When Solidarity Met Self-Determination

Black Power and the Black-Jewish Alliance

This essay examines AIPAC as one contemporary source of friction in the Black-Jewish relationship. But ending the history there would create the wrong impression. Neither AIPAC nor Israel created the underlying tension. Long before either became central to Black-Jewish political disagreement, the Civil Rights Movement itself had begun forcing Blacks and Jews to confront a more difficult question: What happens when solidarity collides with self-determination?

Earlier essays in this series have recalled the extraordinary Jewish participation in the Black freedom struggle. That history should neither be diminished nor romanticized. The same movement that produced some of the most inspiring examples of Black-Jewish cooperation also contained the beginnings of one of the relationship’s most consequential disagreements. Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 brings both realities into view because it joined extraordinary interracial solidarity with an increasingly urgent Black debate over who should lead the movement and who should determine its direction.

Jewish participation was substantial, although a frequently repeated statistic needs correction. It is sometimes claimed that Jews constituted 40 percent of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The available evidence does not support that figure. Dorothy Zellner, a Jewish activist who became a SNCC staff member in 1962, later estimated that perhaps 10 to 15 percent of SNCC’s staff was Jewish by 1964. She also cautioned that nobody knew the exact number because SNCC did not record religious identity.¹ SNCC itself remained a fundamentally Black-led organization rooted in Black Southern communities.

Freedom Summer presents a different numerical picture. Nearly 1,000 outside volunteers went to Mississippi during the 1964 project, and SNCC’s historical archive reports that almost 90 percent were white.² Contemporary recollections of Jewish participation vary because religious affiliation was not systematically recorded, but veterans of the campaign have commonly estimated that Jews constituted at least half of the white volunteers. Julian Bond remembered the level of Jewish participation as dramatically disproportionate to Jews’ share of the American population.³ The defensible conclusion, therefore, is not that Jews constituted anything close to 40 percent of SNCC but that Jews represented an extraordinary share of the white Americans who joined Freedom Summer.

The distinction allows us to hold two truths together. SNCC was a Black organization whose leadership and organizing tradition grew out of Black Southern communities, yet Jews were remarkably overrepresented among the white Americans willing to enter Mississippi and accept the risks of civil-rights work. Those risks were not theoretical. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both Jewish, were murdered alongside James Chaney, a Black Mississippian. SNCC’s historical account records eighty volunteers attacked and beaten, thirty-seven churches bombed or burned, another thirty Black homes and businesses bombed or burned, and scores of volunteers and organizers arrested and beaten during the summer.⁴ Jewish participation in the struggle therefore included people who placed their bodies, livelihoods and, in the cases of Goodman and Schwerner, their lives at risk.

That sacrifice makes the later deterioration of the alliance difficult to understand if the story is told simply as friendship followed by rejection. The tension over white participation had actually begun before Freedom Summer. When SNCC debated whether to invite hundreds of white Northern students into Mississippi, some of its most experienced organizers resisted the proposal. Charlie Cobb, Ivanhoe Donaldson, MacArthur Cotton, Sam Block and others worried that an influx of white college students would undermine years of painstaking work developing local Black leadership. Students from Stanford and Yale had participated in the earlier Freedom Vote and attracted unprecedented media attention, reinforcing the belief that white volunteers might bring national scrutiny to violence that Black organizers had been enduring with far less notice.⁵

The strategic calculation rested on an uncomfortable truth about America. Violence against another Black organizer could receive little national attention, while violence against a white student from a prominent Northern university might bring reporters, politicians and federal officials to Mississippi. Bob Moses told volunteers that putting white bodies at risk was part of an effort to force the country to become involved. SNCC’s account of the orientation also records that the media focused heavily on the white volunteers while paying much less attention to Black volunteers and the predominantly Black leadership of the project.⁶ The very racial privilege that made white volunteers strategically useful could therefore reproduce inside the movement part of the hierarchy SNCC was attempting to overturn.

Veteran organizers feared that white students could be treated naturally as leaders, not because they understood Mississippi better than local people but because they arrived white, educated and connected to influential Northern institutions. Other Black leaders placed greater weight on what the project could accomplish. Fannie Lou Hamer and Amzie Moore supported bringing the volunteers, and Hamer argued that a movement attempting to break down segregation could not simply segregate itself. Once local people supported the project, SNCC’s staff committed itself to making the summer succeed despite continuing reservations.⁷ The disagreement was therefore not a simple division between supporters and opponents of interracial cooperation. Black organizers were debating what interracial cooperation should look like when one purpose of the movement was to cultivate Black political agency.

