The Long History of Jewish-Black Solidarity

From the Kansas Territory in the 1850s to the Supreme Court in 1968, Jewish

Americans stood with Black Americans in the fights against slavery, segregation, and

racial discrimination. They fought in them, funded them, argued them in court, wrote

the laws that ended them, marched in them, and died in them. What follows is a partial

record.

What Jewish Americans Did for the Black Freedom Struggle

• 1850s — Bleeding Kansas. August Bondi and other Jewish immigrants, stood

alongside the abolitionist John Brown against pro-slavery forces in the Kansas

Territory.

• 1861–1865 — The Civil War. Bondi served and fought in the Union Army to

fight against slavery.

1907 — New Orleans. Louis Armstrong, seven years old and desperately poor, went to work for the Karnofskys, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family running a junk-hauling and coal business. They fed him at their table, sang to him, and treated him with a warmth he said he had not received from white families in the segregated South. When he set his heart on a five-dollar cornet in a shop window, Morris Karnofsky advanced him two dollars so he could buy it. It was his first instrument. Armstrong wore a Star of David for most of his adult life, and near the end of it wrote a memoir about that year, published after his death. In it he recalled noticing, even at seven, that the white families around them looked down on the Jewish family he worked for — and that he had seen how they were treated.

• 1909 — The founding of the NAACP. Jewish American Henry Moskowitz was

among the small group who created this organization to fight racial discrimination

through law, lobbying, and public pressure rather than protest alone. Its central

weapon has been litigation — suing segregated school districts, discriminatory

employers, and states that blocked Black voters, then pushing those cases up to the

Supreme Court. Jewish Americans such as Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Rabbi Stephen S.

Wise, Lillian Wald, and Julius Rosenwald signed the founding call.

• 1912–1932 — The Rosenwald Schools. Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish

philanthropist, partnered with Booker T. Washington and Black communities to

help build nearly five thousand schools and other educational facilities for Black

children across the segregated South.

• 1914–1975 — Jewish leadership inside the NAACP. Jewish American Joel

Spingarn chaired the board, served as treasurer, and was president from 1930 until

his death in 1939; in 1914 he created the Spingarn Medal, still one of the

organization’s highest honors. His brother Arthur Spingarn ran the legal committee

and served as president from 1940 to 1965. Kivie Kaplan, a Boston businessman

and son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, succeeded him and was president until

his death in 1975.

• 1930 — The Margold Report. Jewish American Nathan Margold wrote the

memorandum that became the blueprint for the NAACP’s legal strategy against

segregation and for what became the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

• 1954 — Brown v. Board of Education. Jack Greenberg, the son of Jewish

immigrants, was one of the lawyers who argued the consolidated school

desegregation cases before the Supreme Court. In 1961 , who had led that litigation

and would become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court in 1967, handpicked

him to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which he ran for twenty-three

years.

• 1956–1968 — Behind Dr. King. Stanley Levison, a Jewish attorney from New

York, raised money for the Montgomery bus boycott, helped build the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) — the organization Dr. King founded in

1957, which ran the major campaigns of the movement — drafted articles and

speeches published under Dr. King’s name, and refused payment for any of it.

• 1963 — The March on Washington. Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the

American Jewish Congress, spoke before hundreds of thousands of Americans

against racial injustice.

• 1964 — St. Augustine, Florida. A group of Reform rabbis was arrested

alongside Dr. King while challenging segregation in public accommodations. From

jail they wrote a joint letter, “Why We Went”, explaining why they had come. In

short, the letter spoke about the importance of showing up and taking risks for the

values they believe in. They argued that segregation was a religious question, not

merely a political one, and that a rabbi who stayed silent was failing his own

tradition. They also invoked their own history directly: a people who remembered

their own slavery and persecution were obligated to act for others facing the same.

The line most often quoted is the one about silence — that the greatest danger,

second only to silence itself, is losing faith in people's capacity to act.

• 1964 — Freedom Summer. Jews made up roughly half of the young volunteers

who went to Mississippi to register Black voters.

• 1964 — Mississippi. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jewish civil

rights workers, were murdered while helping Black Americans register to vote.

