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Public lynching of Blacks in the South |
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A group of American editors and
publishers in Dachau are shown the corpses of prisoners during an inspection
of the camp |
From Swastika to Jim Crow, A PBS Presentation
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A Tumultuous History
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The history of African-Americans and Jewish-Americans goes back over three hundred years to the very beginnings of European settlement on North America. In 1619, the first Africans arrived in the Virginia colony as slaves. In 1654, a group of Portuguese Jews from Brazil settled in New Amsterdam as merchants. Both cultures were strangers in America but until the twentieth century had very little interaction. Since the days of slavery, African Americans have felt the influence of the American Jewish population. Slaves in the United States compared their situation to the slavery of the Jews in Egypt in biblical times. Spiritual songs such as “Go Down, Moses” refer directly to the exodus of the Jew’s from Pharaoh’s bondage. After World War II, Jews in American started to move into positions of power in American society, participating with African Americans in both the Civil Rights Movement and the Communist Party. A unique relationship was developing between these two cultural minorities in the United States. As the Civil Rights Movement began, African Americans and Jewish Americans worked together towards a better society. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Dubois (African American), Julius Rosenthal (Jewish), Lillian Wald (Jewish), Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch (Jewish), Stephen Wise (Jewish), and Henry Malkewitz (Jewish). “About 50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws” (http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fromswastikatojimcrow/relations.html). As the Black Power movement began in the late 1960s, African-Jewish American relations began deteriorating. The movement, emphasizing self-determination and racial pride, was a radical change from the nonviolence and racial integration supported by Martin Luther King. Black Power, combined with a continuing decrease of anti-Semitism started the decline of African-American/Jewish relations. Jews were no longer a victim to share tragedy and pain with. Them became just another part of the White World with all the privileges “earned” by their skin color. As James Baldwin pointed out in Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew, “Each time a Black person paid his Jewish landlord, shopped at a Jewish-owned store, was taught by a Jewish school teacher, was supervised by a Jewish social worker, or was paid by a Jewish employer, the fact of Black subservience to Jews was driven home” (http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fromswastikatojimcrow/relations.html). The early 1990s saw out-and-out warfare between the Nation of Islam and the American Jewish community. “In 1991, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, a car driven by an Lubavitch [a sect of very observant Jews] Jew spun out of control onto a sidewalk, killing one Black child and injuring another. As angry Black residents beat the car's driver, the privately run Jewish Hatzolah ambulance arrived and workers began attending to the child pinned under the car. When a New York city ambulance arrived, the technician instructed the Hatzolah driver to remove the Lubavitch driver from the escalating scene and take him to the hospital. Black onlookers were infuriated and rumors of the Jew being aided first flew through the neighborhood. The streets filled with shouts of "Get the Jews!" and that night, a mob of 10 to 15 angry Black teens and men fatally stabbed a young Orthodox Holocaust researcher” (http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fromswastikatojimcrow/relations.html). In that same year The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews was anonymously published by a group associated with the Nation of Islam. The book details the involvement of Jews in the slave trade and throughout slavery. It has since been banned in Canada and by both Barnes and Noble and Borders. It is only recently that African Americans and Jewish Americans have again begun to settle their differences. After the November 2000 presidential election, Reverend Jesse Jackson begged that Jews and African Americans unite to push for an accurate vote count. “One again, sons and daughters of slavery and Holocaust survivors are bound together with a shared agenda, bound by their hopes and their fears about national public policy” (http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fromswastikatojimcrow/relations.html). |
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