That distinction became increasingly important as the summer unfolded. Black organizers could value Jewish allies, recognize their courage and honor their sacrifices while still insisting that the Black freedom movement had to remain Black-led. Those positions become contradictory only if solidarity is assumed to create a claim to leadership. From SNCC’s perspective, interracial cooperation had to expand Black power rather than replace Black leadership with a different form of dependence.

Events later in 1964 deepened the concern. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the legitimacy of Mississippi’s segregated regular delegation. Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony attracted national attention, but the Johnson administration worked against seating the MFDP because of fears about alienating white Southern Democrats. Party leaders eventually offered two at-large seats while leaving the regular Mississippi delegation in place. The MFDP rejected the proposal. SNCC’s historical account describes Atlantic City as a turning point, after which many activists no longer believed that exposing an injustice would necessarily cause liberal institutions to correct it.⁸

The movement’s central question was consequently changing. Its earlier campaigns had necessarily concentrated on access: whether Black citizens could register to vote, use public accommodations, attend desegregated schools and receive the constitutional protections formally promised to them. The legislative victories of 1964 and 1965 did not make those questions irrelevant, but they exposed another problem. If Black people gained access to the ballot, who would they have to vote for? If a school became legally integrated, who would control it? If Black people could enter an institution that had once excluded them, who would still possess the authority to determine how that institution operated?

SNCC increasingly turned toward independent political organizations, economic institutions and a more explicit politics of Black control. The shift was especially visible in Lowndes County, Alabama, where SNCC worked with local residents to build an independent Black-led political organization after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was an attempt to make voting rights translate into political power rather than treating registration as an end in itself. SNCC’s own historical account consequently places the roots of Black Power well before the phrase became nationally famous in 1966.⁹

When Stokely Carmichael popularized the words Black Power during the 1966 Meredith March, the phrase carried several meanings. Some heard racial pride; others heard independent Black political organization, economic self-sufficiency, nationalism, separatism or revolution. SNCC increasingly emphasized a more concrete principle: people affected by oppression should possess the authority to determine the institutions governing their lives. In a 1966 statement declining participation in President Lyndon Johnson’s White House Conference on Civil Rights, SNCC’s Central Committee declared that people who suffer should make the decisions about how their lives are changed and called upon Black Americans to build independent political, economic and cultural institutions capable of serving as instruments of social change.¹⁰

Once that principle became central, the role of white activists inside SNCC could no longer be avoided. At the organization’s December 1966 meeting at the Peg Leg Bates resort in New York, staff members engaged in a bitter debate about whether whites should remain within the organization. SNCC’s historical account describes the meeting as part of a broader movement toward Black people creating independent institutions while white activists increasingly turned toward confronting racism in white communities.¹¹ The transition was not neat, and SNCC itself remained divided about how far separation should go. That internal disagreement matters because it prevents us from rewriting Black Power as though Black activists suddenly arrived at a single separatist position.

For Jewish activists, the development could be particularly painful precisely because their participation had been so substantial. They could point toward Mississippi, jail cells, threats, Freedom Summer and the murders of Goodman and Schwerner as evidence that Jewish commitment had extended well beyond statements of sympathy. Zellner later described leaving SNCC after five years as a painful loss while also saying that she understood the reasons Black activists wanted the organization to move in that direction.¹² Black activists, meanwhile, could acknowledge Jewish sacrifice while making a different claim: sacrifice establishes moral credibility, but it does not necessarily confer institutional authority. An ally can help fight an injustice without thereby gaining a permanent right to determine the strategy of those most directly affected by it. Gratitude and self-determination do not have to be opposites.

This was not principally a dispute about Jews. SNCC was wrestling with the role of whites generally, and many Black activists pressing for change were responding to years of experience with white institutions rather than developing a particular theory about Jewish participation. Jews nevertheless experienced the transition with unusual intensity because they had been so disproportionately represented among the white activists participating in the movement. The more significant the Jewish contribution had been, the more painful it could feel to discover that Black autonomy might require Jewish activists to relinquish roles they had understood as expressions of solidarity.

