Shared Legacies Are Not Enough
Why remembering the civil-rights alliance is necessary—and not enough
SERIES I — PART I
This series asks what Black and Jewish Americans need to say to one another when shared history is real but incomplete and when each community remembers the same relationship differently.
In July 2024, I wrote a Boston Herald column titled “Blacks, Jews Must Remember Shared Legacy.” I still believe that. If younger Black and Jewish Americans do not know about the NAACP, Freedom Summer, Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney, King and Heschel, they inherit the conflicts without understanding the relationship that preceded them.
But my own thinking has changed. Since writing that column, I have spent more time inside Jewish communal life. The more I have listened, the more convinced I have become that remembering the heroic history is necessary but insufficient.
Jewish participation in Black civil rights was extraordinary. More than half of the white Freedom Riders were Jewish. Nearly two-thirds of the white volunteers who went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer were Jewish. Roughly half of the white civil-rights attorneys working in the South were Jews. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner paid with their lives alongside James Chaney.
Seventeen rabbis arrested in St. Augustine in 1964 explained their presence in a remarkable joint letter written from jail titled “Why We Went.” They said they came because they could not stay away and could not refuse King’s call.
That history deserves to be remembered. But nostalgia is not reconciliation.
The problem with telling only the heroic version is that it leaves both communities poorly prepared to understand what happened when shared ideals collided with unequal power, competing interests and different definitions of fairness.
The alliance was real. It was also never perfect.
When Service and Exploitation Describe the Same Relationship
One of the best examples comes from something much less dramatic than Selma: the neighborhood store.
Jewish merchants frequently operated stores in Black neighborhoods where other white business owners were reluctant to invest. Many Jewish merchants remembered themselves as providing goods, credit and services to customers that much of white America ignored.
There is considerable truth in that memory.
But many Black residents remember the same economic relationship differently.
As Jewish families became upwardly mobile and left formerly Jewish urban neighborhoods, they often retained ownership of stores and real estate. In some Black neighborhoods, Jews owned very large percentages of local stores. They appeared not as another persecuted minority but as landlords, shopkeepers, creditors and employers.
One community could therefore remember: We served people other whites would not serve.
The other could remember: You owned the store, controlled the credit, set the prices and knew we had few alternatives.
Both memories may contain truth.
Jewish merchants sometimes did provide essential services in neighborhoods abandoned by others. Black customers could simultaneously experience the relationship as paternalistic or exploitative because economic power remained overwhelmingly on one side.
This pattern appeared repeatedly: landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, employer and employee, teacher and student.
The difficult question is not simply whether Jewish merchants helped Blacks or exploited Blacks. It is: When does serving a marginalized community become exercising power over it?
That is the kind of question a renewed alliance needs to be strong enough to discuss.
The Door That Closed Twice
Jews knew what it meant to encounter doors closed because they were Jews.
Universities imposed quotas. Hospitals excluded Jewish physicians. Protestant and Catholic social institutions restricted Jewish membership. Jewish Americans responded by building universities, hospitals, businesses and clubs of their own.
But exclusion did not automatically make the excluded inclusive.
A Jewish country club could be created because Protestant clubs excluded Jews—and then excluded Black applicants themselves.
That contradiction matters.
White-presenting Jews did not cease being white when race rather than religion determined who received access.
The same paradox appears in finance and Hollywood.
A Jewish-founded Wall Street firm could represent Jewish triumph over exclusion from the Protestant establishment without offering Black professionals substantially better opportunities than the firms the founders had once struggled to enter.
Jewish immigrants could build Hollywood after encountering antisemitic barriers elsewhere while the studios they controlled reproduced an American racial hierarchy that gave Black performers few leading roles and little authority over how Black life was represented.
The lesson is uncomfortable but universal: Being the victim of one hierarchy does not prevent us from benefiting from or enforcing another.
That applies to Blacks too. Experiencing racism does not make a Black person incapable of antisemitism.
The South End Story
Boston provides a particularly instructive example.
In 1968, predominantly Black low-income tenants organized against deteriorating housing owned by the Jewish Mindick family.
