Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement \\ 125
Jewish-owned stores in the ghetto might sell to, but not employ, Blacks; outside
the ghetto, such stores might refuse to allow Blacks to try on clothing or sit at
lunch counters, or decline to serve Blacks at all. Jews who employed Blacks generally
hired them in menial capacities at low wages. Jewish landlords charged
Black tenants high rents for overcrowded, poorly maintained facilities, and Jews
led or joined in efforts to contain Blacks in ghetto neighborhoods. There were
numerous incidents of Jewish disparagement or harassment of Blacks; "Nigger"
and "Schwartze" became commonly used epithets. 5
If Jews were prejudiced against Blacks, the reverse was also true. The tensions
showed up in a none-too-subtle strain of Black anti-Semitism. Richard Wright
recalled of his boyhood in Arkansas that everyone in his neighborhood "hated
Jews, not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and
in Sunday school that Jews were 'Christ killers'... .To hold an attitude of antagonism
or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely
racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage." Horace Mann Bond
remembered a youthful encounter with the son of the Jewish grocer in his neighborhood
in Atlanta: "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Nigger," the boy taunted; "You
Christ-killer!" Bond retorted. The boy burst into tears, leaving Bond surprised
and dismayed to realize that he had so easily embraced "one of the 'bad' words
that I had been taught never, never, never to use." 6
Booker T. Washington, who had made the mistake in print of calling Jews a
race distinct from whites, sprinkled his speeches with references to Jews as
exploitative storekeepers and usurious creditors until a trusted white adviser
counseled him that such expressions would surely not help his efforts to raise
funds for Tuskegee Institute among whites in the North. W. E. B. Du Bois, who
traveled across the Atlantic in the summer of 1895, found two of the Jews he met
aboard ship congenial, but the rest distasteful: "There is in them all that slyness
that lack of straight-forward openheartedness which goes straight against me." 7
The first edition of Du Bois's classic book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903),
described Jews as "heir[s] of the slave-baron," "shrewd and unscrupulous," given
to "deception and flattery," "cajoling and lying." 8
Langston Hughes voiced some of the complexity of the urban encounter of
Blacks and Jews in his book of poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew.
When hard luck overtakes you
Nothin' for you to do.
When hard luck overtakes you
Nothin' for you to do.
Gather up yo' fine clothes
An' sell 'em to de Jew.
James Baldwin, growing up in Harlem, captured the tensions more sharply: "I
remember meeting no Negro...in my family or out of it, who would really ever