Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

144 // NANCY J.WEISS
ion when he told the Jewish Daily Forward that "the Negro race looks to Jews for
sympathy and understanding." Other commentators took a more categorical
view: "They have stood by us and have aided us when all other groups in America
have turned their backs on us," the Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, asserted.
Or, as the Messenger expressed it, "The Jewish people have been fairer and
squarer in their treatment of Negroes than any other people in the world." 60
Statements like the latter, of course, oversimplified the record of white participation
in the struggle for racial advancement. Of course there were many non-
Jews who played critical roles. But there is no doubt that the contribution of Jews
was unusual in its character and intensity. As we have seen, Jews loomed large in
the governance and financial support of both the NAACP and the National Urban
League, and in the development of the NAACP's legal program. In so doing, they
helped importantly to shape and sustain the early twentieth-century movement
for Black civil rights.
NOTES
1. Roy Wilkins interview, Aug. 21, 1973, pp. 26-27, American Jewish
Committee's Oral History Collection, Jewish Division, New York Public Library.
2. Quoted in New York Times, July 24, 1994, p. 18.
3. In taking this approach, this essay confirms the hypothesis posited in John
Bracey and August Meier, "Towards a Research Agenda on Blacks and Jews in United
States History," Journal of American Ethnic History, XII (Spring 1993), 65—66. The
principal published accounts thus far are Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land:
American jews and Blacks, 1915—1935 (Westport, CT, 1977), and David Levering
Lewis, "Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and
Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s," Journal of American History, LXXI (Dec.
1984), 543—64. For a particularly thoughtful brief summary, see Murray Friedman,
"Civil Rights," in Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker, eels., Jewish-American History and
Culture: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1992), pp. 87-91.
4. Baltimore Sun, Oct. 18,22, 1903, and Solomon Cohen letter to The Public, Aug.
22, 1903, quoted in Philip S. Foner, "Black-Jewish Relations in the Opening Years of
the Twentieth Century," Phylon, XXXVI (Winter 1975), 365 and 363-64, respectively.
5. See, among other sources, Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet
Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT, 1970), pp. 34—35,
43-44; Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City,
1865-1920 (New York, 1965), p. 1.33.
6. Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York, 1945),
pp. 53—54; Horace Mann Bond, "Negro Attitudes toward Jews, "Jewish Social Studies,
XXVII (Jan. 1965), 3-4,