Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

140 // NANCY J.WEISS
family members surely provided a means for communicating his views to the
leadership of the organisation, and it gave him an intimate perspective on the
League's operations. In the late 1920s, however, as the Julius Rosenwald Fund
took over Rosenwald's philanthropic activities, direct efforts were made to change
the way the Urban League operated. The Fund tried to force the League to merge
with the NAACP and to oust Eugene Kinckle Jones as executive secretary. It is
not clear whether the Fund ignored, or considered and then set aside, the differences
in philosophy and method that made the two organizations distinctive. As
the new president of the Fund, Edwin R. Embree, explained, from the Fund's perspective,
the proposed merger made good sense in terms of efficiency and economy;
by combining forces, the NAACP and the Urban League would avoid duplication
of effort, enhance their influence, and—not incidentally—save money.
There was also another motive for the merger, and that was the dislike for
Jones on the part of Alfred K. Stern, Rosenwald's son-in-law, his administrative
assistant at the Fund, and a member of the board of the Chicago Urban League.
Stern put the case bluntly to Rosenwald in 1929 when he said that he and Embree
were of the view that Jones was "incompetent" to run the organization. Beyond
that, Stern—who had a reputation for being opinionated and for insisting that
others defer to his ideas—found Jones to be personally uncongenial, possibly
because he was unwilling to bend to Stern's bidding. The proposed merger would
provide an excuse for replacing Jones; in Stern's plan, Will W. Alexander, a white
southern liberal who was directing the Commission on Interracial Cooperation,
would have headed the new organization, and Jones would have been relegated to
the role of an assistant to Alexander, in charge of programs for improving the economic
conditions of Blacks. Short of that, if the two organizations continued to
operate separately, Stern believed that substantial reorganization was in order at
the League; at the very least, Jones ought to be forced to retire, and the Chicago
League (where the board had ignored a number of Stern's directives about policy)
reorganized as well, with a new board and a new executive secretary.
Stern made no secret of the fact that there was a pricetag on the continuation
of Rosenwald funding for the Urban League. But the League was unable—or unwilling—to
bear the costs of acceding to his wishes. Recognizing the stakes, the
Chicago League tried to meet some of Stern's criticisms, but the effort failed
to appease him (the expansion of the League's industrial relations activities,
for example, undertaken expressly in order to assuage Stern's concerns about the
effectiveness of the agency's program, backfired when the League appointed as
the department's new director a man Stern considered to be wrong for the job).
At the national level, Jones further fueled Stern's displeasure by not removing
the Chicago executive secretary. And both the National Urban League and the
NAACP stood firm against the pressures for merger of the two organizations.
Stern's interventions raised a spectre that would continue, in various forms, to
concern Black Americans as the civil rights struggle unfolded: Did Jewish support
for the movement necessarily come at the cost of ownership and control?