Jewish Dominance and Exploitation
of the Black Civil Rights Movement
Many observers argue that the presumed Jewish altruism and social activism
in the American civil rights movement of the 1960's had baser motives.
Benjamin Ginsberg argues that the multicultural coalitions spearheaded
by Jews in the civil rights era "was a political tactic" to "undermine
the power" of those establishment social forces that hindered further
Jewish socio-economic advancement. [GINSBERG, p. 125] In 1975 Hasia Dinner
wrote a PhD thesis about the way that "Jewish support for black causes
was a way for Jews to broaden their own rights without becoming conspicuous
by advocating their group interests." [FEINGOLD, p. 130] "Jewish leaders,"
wrote Diner, "representing different socio-economic classes, ideologies,
and cultural experiences committed themselves to black betterment and
gave time, money, and energy to black organizations. The spectrum was
so wide and the involvement so extensive that one must conclude that these
leaders acted out of peculiarly Jewish motives ... [My] book demonstrates
that Jewish ends were secured by involvement with blacks." [DINER, p.
xiv, xii]
(Similarly, Jewish author Peter Novick notes the changing Jewish strategy
in using massive Jewish attack against generic prejudice as a tool in
fending off specific anti-Jewish hostility:
"In recent decades, the leading Jewish organizations have invoked the
Holocaust to argue that anti-Semitism is a distinctively virulent and
murderous form of hatred. But in the first postwar decades their emphasis
-- powerfully reinforced by contemporary scholarly opinion -- was on the
common psychological roots of all forms of prejudice. Their research,
educational, and political action programs consistently minimized diffrences
between different targets of discrimination. If prejudice and discrimination
were all of a piece, they reasoned that they could serve the cause of
Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination
against blacks as by tackling anti-Semitism directly.") [NOVICK., P.,
1999, p. 116]
"The Jewish struggle for equality and fair treatment," says Jonathan Kaufman,
"was linked to the struggles of Blacks for greater opportunity. It was
not a struggle of equals; Jews did not consider their plight equal to
that of Blacks. But they recognized in the Black struggle for civil rights
elements that could benefit them and conditions with which they sympathized."
[MARTIN, p. 131] Hence, perhaps three-quarters of the funding for the
three major civil rights organizations -- the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, The Congress of Racial Equality, and Martin Luther King's Southern
Christian Leadership Conference is attributed to Jewish sponsorship. [MARTIN,
p. 132]
"Any support of human rights in general by Jews," says Israel Shahak,
"which does not include the support of human rights of non-Jews whose
rights are being violated by [Israel] is deceitful ... [Jewish] support
of Blacks in the South was motivated only by consideration of Jewish self-interest."
[SHAHAK, p. 103] "The major role [that Jews] once played in the civil
rights movement," says Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen, "[is a] myth
... [that] enhances the self-image of a Jew as a caring and sensitive
minority selflessly contributing to improve the lot of other minorities."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 17] "Among the many myths life and history have imposed
on Negroes," wrote Black author Harold Cruse in 1967, "... is the myth
that the Negroes' best friend is the Jew." [CRUSE, p. 476]
For years W.E.B. DuBois was the only Black officer in the NAACP, which
was largely directed, funded, and controlled in its early decades by Jews
like Henry Moskowitz and Joel Spingarn. [ARSON, p. 140] (In 1913 Spingarn
announced a yearly award named after himself, the "Spingarn Medal," for
the "highest and noblest achievement of an American Negro." [DINER, p.
138] ) In a later era, and another Black organization, the Southern Leadership
Christian Conference, a Jew -- Stanley Levison -- even wrote Martin Luther
King's speeches for him. [MARTIN, p. 132] Levison has been described as
one of King's "closest personal advisers." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 66]
This voice of "Christian Leadership," Levison, was also discovered by
the FBI to have been a former Communist party member. [KAUFMAN, J., p.
66] Another Jew, Marvin Rich, was the "chief fundraiser and key speech
writer for the Congress of Racial Equality -- CORE", [GINZBURG, p. 145]
and his position was later filled by another Jewish attorney, Alan Gartner.
