Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Need to Remember \\ 237
several years older than his presumptive brothers, served in the postwar South
Carolina legislature, representing Kershaw County from 1870-1874. After that
he pastored at Wesley A. M. E. Church in Columbia and edited a denominational
paper. Francis played critical roles in reconstruction politics in South Carolina,
serving as both secretary of state and state treasurer. Thomas entered the political
fray in North Carolina and later Mississippi, where he became superintendent of
schools from 1874-1876.
The younger Cardozos achieved their prominence in large part because of the
role education played in their lives. Little is known about what their father or
mother said about their sons' education; nonetheless, Francis and Thomas both
attended private schools in Charleston for free Blacks of color. Here we might
conclude that the father, who remained involved in the lives of his partner and
sons until his death in 1855, paid those bills.
It is equally possible that the sons paid their own way. Once he reached twelve,
Francis entered an apprenticeship, wherein he learned to become a carpenter.
Upon Isaac's death, Thomas was also apprenticed; the seventeen-year-old worked
for a rice-threshing manufacturer for two years before moving to New York with
his mother and resuming his education. Francis, we know, used his skills to set
aside funds for a European education. After five years as an apprentice and four as
a journeyman, Francis had saved $1,000. With these funds he studied first at the
University of Glasgow, and then in London and Edinburgh, where he received
three years of theological training. He returned to the United States as one of the
best educated men of his generation. 23
Whether his father assisted him in any way before he reached adulthood is not
clear. Francis was eighteen when his father died, and did not leave for Scotland for
another three years. More significant, Francis embraced Christianity as an adult
and not Judaism (had he been given the choice). He trained at Presbyterian seminaries
abroad and pastored at a Congregationalist church upon his return. At the
end of the war, Francis and Thomas worked for the American Missionary
Association (AMA) as teachers and educators. In fact, both would alternate
between the bruising theater of reconstruction politics and the equally challenging
world of educating freeclpeople. In helping to found Avery Institute, a normal
school, Francis would write that training Black teachers to train Black students
"is the object for which I left all of the superior advantages and privileges of the
North.... "24
The Cardozo story is significant because it highlights the still unfocused educational
relationship between Blacks and Jews. From the 1820s well into the first
decades of the twentieth century, the relationship turned on individual contacts
rather than group relations. With the number of Jews remaining a fraction of 1
percent nationally—and in the South—possible contacts were rare except in
enclaves such as Charleston. Isaac aided his sons because they were his progeny;
he knew them and, we are to assume, loved them. They aided the cause of a larger
Black world because dominant ideology and life experiences defined them as