Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

116 // JONATHAN KAUFMAN
dominate the 1970s and 1980s. Jews, who had been at the cutting edge of Black
demands for freedom in the 1950s and 1 960s, were now at the cutting edge of the
next phase of Black demands. Only this time it was they who were being cut.
The sound heard in New York in 1968 and 1969 was the sound of a coalition
ripping itself apart.
The Ocean Hill—Brownsville clash was the most public sign in the late 1960s
that the alliance between Blacks and Jews was coming to an end. But there was
another change, little noticed at the time, which was to have as great an impact,
especially in Jewish minds. This was the steady change of many city neighborhoods
from Jewish to Black.
The enormous influx of Blacks into American cities pushed the existing ghettos
past the bursting point. In Chicago, for example, Blacks were crammed into
two areas: the gradually expanding "Black Belt" that began just south of the
downtown Loop, detoured briefly around the University of Chicago, and ran several
miles southward; and the newer West Side ghetto where in 1966 Martin
Luther King took an apartment to symbolize his concern for the plight of poor
people.
Reinforcing these bureaucratic and financial barriers to open housing was
steady violence that echoed like a drum beat through Chicago's tight-knit ethnic
neighborhoods whenever Blacks had the audacity to move in. In the summer of
1951, a mob of 2,000 whites in the white, working-class suburb of Cicero, bordering
Chicago's western edge, stormed an apartment building that had a Black
family living inside. In 1957, 6,000 whites attacked Black picnickers in Calumet
Park on the Southeast Side. Through the late 1950s, vigilantes threatened and fire
bombed a small group of Black families living in the Trumbull Park Homes, a
public housing development that had become "accidentally" integrated when a
light-skinned Black family moved in. 10
Still, the burgeoning size of the Black population meant Blacks had to move
somewhere. Hemmed in by violence and homeowners who refused to sell to them,
they followed the path of least resistance. That path in Chicago—as in New York,
Boston, and dozens of other cities—was to move into Jewish neighborhoods.
Unlike the Italians and Slavs of Chicago's Trumbull Park or the Irish-
Americans of South Boston, Jews did not fire bomb houses or chase Blacks down
the street when they moved into "their" previously all-white neighborhood.
When Blacks moved into Jewish areas, the Jews simply moved out. Often this
was made easier by the fact that the Jewish areas were relatively poor and the more
successful immigrants wanted to move away anyway. But it was also true that, all
things being equal, many Jews would have preferred not to have moved. Their
ties to the old neighborhood remained strong. The other side of Black complaints
about Jewish landlords and store owners was that the Jews had been in the neighborhood
first and had been unwilling—or, as the area deteriorated, unable—to
sell all their property.
The move of Blacks into Jewish neighborhoods was often hastened by the