In the 1960s, "in CORE, younger and more militant members blocked efforts
by [James] Farmer to name one of his Jewish advisers president of CORE,
insisting the post be filled with a black." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 76]
In the same era, the Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress,
Will Maslow, was also a CORE national board member. (He resigned in outrage
when one African-American CORE official, Clifford Brown, angrily declared
that Hitler hadn't "killed enough" Jews). [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 327]
Another such Black civil rights group was the National Urban League, greatly
funded by the Sears-Roebuck magnate, Julius Rosenwald. Edwin Seligman
("descended from one of the wealthiest and most prestigious Jewish families"),
was the first chairman of the organization. Its first Executive Board
included Abraham Lefkowitz and Felix Adler -- later joined by Seligman's
brother George and Ella Sachs Plotz. In 1932, six Jews "served as officials"
at the Urban League's Chicago branch. [DINER, p. 186] Following Jewish
philanthropic donations, Salmon O. Levinson began directorship of the
Abraham Lincoln Center (a social work center for Blacks and whites) in
1917. [DINER, p. 181] Jacob Billikopf, also Jewish, became chairman of
Howard University, a Black college, in 1935. Fisk University also had
influential Jewish board members. To this day, Rabbi David Saperstein
serves as an NAACP board member. "By the mid-1960s," says Jonathan Kaufman,
"Jewish contributions made up three-quarters of the money raised by SNCC
[Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], CORE, and SCLC. So important
were contributions from Jews to SCLC, Jesse Jackson recalled later, that
for a time King's advisers debated whether they should call the group
simply the Southern Leadership Conference, eliminating the reference to
'Christian.' In phone conversations with King, Bayard Rustin, one of King's
top advisers, would remind him to include references in his speeches to
the 'Judeo-Christian tradition.'" [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 66]
Jewish actor Theodore Bikel, a Zionist activist, was once "one of SNCC's
most prominent supporters." [VOLKMAN, p. 215] Howard Zinn was also a Jewish
SNCC "adviser." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 67] SNCC African-American leader
Stokely Carmichael's "first demonstration was a pro-Israel rally held
in front of the United Nations by the Young Socialist League." (He later
became very vocally anti-Zionist). Another SNCC Black leader, Robert Moses,
"had gone to the Jewish socialist camp, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, as a child and
befriended many Jews from radical and socialist homes." [KAUFMAN, J.,
1988, p. 67]
What about the Southern Poverty Law Center, famed fighter for the impoverished
and African-American rights, especially in the South? It is based in Montgomery,
Alabama, and in 1996 the local Montgomery Advertiser printed an embarrassing
expose about the Center. The salary, noted the paper, for SPLC president
and CEO (as well as SPLC co-founder) Joseph Levin was $137,798 a year.
Not bad for a fighter on behalf of those mired in poverty. The Center's
Legal Director, Richard Cohen, made $151,420. But that's not all. The
Advertiser further noted that "One thing remains a constant at the nation's
wealthiest civil rights charity, the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty
Law Center: All the top-paid, top-level management jobs are held by whites."
[RICHARDSON, S., 8-29, p. D7] [No notation of the percentage of Jews within
this "white" nomenclature is noted] In SPLC's 25-year history "no black
person has held a top-level management position, and only one black staffer
has ever been among the top five paid positions." In SPLC's team of five
lawyers, one was African-American. [RICHARDSON, S., 8-29-96, p. D7]
The next year, an editorial writer, Rose Sanders, expressed outrage in
the same newspaper that the SPLC publicly condemned Louis Farrakhan of
the Nation of Islam (a hero in large parts of the Black community) as
a racist. She pointed out the hypocrisy of the charge, noting that "Joseph
Levin says he is not a bigot, but how does he explain the bigotry evidenced
by the employment practices at the Poverty Law Center? An example of the
Center's racial prejudice is illustrated by its racial tolerance program.
The program did not have a single black employee. No black person helped
shape or design the program." [SANDERS, R., 9-22-97, p. 7A] The granddaddy
of Black civil rights organizations, the NAACP, "took shape" at the estate
("Troutbeck") of Joel Spingarn who became its Board Chairman in 1915.
He served in this position until 1929 when he became, instead, the president,
til 1939. He was succeeded by his brother Arthur (for many years head
of the NAACP's Legal Committee) till 1966, when another Jew, Kivie Kaplan,
"a millionaire manufacturer of patent leather," [HILLEL/LEVINE, p. 127]
took over. "By 1968," note Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, "the perceived
paternalistic leadership style of Kaplan and other prominent Jews in the
civil rights movement was coming under increasingly sharp attack. Activists
called for his resignation; Kaplan refused." [HILLEL/ HARMON, p. 127]
Only with Kaplan's death in 1975 did the NAACP -- 64 years after its founding
-- have the opportunity to elect its first Black president. [GOLDBERG,
p. 24]
"Litigation," notes Hasia Diner, "was the Association's most potent weapon
... Many of those lawyers and legal advisors were Jews. In fact, Jews
made their greatest impact on the Association in this area." [DINER, p.
128] Jewish lawyer Nathan Margold's 1929 "report became the bible of the
NAACP's legal efforts." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 91] Jack Greenberg headed
the 1960s-era NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1982, still at the helm, a
Black student coalition at Harvard protested Jewish paternalism and the
fact that a white Jew "was heading the country's premier black legal organization."
[KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 119-121] Joel Spingarn, who served as both the
NAACP Chairman of the Board and as a major in the U.S. Military Intelligence
Department (MID) during World War I, was revealed in recent years by the
Memphis Commercial Appeal to have "used his [NAACP] post to obtain critical
information for MID." [MARTIN, p. 49] Another such "liberal" Jew on the
NAACP membership rolls included Judge Julian Mack (of the U.S. Court of
Appeals), the first President of the American Jewish Congress. Mack was
also president of the Zionist Organization of America from 1918 to 1921.
He and Louis Brandeis, notes Thomas Kolsky, "dominated American Zionism
from 1914 to 1921 and also in the 1930s." [KOLSKY, T., p. 26]
With Jews holding the purse strings to many ostensibly Black organizations,
in 1976 Black activist Julian Bond sought the directorship of the NAACP.
