Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Blacks and Jews: The Struggle in the Cities \\ 117
white power structure in cities that excluded or restricted the influence of Blacks
and Jews. In Boston, banks and the city established a special loan program,
known as "B-BURG" which granted low cost mortgages to Blacks — only if they
bought in the Jewish neighborhood of Mattapan. Under pressure from King,
Chicago's business leaders and Mayor Richard Daley agreed to set up a "summit
conference" that would push open housing throughout Chicago. Invited to attend
one of the meetings in 1967, Rabbi Robert Marx, head of the Jewish Council
on Urban Affairs, a liberal Jewish civil rights group, found that the business
leaders — most of whom were neither Black nor Jewish — had chosen five neighborhoods
to start integration. Three of them were Jewish neighborhoods. The
Jewish areas, one of the businessmen told Marx, would be "easier to integrate."
Marx left the meeting convinced that Jewish neighborhoods were being sacrificed
to protect other institutions, including the Catholic Church, which had a great
deal of property and schools in Chicago's stubbornly white enclaves. 11
white power structure in cities that excluded or restricted the influence of Blacks
and Jews. In Boston, banks and the city established a special loan program,
known as "B-BURG" which granted low cost mortgages to Blacks—only if they
bought in the Jewish neighborhood of Mattapan. Under pressure from King,
Chicago's business leaders and Mayor Richard Daley agreed to set up a "summit
conference" that would push open housing throughout Chicago. Invited to attend
one of the meetings in 1967, Rabbi Robert Marx, head of the Jewish Council
on Urban Affairs, a liberal Jewish civil rights group, found that the business
leaders—most of whom were neither Black nor Jewish—had chosen five neighborhoods
to start integration. Three of them were Jewish neighborhoods. The
Jewish areas, one of the businessmen told Marx, would be "easier to integrate."
Marx left the meeting convinced that Jewish neighborhoods were being sacrificed
to protect other institutions, including the Catholic Church, which had a great
deal of property and schools in Chicago's stubbornly white enclaves.
The large-scale movement of Blacks into once-Jewish neighborhoods was a
phenomenon repeated across the country, and accounted for the fact that so many
Black churches in Brooklyn, Hartford, and Cleveland hung painted signs reading
"Mt. Hope Baptist Church" or "Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church" over the entrances of
former synagogues. Many Blacks felt that Jews, despite their liberal rhetoric, had
abandoned their neighborhoods as soon as Blacks began to move in. Stores closed.
Crime rose. City services deteriorated. For Jews too poor or too old to move out
of these neighborhoods, the disruption caused by the crime and violence that
accompanied the change from working-class and middle-class white neighborhood
to poor Black neighborhood was profound. Indeed, by the end of the 1960s
there seemed not to be a Jewish family in America who did not have a grandmother
or elderly aunt or friend trapped in a once Jewish, now Black neighborhood,
hemmed in by fear of violence and crime. Blacks in these neighborhoods
suffered under the same fears, of course. But by the late 1960s, the writings of
Jewish intellectuals distancing Jews from the civil rights movement were being
matched by an inchoate fear and anger gripping the mass of rank-and-file Jews,
an anger which perversely mirrored the widespread support the civil rights movement
had enjoyed among Jews just ten years before. The change in city neighborhoods
had driven yet another wedge between Blacks and Jews.
11
The large-scale movement of Blacks into once-Jewish neighborhoods was a
phenomenon repeated across the country, and accounted for the fact that so many
Black churches in Brooklyn, Hartford, and Cleveland hung painted signs reading
"Mt. Hope Baptist Church" or "Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church" over the entrances of
former synagogues. Many Blacks felt that Jews, despite their liberal rhetoric, had
abandoned their neighborhoods as soon as Blacks began to move in. Stores closed.
Crime rose. City services deteriorated. For Jews too poor or too old to move out
of these neighborhoods, the disruption caused by the crime and violence that
accompanied the change from working-class and middle-class white neighborhood
to poor Black neighborhood was profound. Indeed, by the end of the 1960s
there seemed not to be a Jewish family in America who did not have a grandmother
or elderly aunt or friend trapped in a once Jewish, now Black neighborhood,
hemmed in by fear of violence and crime. Blacks in these neighborhoods
suffered under the same fears, of course. But by the late 1960s, the writings of
Jewish intellectuals distancing Jews from the civil rights movement were being
matched by an inchoate fear and anger gripping the mass of rank-and-file Jews,
an anger which perversely mirrored the widespread support the civil rights movement
had enjoyed among Jews just ten years before. The change in city neighborhoods
had driven yet another wedge between Blacks and Jews.
//
By the 1970s America's cities had come to represent the very different way the
American dream had worked for Blacks and Jews. Jews. America's cities cities had worked for
Jews. Jews. They had arrived as immigrants, gone to public schools and colleges, lived
in city neighborhoods, and climbed up the economic ladder of success through
civil service jobs and jobs in the private sector. But cities cities had not worked for many
Blacks. Increasingly many Blacks Blacks remained trapped in ghettos, unable to break break
through to prosperity. The downtown office towers that had beckoned Jewish