The Black tenants experienced Jewish landlords as people exercising economic power over their lives.
But the story did not end there.
A Beth Din became involved. Jewish lawyers, rabbis and congregations supported the tenants. Jewish communal institutions helped hold Jewish landlords accountable.
Eventually the struggle contributed to tenants gaining control of the properties.
That story may be more useful than a hundred speeches about allyship.
Jewish people could participate in racialized economic injustice. Other Jewish people could use Jewish values and institutional power to confront it.
Criticizing the first was not antisemitism. Supporting the tenants was not betrayal of Jews.
Do Blacks Owe Jews?
There is another difficult conversation underneath the celebration of Jewish participation in civil rights.
Some Jews understandably feel that Black Americans do not know enough about what Jews actually did.
They remember the lawyers, philanthropists, rabbis, students and organizations. They remember Goodman and Schwerner. They remember Heschel. They remember the rabbis sitting in a Florida jail writing Why We Went.
And sometimes beneath that memory lies another feeling: We were there for you.
That feeling becomes particularly powerful when Black political leaders take positions on Israel that many Jews experience as threatening.
The unstated question becomes: After everything Jews did during the civil-rights movement, how can Black Americans stand against Israel?
Black Americans can legitimately resist that logic.
Gratitude does not create permanent political indebtedness. A Jewish student’s decision to go to Mississippi in 1964 cannot purchase a Black person’s position on Gaza sixty years later.
But the Black answer should not be dismissive either.
People really did take risks. Some lost their lives.
A mature alliance should be capable of saying simultaneously: We remember what you did. We are grateful. And we retain independent moral judgment about Israel, Palestine and every other issue.
Jewish solidarity should not purchase Black political loyalty. Black political independence should not erase Jewish sacrifice.
This question has become personal for me. I know the Black church from the inside. I also now know what it is like to enter a synagogue week after week, hear Jewish prayer and Torah, observe the Jewish calendar and listen to Jewish friends describe fears that are not visible from outside the community.
Perhaps We Know Each Other’s Politics Better Than Our Histories
Jews also have a legitimate complaint about reciprocal knowledge.
Jewish participants in interracial dialogue are generally expected to understand slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, the civil-rights movement and contemporary racism.
That expectation is reasonable.
But how much do Black participants know about Jewish history? The Holocaust. European pogroms. University quotas. 1948. 1967. The history of Zionism. Why a Jewish person hears the phrase ‘Jewish power’ differently from how a Black political activist may intend it. Why October 7 activated historical memories that extend far beyond Israeli politics.
Jewish frustration here is not simply that Blacks fail a history test. It is that people sometimes make sweeping judgments about Zionism, Israel or Jewish power while knowing little about Jewish statelessness, pogroms, immigration restrictions, the Holocaust, 1948, 1967, or the repeated accusation that Jews are secretly loyal to someone else.
Likewise, how much do Jews really understand the theological and political formation of Black Christians beyond recognizing King and the civil-rights movement?
Perhaps Blacks and Jews sometimes know one another’s politics better than we know one another’s history and religion.
Serious solidarity requires reciprocal historical literacy.
Not identical knowledge. But enough knowledge to understand why the same event can mean something completely different to the person across the table.
Shared Legacies is therefore necessary. But shared legacy is the beginning rather than the destination.
Van Jones is rebuilding the table. The question is whether we can put enough history on it to understand why the people who once marched together eventually found themselves arguing from opposite sides.
The Black–Jewish alliance does not need a better mythology. It needs enough trust to survive the truth.
Selected sources and research notes
- NAACP history — https://naacp.org/about/our-history
- My Jewish Learning, Jews in the civil-rights movement — https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-in-the-civil-rights-movement/
- Northeastern, South End / Harriet Tubman House history — https://harriettubmanhouse.library.northeastern.edu/south-end-history/
- JTA archive, private clubs excluding Jews and Blacks — https://www.jta.org/archive/numerous-sport-clubs-in-new-york-are-closed-to-jews-and-negroes