That is why the familiar narrative—Jews helped Blacks, Black Power emerged, and Blacks rejected Jews—is inadequate. Historian Marc Dollinger has substantially complicated that account through his examination of Jewish organizational records. He found evidence that important Jewish leaders understood the origins of Black militancy and supported significant elements of Black self-determination. More surprisingly, he argues that Black Power influenced the development of a more assertive Jewish politics. Activists in the movement for Soviet Jewry adopted tactics associated with Black militancy, while American Zionists likewise participated in an emerging politics of ethnic self-assertion after the Six-Day War.¹³

The connection is important, but it should not be overstated. Black Americans were confronting the continuing consequences of slavery, Jim Crow and a racial hierarchy constructed around Black subordination. Jews carried a different history of antisemitism, exclusion, immigration and the Holocaust, and increasing access to white American institutions did not eliminate Jewish vulnerability. As an earlier essay in this series argued, Black Jews further expose the limitations of speaking about “Blacks” and “Jews” as though they were always separate populations. The histories were not interchangeable, but both communities were becoming more comfortable with the proposition that particular identity did not have to disappear into interracial universalism in order to make legitimate political claims.

Black Power therefore altered more than the relationship between Blacks and whites inside SNCC. It changed the political vocabulary available to Blacks and Jews alike. Black activists increasingly insisted on the right to organize as Black people around Black interests, while Jewish activists increasingly asserted the legitimacy of organizing as Jews around Jewish interests. Dollinger argues that the late 1960s should therefore not be understood only as the destruction of an interracial alliance. The period also produced new forms of Black and Jewish ethnic self-definition and eventually a different kind of relationship between the communities.¹⁴

The difficulty was that stronger self-determination made coalition more complicated. During the most celebrated phase of the Southern civil-rights struggle, Blacks and Jews could unite against visible structures of injustice without settling every difference in how they understood American society. Jim Crow voting restrictions, legally segregated schools and racially exclusionary public accommodations presented identifiable barriers against which an interracial movement could organize. Once some of those barriers began to fall, the questions moved deeper into the organization of power itself.

The emerging disputes concerned who should control Black schools, who should own businesses in Black neighborhoods, who should lead Black political organizations and how much authority institutions outside Black communities should retain when they supplied funding or professional expertise. Integration itself also became more contested. Was freedom primarily the right of Black people to enter institutions from which they had been excluded, or did equality require changing who owned, governed and benefited from those institutions? These questions did not repudiate the earlier struggle against segregation; they grew partly from its success.

They also exposed an important difference in the historical trajectories of many Blacks and Jews. By the postwar period, many white American Jews had gained significant access to universities, professions, neighborhoods and institutions that had once excluded them. Dollinger notes the paradox directly: Jews remained vulnerable to antisemitism while also possessing forms of racial privilege relative to African Americans.¹⁵ Black activists could look at the same society and see that formal legal access had not produced comparable political control, accumulated wealth or institutional power in Black communities. The two groups could therefore share an opposition to discrimination while drawing different conclusions about whether eliminating discriminatory barriers was sufficient.

That disagreement was ultimately deeper than the question of whether Jewish or other white activists should remain inside SNCC. It concerned what liberation meant after some of the doors had been opened. One vision emphasized making American institutions genuinely accessible to those they had excluded. Another increasingly asked who owned those institutions, who governed them and whether structures that had helped produce racial inequality could deliver justice merely by admitting Black people into them.

Those questions would soon move into businesses, neighborhoods, schools and national politics. Ocean Hill-Brownsville would make the conflict painfully concrete, while later disputes over affirmative action, community control and political influence would keep versions of it alive. Even some contemporary Black-Jewish disagreements become easier to understand when placed against this longer history.

The previous essay examined one contemporary manifestation of institutional power through AIPAC. Looking backward reveals that the underlying debate began much earlier. Blacks and Jews learned during the Civil Rights Movement that they could agree passionately about the injustice of discrimination while disagreeing about the distribution of power and about what should follow once discriminatory barriers began to fall.

Black Power forced that disagreement into the open, and the next fault line followed from it naturally: Did justice require opening the American system more fully, or did parts of the system itself need to be reconstructed? That is where the series goes next.

