on in Israel.
40:02There was a generational split.
40:05So the grown-ups in the civil rights movement, somebody like Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, were so grateful for
40:16the important support they had gotten from Jewish Americans.
40:20And so they didn't hesitate to support Israel.
40:23For the younger people, like Stokely Carmichael and the people in SNCC, they took the side of the Palestinians as
40:32Third World people.
40:34The line was clearly drawn that Palestinians were viewed as oppressed people who didn't have the level of power that
40:42the State of Israel had.
40:43And Israel came to be defined as a colonizer in a way.
40:48As we come into the black power era and many organizations are kind of defining themselves as part of the
40:56Third World activists, you get a kind of new sense of solidarity and kinship with Palestinian people and a new
41:03awareness that many of the conditions that Palestinians were confronting resemble that of the conditions that black Americans were simultaneously
41:12confronting in the United States.
41:14Everyone is very proud of a brave little Israel, a state against which I have nothing.
41:19I don't want to be misinterpreted. I'm not an anti-Semite.
41:22But you know, when the Israelis pick up guns or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in
41:27the world says, give me liberty or give me death.
41:32The entire white world applauds when a black man says exactly the same thing.
41:38Word for word.
41:40He is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this
41:47bad nigger so they won't be any more like him.
41:52The war didn't create strains between the black and Jewish communities, but it did sharpen them, especially after Sinek published
42:01an article in their newsletter that was not only critical of Israel, but also included an anti-Semitic cartoon.
42:11It's an image that shows a hand with a star of David embossed on his sleeve and one noose is
42:19around the neck of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the other nooses around the neck of Muhammad Ali.
42:25This is very clearly an image of Jews manipulating and harming Arabs and blacks alike.
42:33There's going to be accusations that Sinek is practicing anti-Semitism.
42:38Sinek is going to lose a lot of Jewish supporters.
42:43Stokely Carmichael became a lightning rod for this shift in black Jewish relations when he embarked on an international tour
42:52later that year.
42:53By 1967, Stokely becomes a huge critic of Zionism and this is going to get him in massive controversies.
43:03But even as Stokely is going to be accused of being an anti-Semite, he's going to always insist that
43:09anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
43:15But tensions between black and Jewish people were mounting for other reasons that had nothing to do with global politics.
43:22It was about economics at home.
43:25By the late 60s, the class divide between the two communities was becoming more and more stark.
43:34Racist housing policies confined many African-American families to deteriorating inner cities.
43:42While most Jewish people had long since decamped to the suburbs.
43:46At the same time, Jews were well represented among those who owned rental properties and businesses in black neighborhoods.
43:55So you get this complicated and adversarial relationship in which you have absentee landlords and business owners who are not
44:03part of the community.
44:05And there's price gouging and there are all sorts of things that structurally happen.
44:09And that creates tension.
44:12In 1967, James Baldwin wrote,
44:16When we were growing up in Harlem, our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish.
44:23And we hated them.
44:25His article, published in the New York Times Magazine, was provocatively titled,
44:32Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white.
44:38So, James Baldwin is not denying the reality of Jewish suffering.
44:43What he's saying is whatever the situation of Jewish suffering, up to and including the Holocaust,
44:51it is not shaping the Jewish reality in the United States of 1967.
44:59What Baldwin is saying is, look, you're part of the system that exploits us.
45:03It doesn't matter how much you were exploited somewhere else.
45:08Even after the civil rights movement, black people were still living as second and third class and fourth class citizens.
45:18There was so much attention on integration, and yet there was also a stark realization about the failures of integration
45:28as well.
45:29All across the country, you had black people saying, we need to elect our own elected officials.
45:36We need to own our own businesses.
45:38We need schools where children are actually going to be educated.
45:45In a striking twist of irony, the very issue that had once united blacks and Jews in the 1950s, equality
45:54in education,
45:55would just a decade later become a source of tension that helped further unravel the alliance.
46:03Those tensions erupted in 1967 in a Brooklyn school district called Ocean Hill Brownsville.
46:14New York City public schools beginning in the 60s had come into an almost black and Puerto Rican majority.
46:21Most of the teachers in the New York City public schools were white, and most of those teachers were Jewish.
46:28And then you had Central Brooklyn schools that were overcrowded, where there is inferior instruction.
46:34So many years, they have not been doing a job that was productive to our children.
46:40Our children, you have children going into the ninth and tenth grade with reading levels of a third grade child.
46:46As part of an effort to address these concerns, the Ocean Hill Brownsville district became part of an experiment in
46:55community control.
46:57A board of black community members was appointed, led by an educator named Rody McCoy.
47:05Rody McCoy decides to fire 19 teachers and have them transfer to another district.
47:11They were all white, most of them were Jewish.
47:15And this precipitated an angry response from the teachers union, known as the UFT.
47:21Ocean Hill Brownsville experiment, if it is an experiment, must now be deemed to be a failure.
47:32Albert Shanker, who was the head of the UFT at that time, demanded that those 19 teachers get reinstated.
47:41The UFT went on strike citywide.
47:45Those strikes ended up really turning New York City upside down.
47:49It stopped children from going to school for almost seven weeks.
47:54We will write our own curriculum.
48:00By virtue of what authority?
48:04We want and we know and we realize that we need black control.
48:10What's happening is, Jews see the fight in Ocean Hill Brownsville as a labor union struggle, right?
48:18We're defending our members and you can't just reassign them and that's what the battle is about.
48:24The blacks in the community and Rody McCoy see it as a battle for their children.
48:30I remember very well because it was the year I graduated junior high school, going to high school.
48:38For two months, we were waiting to go to school.
48:41And I remember the tension because it became the whole battle about blacks and Jews.
48:49During the course of the strike, a leaflet appeared that was anti-Semitic, up and down.
48:58We don't know where it first came from, but thousands of copies were made by the UFT and they were
49:05passed around.
49:07And this was offered as evidence that Ocean Hill Brownsville was in fact an anti-Semitic experiment at its root.
49:16The story becomes not who should control schools, but the idea that so many blacks hate Jews.
49:22This is not about teacher performance. It's about anti-Semitism.
49:26There have been anti-Semitic remarks made. I have heard them, but we don't approve of them.
49:33And even in retrospect, when you talk to Albert Shanker, he will admit that Ocean Hill Brownsville had nothing really
49:42to do with anti-Semitism.
49:44But that theme was introduced and exploited.
49:48White against black, black militant against Jew. It's a bitter lesson to learn.
49:54I understood that sometimes the loudest voices were not the ones that represented most of the people in both communities.
50:05Ultimately, the New York City Board of Education suspended the community board and allowed the teachers to return to their
50:14jobs.
50:15The Ocean Hill Brownsville teacher strike became yet another flashpoint in the unraveling of the black Jewish coalition, a metaphor
50:26for a broken alliance.
50:32It's been a pattern that we see where, you know, well-intentioned liberals may support and even participate in securing
50:40civil rights for black people and other oppressed people.
50:44But when it comes to actually giving black people control over institutions and their communities, that's where it goes too
50:52far.
50:53By the 1970s, the once celebrated bond between black and Jewish Americans had begun to fray.
51:02A connection built on shared histories of slavery and persecution.
51:07And a common belief in justice was now strained by politics and class.
51:15And in the decades that followed, escalating tensions both at home and abroad would force both communities to ask hard
51:25questions.
51:26Can we afford to turn on each other?
51:29Or can we still turn to each other?
51:32Can we find common ground again?
52:01Can we find common ground again?
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