• 1964 and 1965 — The two landmark acts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the

Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of the Religious

Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C., which housed the

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights for decades.

• 1965 — Selma to Montgomery. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched

alongside Dr. King, fighting for Black voting rights.

• 1968 — Fair Housing. In Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., seven national Jewish

organizations and [NUMBER] local Jewish councils supported the fight before the

Supreme Court against racial discrimination in housing, contributing to the

landmark ruling that stopped racial discrimination in the sale and rental of

property.

• Across the country. Jewish attorney Leo Nevas practiced law in Westport,

Connecticut for seventy-three years, specializing in real estate, land use, and zoning

— the body of law through which housing discrimination ran — and served on the

Connecticut Commission on Human Rights, the state agency that enforced

Connecticut’s anti-discrimination statutes. He was one of thousands of Jewish

Americans who worked town by town and statute by statute for the right of Black

Americans to live where they chose, own property, hold a job, and send their

children to whatever school they chose. For every name in this record there were

Jewish Americans doing the same work in their own towns, whose names appear in

no history book.

Why the Jews in America feel a Special Bond

with the Blacks in America

Jews were kept out of neighborhoods, universities, professions, and clubs by rules that

were rarely written down and never had to be. Much of it is within living memory. Some

of it has not ended.

IMMIGRATION

• The Johnson-Reed Act, 1924. National-origin quotas sharply restricted

immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, where most of the world’s Jews

then lived. The quotas remained in force through the years when Jews were trying

to escape Nazi Europe.

JOBS

• Hiring bars. Employment advertisements specified Christians only. Major law

firms, banks, insurance companies, hospitals, and universities declined to hire Jews

outright or held them to a fixed number.

LAND AND HOUSING

• Restrictive covenants. Deeds across the country carried clauses barring the sale

or rental of property to Jews, alongside identical clauses barring Black buyers. The

Supreme Court held such covenants judicially unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer

in 1948, but the practice continued informally for years afterward.

• Resort and hotel exclusion. Hotels and resorts advertised themselves openly as

restricted, and the phrase carried a clear meaning to anyone reading it.

SCHOOLS

• Professional schools. Medical and law schools operated their own limits on

Jewish admissions well into the mid-twentieth century.

• The Harvard quota, 1922. Jewish enrollment at Harvard had risen from roughly

6 percent in 1908 to 21.5 percent by 1922. President A. Lawrence Lowell proposed

capping it at 15 percent, writing that antisemitic feeling grew in proportion to the

number of Jews on campus. A faculty committee rejected the open quota in 1923.

• What replaced it. Harvard capped total enrollment and shifted admissions

toward assessments of character, fitness, and geographic distribution — criteria that

held Jewish numbers down for decades without ever naming Jews. Other American

and Canadian universities adopted similar systems.

CLUBS AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

• The 1959 New York Times survey. A spot survey of private sports clubs in the

New York metropolitan area found a consistent pattern of exclusion of both Jewish

and Black members — enforced by nomination requirements and blackball votes.

• Why Jewish country clubs exist. They were founded because Jews were

blackballed from existing clubs. By 1928 there were 34 Jewish social and country

clubs in the greater New York area alone.

• An Anti-Defamation League survey of 803 country clubs. Among the

predominantly Christian clubs surveyed, 89 held quotas on Jewish membership and

416 admitted no Jews at all.

• The mechanism. None of these clubs wrote the exclusion into their bylaws. It ran

through who was permitted to propose a candidate and how few votes were needed

to reject one.

• It has not fully ended. Formal restrictions on Jewish membership began to fall

away in the 1970s and 1980s, and more clubs opened to Jewish and Black members

through the 1990s. Even so, some clubs that are open to all on paper still admit few

Jews or none, through pretexts rather than written rules.

PRESENT DAY

Jews are roughly 2 percent of the United States population and were the

targets of 16 percent of all hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2024

• FBI hate crime statistics, 2024. Of 11,679 reported hate crime incidents, 3,096

were single-bias offenses motivated by religious bias — nearly 70 percent of them

anti-Jewish, more than seven times the next most targeted religious group. The

offenses include murder, assault, acts of intimidation, and vandalism/property

destruction.