Notes

1. Jonathan Mark, “Freedom Summer Memories,” New York Jewish Week, July 16, 2014, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, https://www.jta.org/2014/07/16/ny/freedom-summer-memories. Mark’s article quotes Dorothy Zellner estimating that perhaps 10–15 percent of SNCC’s staff was Jewish by 1964 and emphasizing that SNCC did not record volunteers’ religious affiliation.
2. SNCC Digital Gateway, “Volunteer Orientation for Freedom Summer in Oxford, Ohio,” June 1964, accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/events/volunteer-orientation-freedom-summer/. The Gateway reports that almost 90 percent of the nearly 1,000 Freedom Summer volunteers were white.
3. Mark, “Freedom Summer Memories.” Mark reports the frequently cited estimate that Jews constituted at least half of the nearly 1,000 white volunteers and quotes Julian Bond describing Jewish participation as far out of proportion to Jews’ share of the population.
4. SNCC Digital Gateway, “Challenging White Power,” accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/the-story-of-sncc/challenging-white-power/. The account records eighty volunteers attacked and beaten, thirty-seven churches bombed or burned, thirty Black homes and businesses bombed or burned, and the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
5. SNCC Digital Gateway, “SNCC Debates Freedom Summer,” January 1964, accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/events/sncc-debates-freedom-summer/. The account identifies Charlie Cobb, Ivanhoe Donaldson, MacArthur Cotton and Sam Block among those worried that white volunteers would undermine SNCC’s emphasis on developing local Black leadership.
6. SNCC Digital Gateway, “Volunteer Orientation for Freedom Summer in Oxford, Ohio.” The account records Bob Moses explaining the strategic importance of white volunteers and notes that the press focused disproportionately on white volunteers while largely overlooking Black volunteers and the project’s Black leadership.
7. SNCC Digital Gateway, “SNCC Debates Freedom Summer.” The Gateway reports that Fannie Lou Hamer and Amzie Moore supported bringing white volunteers and records Hamer’s argument against reproducing segregation within the movement.
8. SNCC Digital Gateway, “MFDP Challenge at Democratic National Convention,” August 1964, accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/events/mfdp-challenge-at-democratic-national-convention/. The account describes the Johnson administration’s opposition, the proposed two-seat compromise, its rejection by the MFDP, and SNCC veterans’ later characterization of Atlantic City as a turning point.
9. SNCC Digital Gateway, “Political & Economic Power,” accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/our-voices/emergence-black-power/political-economic/; and SNCC Digital Gateway, “Black Power,” accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/resources/themes/black-power/. These accounts connect SNCC’s Black Power politics to its experience building the independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization and trying to convert voting rights into political and economic power.
10. SNCC Central Committee, “SNCC Statement on White House Conference,” 1966, reproduced by SNCC Digital Gateway, “White House Conference on Civil Rights,” accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/white-house-conference-civil-rights/. The statement calls upon Black Americans to build independent political, economic and cultural institutions and declares that those who suffer should determine how their lives are changed.
11. SNCC Digital Gateway, “SNCC Staff Meeting at Peg Leg Bates Club,” December 1966, accessed September 20, 2026, https://snccdigital.org/events/sncc-staff-meeting-peg-leg-bates-club/; see also SNCC Digital Gateway, “Dottie & Bob Zellner Present GROW Proposal,” May 1967, https://snccdigital.org/events/dottie-bob-zellner-present-grow-proposal/. The latter account states that SNCC stripped its remaining white members of voting privileges and encouraged them to organize in white communities.
12. Mark, “Freedom Summer Memories.” Zellner recalled leaving SNCC after five years as painful while also saying that she understood the reasoning behind the organization’s change.
13. Marc Dollinger, “Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s,” American Jewish Historical Society, February 3, 2019, https://ajhs.org/black-power-jewish-politics-reinventing-the-alliance-in-the-1960s/. Dollinger argues that important Jewish leaders understood and sometimes supported Black Power and that Soviet Jewry activists and American Zionists drew upon Black Power’s politics and tactics.
14. Dollinger, “Black Power, Jewish Politics.” Dollinger argues for understanding the late 1960s not simply as a Black-Jewish schism but as the emergence of new forms of ethnic self-definition and a different kind of alliance.
15. Dollinger, “Black Power, Jewish Politics.” Dollinger notes that white Jews remained subject to discrimination while also recognizing the racial privilege they enjoyed relative to African Americans.