Shared Legacies Are Not Enough
Why remembering the civil-rights alliance is necessary—and not enough
SERIES I — PART I
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, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel, they inherit the conflicts without understanding the relationship that preceded them. Yet my own thinking has changed as 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 Jews; and about half of the white civil-rights attorneys working in the South were Jewish. Goodman and Schwerner paid with their lives alongside Chaney. In June 1964, sixteen rabbis and one Jewish community leader arrested in St. Augustine wrote the joint letter “Why We Went,” explaining that they had come because conscience would not permit them to remain spectators.
That history deserves to be remembered, but nostalgia is not reconciliation. The heroic version leaves both communities poorly prepared for what happens when shared ideals collide with unequal power, competing interests and different definitions of fairness. The alliance was real; so were the contradictions inside it.
When Service and Exploitation Describe the Same Relationship
The neighborhood store offers a less dramatic but more revealing example than Selma. Jewish merchants often operated in Black neighborhoods where other white businesses were reluctant to invest, providing goods, credit and services to customers much of white America ignored. There is considerable truth in that memory. Many Black residents, however, experienced the same relationship from the other side of the counter. As Jewish families became upwardly mobile and left formerly Jewish urban neighborhoods, some retained stores and real estate, so Black customers encountered Jews not primarily as another persecuted minority but as landlords, shopkeepers, creditors and employers.
Both memories can contain truth. A merchant can provide a needed service and still exercise disproportionate economic power over customers with few alternatives. A landlord can have known religious exclusion and still benefit from a racial housing hierarchy. The more useful historical question is therefore not whether Jewish merchants helped or exploited Black residents as a class, but how service, dependence, power and opportunity operated in particular relationships. That kind of specificity protects legitimate criticism from becoming stereotype.
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; clubs and social institutions restricted Jewish membership. Jewish Americans responded by building universities, hospitals, businesses and associations of their own. Yet exclusion did not automatically make the excluded inclusive. A Jewish country club formed because Protestant clubs excluded Jews could later exclude Black applicants. A Jewish-founded Wall Street firm could symbolize triumph over Protestant barriers without creating substantially better opportunities for Black professionals. Jewish immigrants could build Hollywood after encountering antisemitic barriers elsewhere while studios reproduced American racial hierarchies in who appeared on screen and who held authority behind it.
The lesson is uncomfortable precisely because it is universal: suffering under one hierarchy does not prevent a community from benefiting from or enforcing another. White-presenting Jews could experience antisemitism while also receiving racial advantages unavailable to Black Americans. The reciprocal truth belongs in the same sentence: experiencing racism does not make a Black person incapable of antisemitism.
The South End Story
Boston provides an unusually instructive example because the story contains exploitation, protest and Jewish institutional accountability in the same episode. In 1968, a multiethnic group of roughly seven hundred low-income renters organized the South End Tenants’ Council and confronted Joseph, Raphael and Israel Mindick, three brothers who managed more than sixty deteriorating buildings. Tenants documented hazardous conditions, filed complaints, organized a rent strike and protested at the Mindicks’ homes and synagogue.
The story did not end with Black tenants confronting Jewish landlords. A Beth Din, or rabbinical court, intervened; Jewish law firms and congregations sent letters supporting the tenants; and an agreement eventually led the Boston Redevelopment Authority to purchase the buildings so tenants could become owners and redevelopers. The following year, the Tenants’ Development Corporation was created to manage rehabilitation. This history is more useful than a hundred speeches about allyship because it demonstrates that Jewish people could participate in racialized economic injustice while other Jews could use Jewish values and institutional power to confront it. Criticizing the first was not antisemitism, and holding the landlords accountable was not betrayal of Jews.
Does Gratitude Create a Political Debt?
Another difficult conversation sits beneath 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; Goodman and Schwerner; Heschel at Selma; and the rabbis sitting in a Florida jail writing “Why We Went.” Beneath that memory can be a deeply human feeling: we were there for you when standing with you carried real risk.
That feeling becomes particularly powerful when Black political leaders take positions on Israel that many Jews experience as threatening. Black Americans can legitimately resist the idea that solidarity in 1964 created permanent political indebtedness. A Jewish student’s decision to go to Mississippi cannot purchase a Black person’s opinion about Gaza sixty years later. Yet the Black answer should not be dismissive either. People really did take risks, and some lost their lives. A mature alliance should be capable of remembering sacrifice with gratitude while retaining independent moral judgment about Israel, Palestine and every other issue.
This question has become personal for me because I know the Black church from the inside and 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 often invisible from outside the community. That proximity has not eliminated my disagreements; it has made it harder to caricature the people with whom I disagree.
Perhaps We Know One Another’s Politics Better Than Our Histories
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 because political disagreements cannot be understood apart from the histories that produced them. The same standard should run in both directions. Black participants need enough familiarity with pogroms, the Holocaust, Jewish immigration restrictions, university quotas, 1948, 1967, Zionism and recurring accusations of Jewish dual loyalty to understand why a phrase such as “Jewish power” can carry meanings very different from those intended by a Black political activist.
Reciprocity requires an equally difficult question for Jews: how much do Jewish Americans understand the theological and political formation of Black Christians beyond King and the civil-rights movement? How deeply do they understand why slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, apartheid, redlining and continuing racial inequality shape Black interpretations of power? Perhaps Blacks and Jews sometimes know one another’s politics better than we know one another’s histories and religions.
Black Jews make the limits of that mutual ignorance especially concrete. Yavilah McCoy has described growing up as an Orthodox Black Jew whose Jewishness was repeatedly questioned because of the body she inhabited. “I had to make space for myself in the Torah,” she has said. Her experience should challenge Jewish readers because it locates anti-Black racism inside Jewish belonging rather than safely outside the Jewish community. It should also challenge Black readers who casually treat Jewishness as another form of whiteness. McCoy’s life contains both histories: she can encounter anti-Black racism within Jewish institutions while carrying Jewish religious practice, Jewish history and Jewish vulnerability as her own.
Serious solidarity therefore requires reciprocal historical literacy: enough knowledge to understand why the same event can mean something different to the person across the table, and enough humility to recognize that more than one of those histories can live within the same person. Shared legacy is the beginning, not the destination. The Black–Jewish alliance does not need a better mythology; it needs enough truth to survive its own history.
Selected Sources and Research Notes
- Library of Congress, NAACP founding and early years — https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html
- My Jewish Learning, “Blacks and Jews in America, 1960s–1980s” — https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/blacks-and-jews-in-america-1960s-1980s/
- Hebrew Union College, “Why We Went” (1964) — https://huc.edu/news/why-we-went-1964/
- Northeastern University, Harriet Tubman House Memory Project, South End history — https://harriettubmanhouse.library.northeastern.edu/south-end-history/
- ARQ, interview with Yavilah McCoy — https://thisisarq.com/read/yavilah-mccoy