Although critical of Israel, Bond found it necessary to sign a yearly
"Black Americans in Support of Israel (BASIC)" statement "if he was to
have any chance of winning the NAACP position, given the powerful influence
of Jews within the organization." [GINZBURG, p. 169] In the early years
of the NAACP, adds Hasia Diner, "heavy Jewish involvement may explain
why the [NAACP] conference passed the 'Russian Resolution,' which protested
the expulsion of Jews from the city of Kiev, Russia." [DINER, p. 136]
Later, African Americans like William Pollard, Deputy Director of the
NAACP, took "many trips" to Israel, although socialization to the Jewish/Israeli
perspectives was not always completely successful. [STARR, J., 1990, p.
251]
Clues to the nature of Spingarn's NAACP may be gleaned from the following
quotes from B. Joyce Ross, author of J.E. Spingarn and the Rise of the
NAACP:
* "Spingarn's failure to relinquish the power he wielded in the NAACP
comprised one of the greatest paradoxes of his career." [p. 69]
* "Spingarn's familiarity with New York's most reputable financial institutions
and his expertise in the management of stocks and bonds enabled him to
become one of the key formulators of the NAACP's financial policy." [p.
57] (He also had a "special influence" at publishers Harcourt, Brace and
a "special relationship" at Alfred Knopf). [LEWIS, p. 562]
* 'The NAACP became a closed corporation ... [resulting in] a tremendous
narrowing of the broad base of authority suggested by the Association's
constitutional structure, with a concomitant tendency toward a self-perpetuating
Board of Directors." [p. 52]
* "The central office's tight control of the branches meant essentially
that a few New York administrators determined NAACP policy on a nationwide
scale." [p. 58-59]
* "[W.E.B. Du Bois], the only Black executive officer [until 1916] contended
that it was absolutely necessary that he have a large measure of autonomy
lest the Association with its preponderance of white executives, should
become a white dominated organization with Negroes as mere helpers ...
From an administrative standpoint [Du Bois'] demand for autonomy was a
potential threat to the organization's basic unity." [p. 61-62]
* Even though W. E. Du Bois, one of the foremost Black leaders of the
day, received a full salary from the Association for his services, he
frequently was obliged to solicit personal loans from Spingarn." [ p.
57] The early Black nationalist Marcus Garvey "stormed out of the NAACP's
headquarters in 1917, 'dumbfounded' by the apparent domination of whites."
These included Board Chairman Joel Spingarn, his brother Arthur who was
pro bono counsel, Herbert Lehman of the Executive Committee, Arthur Sachs,
Herbert Seligmann - director of public relations, and his secretary Martha
Gruening. [LEWIS, p. 553] (A particularly curious instance occurred in
1962-63 when the labor union expert at the NAACP, a Jew named Herbert
Hill, led an attack on the -- largely Jewish -- International Ladies Garment
workers union, for racism ["discrimination."] [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 178]
Other NAACP activists included Felix Frankfurter ("an active Zionist who
is credited with drafting the Balfour Declaration, the 1918 statement
of the British government favoring the establishment of the Jewish homeland
in Palestine" and Herman Lehman who "was also a Zionist and lent a hand
in the Palestine Economic Corporation. Among Louis Marshall's "primary
activities" included "serving as president of the American Jewish Committee."
Herman Moskowitz "worked ardently in the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
and the Jewish Social Service Association." [DINER, p. 123]
In later years Marcus Garvey ran into trouble with the law concerning
his part-ownership of a steam line business. "I am being punished for
the crime of the Jew Silverstone [an agent of the Black Star line]," he
complained, "I was persecuted by Maxwell Mattuck, another Jew, and I am
to be sentenced by Judge Julian Mack, the eminent jurist [and an NAACP
board member]. Truly, I may say, 'I am going to Jericho and fell among
thieves.'" [MAGIDA, p. 166]
"One is driven to the hypothesis," says Israel Shahak, "that quite a few
of Martin Luther King's rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists
who supported him for tactical reasons (wishing to win black support for
American Jewry and for Israel) or were accomplished hypocrites." [SHAHAK,
p. 26] "[Jewish] loyalists," declared Thelma Thomas Dalevy, president
of the mostly Black Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1979, "are not compatible
with the struggle of black Americans for equal opportunity under the law.
Indeed, we question whether their loyalties are first with the state of
Israel or the United States." [STANFIELD, p. 1849]
Yet, "Jews cannot afford to engage in or tolerate political tactics or
public rhetoric that seriously threatens to discredit blacks," observes
Benjamin Ginzburg, "This is one of the major reasons that Jewish racism,
often expressed privately, seldom manifests itself publicly. African-Americans
are simply too important to the legitimacy of the American domestic state.
If Jews engage in attacks on blacks or permit doubts to be raised about
the merits of their political claims, then Jews are, in effect, undermining
a major moral prop supporting the institutions from which they themselves
derive enormous benefits and through which they exercise considerable
power." [GINZBURG, p. 153]
