Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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program. Exploring in some detail the involvement of Jews with the two
agencies in each of these areas will illustrate the scope and significance of their
contribution.
From the outset, a small number of Jews took part in the various governing
committees of the NAACP. In the wake of the Springfield race riot of 1908,
Henry Moskowitz, a social worker at the Madison Street Settlement in New York
who was associated with the Ethical Culture movement, was one of five drafters
of the "Call" to a conference in 1 909 "to discuss means for securing political and
civil equality for the Negro." Among the sixty signers of the "Call," four can be
positively identified as Jews: Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, the founder of the Henry
Street Settlement in New York, and two rabbis known for their outspoken commitment
to social justice, Stephen Wise and Emil Hirsch. The Committee of
Forty, the executive committee of the National Negro Committee, included six
members who can be positively identified as Jews: Moskowitz; Wald; Wise; Jacob
W. Mack, a shirt manufacturer in New York; Edwin R. A. Seligman, a professor
of political economy at Columbia University; and Joseph Silverman, the rabbi
holding Samuel Adler's former pulpit at Temple Emanu-El. Among the forty-five
members of the NAACP's first general committee, seven can be positively identified
as Jews: Mack; Moskowitz; Seligrnan; Wald; Wise; Rita Wallach
Morgenthau, a social worker at the Henry Street Settlement; and Jacob H. Schiff,
the banker and philanthropist who had become a great supporter of Tuskegee
Institute. Of the thirty men and women elected to the Association's first board of
directors, four can be positively identified as Jews: Silverman, Wald, Walter E.
Sachs, a banker at Goldman, Sachs and Company, and Joel E. Spingarn. 23
The case for Jewish influence in the NAACP comes not from disproportionate
numbers, but from the critical roles played by particular individuals in the organization's
early decades. 2 ' 1 Surely the most influential in the agency's formative
years was Joel Elias Spingarn, who would become the chairman of the NAACP
board. The son of a Viennese immigrant who prospered in the wholesale tobacco
business in New York, Spingarn earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at
Columbia University in 1899. He joined the Columbia faculty that year and rose
to the chairmanship of the Department of Comparative Languages and Literature,
but he resigned abruptly in 1911 in protest over the LJniversity's dismissal of a
prominent faculty member without due process. Thereafter, Spingarn fashioned a
life that combined literary pursuits with active engagement in political and social
reform. The author of several volumes of poetry and literary criticism, he was one
of the founders of the publishing house of Harcourt, Brace. He bought a country
estate in Dutchess County, New York, and immersed himself in reform politics as
the publisher of a local paper, a proponent of women's suffrage, and an active participant
in the affairs of the Progressive Party. In the words of Langston Hughes,
he was "a scholar steeped in the humanities" who "had the interest of all human
beings at heart." 25