Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Need to Remember \\ 243
and anti-Black for his support of crossracial cooperation. As early as the 1930s,
economic competition in Harlem pitted Black residents and activists against
Jewish residents, merchants, and landlords. In support of economic boycotts
directed at non-Blacks, some African Americans introduced the poker-hot language
of bigotry. In the exchanges Jews became "the exploiters of the colored people,"
and "Harlem's worst enemies." 38
Nor were these insecurities solely the preoccupation of job-insecure northern
Blacks. Black militancy had an unsettling effect on southern Jews. Many voiced
their discomfort with northern Jews who embraced civil rights for Blacks. After
all, non-Jewish white racists easily attributed the fight for Black civil rights to a
Jewish conspiracy (suggesting that even as late as I960 some Gentiles viewed
Jews as other than "white.") American Nazi figure George Lincoln Rockwell published
a pamphlet that called desegregation a grand plot by Jews to take over the
nation by creating a mongrel race. Following the Supreme Court decision in the
Brown case and during the height of the school-closing crisis in late 1950s
Virginia, the level of anti-Jewish sentiment increased. Letters circulated through
the Hampton Roads section of Virginia with the directive "The time has obviously
come for white Americans to take action if this Jew-inspired program for
compulsory mongrelization is to be defeated." Nor were racist comments or the
responses engendered limited to Virginia. A Jewish resident of Macon, Georgia
fretted, "When a rabbi from New Haven... takes part in a demonstration, you
have no idea the position Jewry in our state is placed." More hysterically, one
Jewish leader from Alabama charged northern counterparts, "You're like Hitler.
You stir up anti-Semitism against us." 39
When Jewish students added their names to the growing list of civil rights
martyrs, episodes of fear and recrimination exposed real rifts among the socially
conservative and the socially liberal. These encounters highlight the dangers of
painting this complicated history of interaction with too broad a stroke.
Throughout the tumult of the 1950s and 1960s, socially conscious Jewish
Americans lent their suasion to the cause of civil rights, risked their lives to
desegregate America, provided funds and moral support to Martin Luther King
and other activists, and taught Blacks in schools and colleges. Even the more conservative
maintained relations with Black customers and tenants, counseled Black
Americans on the virtues of going slow, agonized when Black youth embraced
Israel's enemies, and openly feared the consequences of a Black ascendancy. 40
Still, in the interstices of an old relationship the personal and the institutional
prevailed—they marked Black-Jewish interaction.
Community Confrontation
Until the 1960s, however, Blacks and Jews had never confronted one another as
real competitors for civic control. Sure, intergroup conflict surfaced from time to
time, most notably during race riots. Yet, even during the riots in Harlem (1935