An (Incomplete) History of Jewish Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (second from right) marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama (1965). Photo courtesy of Susannah Heschel (featured in “Jews in the Civil Rights Movement”).

Although Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is nationally recognized with a federal holiday on the third Monday of January each year, NYU devotes an entire week to the social activist and minister. With MLK Day usually falling during its winter recess, the University seeks to use its postponed celebration to involve the most students and faculty possible. Be sure to check out the events happening in 2024’s MLK Week. Dr. King remains one of the most widely recognized faces of the 1960s American Civil Rights movement, a man who fought for racial equality through nonviolent resistance. While we use this week to honor MLK and the countless other Black leaders who fought for equality and the protection of human rights for all people, I thought it might be interesting to look at how intersectionality between Black and Jewish activists aided the Civil Rights Movement.

I want to be very clear that by sharing some of the history of the shared work of Black and Jewish Americans, I do not seek to overshadow or draw attention or credit away from Martin Luther King Jr. and the incredible efforts he (and countless others like Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, etc.) made toward the desegregation of schools and other public places, for equal voting rights, labor rights, and many other social and political movements toward racial equity. What I really want the takeaway to be by sharing stories of times that Jewish individuals and organizations offered support to the Civil Rights Movement is that it should be the responsibility of the Jewish community to continue to advocate for positive change in the world and to show empathy to other oppressed populations in the world. Audre Lorde, a Black and LGBTQ+ activist and poet sums up the need for intersectional work against oppression in a passage from Homophobia and Education (New York: Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1983). She writes that as “there is no hierarchy of oppression…I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group.”

So here are some things to know about Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement:

1. Jews were some of the earliest supporters of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League, an organization founded in 1911 that helped settle Black individuals from the South in New York (Sachar). Henry Moskowitz (a Jewish civil rights activist) helped to found the NAACP alongside Black activists like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. Funding was even given to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), of which MLK was the first president, to support their projects.
2. A turning point at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in which school segregation was named unconstitutional at the federal level. The decision was made in part after reviewing Kenneth Clark’s sociology research which stated that segregation unfairly labeled Black children as inferior to both themselves (“The Doll Test”, article from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund) and the world around them by examining how young children perceived race. He was then hired by the American Jewish Committee, a civil liberties advocacy and defense organization, to present his research during the case. Jewish lawyers and legal groups were largely involved in other racial equality cases and laws. In fact, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was first drafted at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
3. Jewish people consisted of roughly 30% of the white allies of the Civil Rights Movement as volunteers who helped to register Black voters, protested segregated businesses, and marched in demonstrations alongside Black Americans. Among them were several rabbis like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched in Alabama, in 1964, with Dr. King from Montogomery to Selma. The same year, in St. Augustine, Florida, seventeen rabbis were arrested alongside MLK “after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations” (Office of Public Affairs). Also in 1964, around 1,000 northern white students, of which a large portion were Jewish, traveled to Mississippi during the “Freedom Summer,” which was a project centered around “fighting segregation through mass action and local, community-based activity” run by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The idea was to use the nation’s racial biases against it by showing white students being treated with violence in the South; The basis for this choice, unfortunate though it was, was that the government would be more likely to pay attention and take action against segregation if they thought there were white civil rights workers among the demonstrations. Three of the students who came to participate in the Freedom Summer of 1964–James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman–were abducted and killed just one day after arriving in Mississippi due to their investigation of arson against a Black church. Chaney was a 21-year-old Black man. Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish men, also in their early twenties.
4. It would be impossible to say that every Jewish individual supported racial equality projects in the 1960s. Many of them didn’t. Some Southern Jews were afraid to risk their safety or social standing by aligning themselves themselves with the movement. Others chose to act merely as bystanders, trying to sink into the shadows to avoid attention from either side of the issue. However, keeping a low profile did not keep Jewish people from facing discrimination, and although they were not and have never been the main targets of white supremacist groups, antisemitic violence was not an uncommon practice (Sachar). Yet there were still many Jewish people in the North and South alike, who, even in the face of sociopolitical backlash, were brave enough to be public allies to the Black community.

Sources:

“A Brief History of Jews and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.” Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, www.rac.org/issues/civil-rights-voting-rights/brief-history-jews-and-civil-rights-movement-1960s. Accessed 4 Feb. 2024.

Courtesy of Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. “Justice Department Recognizes Jewish American Heritage Month.” Office of Public Affairs, 25 May 2023, www.justice.gov/opa/blog/justice-department-recognizes-jewish-american-heritage-month.

“Introduction: Jews and the American Civil Rights Movement.” Jewish Women’s Archive, www.jwa.org/article/introduction-jews-and-american-civil-rights-movement. Accessed 4 Feb. 2024.

Sachar, Howard. “Jews in the Civil Rights Movement.” My Jewish Learning, 16 Jan. 2018, www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-in-the-civil-rights-movement/.