When Blacks and Jews Began to See America Differently

Reform or Reconstruction?

When Blacks and Jews Began to See America Differently

The previous essay examined one of the first major fault lines inside the Black-Jewish civil-rights alliance. Jewish participation in the Black freedom struggle had been extraordinary, particularly among the white volunteers who went South during Freedom Summer. Yet Black Power increasingly insisted that solidarity did not entitle white allies to determine the direction of Black organizations. Behind that disagreement was a deeper one: once discriminatory barriers began to fall, who would possess the power to govern the institutions behind them?

The distinction should not be exaggerated into two monolithic political positions. Black integrationists, nationalists, socialists, liberals and conservatives disagreed among themselves, just as Jewish liberals, radicals, socialists and conservatives did. Martin Luther King Jr. remained committed to interracial democracy while becoming increasingly critical of American economic structures, and Jewish radicals challenged established institutions even as major Jewish organizations continued to rely heavily on courts, legislation and conventional political advocacy. What mattered was not unanimity within either community but the fact that their different historical trajectories increasingly encouraged different judgments about how much change equality required.

For many white American Jews, the decades after World War II provided substantial evidence that American institutions could change. Earlier generations had confronted university quotas, employment discrimination, residential exclusion and open antisemitism. By the postwar period, however, many of those barriers had weakened. Historian Naomi W. Cohen describes growing Jewish access to higher education, the professions, business and suburban life, while Marc Dollinger emphasizes the resulting paradox: white Jews could remain conscious of their history as a vulnerable minority while also acquiring forms of racial privilege unavailable to African Americans.¹ That experience gave liberal reform credibility. If courts could prohibit discrimination, universities could dismantle quotas and political organization could open once-hostile institutions, then America might be deeply flawed without being beyond repair.

Black Americans had accumulated reasons for greater skepticism. Voting rights could make registration possible without ensuring that Black communities controlled local political institutions. School desegregation could remove a legal barrier without guaranteeing educational equality. Employment law could prohibit explicit discrimination without changing who owned businesses or possessed accumulated wealth. SNCC’s work in Lowndes County, Alabama, made the distinction concrete. After passage of the Voting Rights Act, organizers helped local residents develop an independent Black-led........

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