A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer - Southern Jewish Historical Society

28 SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY
jubilee was the gala pageant held at Bessemer Stadium on the
evenings of April 9 to 14, 1962, with Frank Sachs as head of wardrobe
and makeup and Herbert S. Goldstein, Murray Sokol, and
Carol Green as actors. 127
Also acknowledged for the event were the Jewish-owned
businesses placing ads in The Bessemer Story, the jubilee’s commemorative
magazine, including Picard’s Clothing, Sokol’s, I.
Rosen, (“Fair and Square since 1916”), Sachs’ Furniture, Guarantee
Shoe, Jefferson Furniture, Kartus Korner, The Outlet Store owned
by Jack Kartus, and Pizitz of Bessemer. Julian Erlick, son of pioneer
Samuel Erlick, individually sponsored an ad.
Yet the jubilee marked the twilight of Jewish-owned stores in
downtown. With the death of the early patriarchs and with no
younger generation to take over, many Jewish-owned retail businesses,
like I. Rosen, closed in the 1960s, while others, including
Sokol’s, tried to survive by opening locations in recentlyconstructed
malls, either in Bessemer or in more-economically viable
and prominent communities elsewhere. Still other Jewish
residents, like Jerry Cherner, while continuing to own stores in
Bessemer, moved to Birmingham to be better situated to join other
synagogues and the Jewish community center. Additionally, as in
other contemporary southern communities, Bessemer’s businessmen
had to cope with the civil rights issues that were finally
becoming too heated to be ignored. This was a town that through
the 1950s allowed the Ku Klux Klan to post a sign on at least one
highway leading into the city welcoming everyone to Bessemer.
Many of Bessemer’s white-owned retail stores did business with
both black and white clientele (heeding the philosophy of Neiman
Marcus that “Anyone alive should be considered a prospect” 128 ).
Some white and Jewish-owned businesses catered primarily to
one or the other race (Nat Wittenstein’s State/Dixie Clothing being
an example of a Jewish-owned business catering primarily to
black clientele). However, all of these stores had segregated restrooms,
drinking fountains, and lunch counters. With integration
and subsequent boycotting of white-owned businesses in the mid-
1960s, downtown Bessemer ultimately became a shopping district
patronized primarily by black citizens, the more mobile whites