Remarks delivered at the Fifth National Conference of

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

Sunday, June 17, 2007 - Fordham University School of Law

A Forgotten Black-Jewish Alliance
by Dr. Rafael Medoff

The conventional history of relations between Jews and blacks in the United States is one of Jews helping blacks, from the Jews involved in establishing the NAACP, to Jewish philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald who helped finance black colleges, to the many Jews who were active in the civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s.

But today I want to share with you the Wyman Institute’s research-in-progress on a little-known alliance of American Jews and African-Americans, which took place twenty years before the famous civil rights movement. In a startling reversal of roles, this was an alliance in which blacks were helping Jews.

* * *

The Bergson Group had several kinds of supporters.

Some were financial supporters, mostly behind the scenes, who contributed the funds that made it possible to pay the bills and carry on its activities.

Some were political supporters, mostly Members of Congress, who helped push the Bergson agenda of rescue in the political arena.

The third crucial category of supporters were individuals of prominence from all walks of life, who lent their names to the Bergson Group’s letterhead or its hundreds of newspaper advertisements, spoke at its event, or in other ways publicly expressed their support for the group’s positions.

I would argue that it was this third category that gave the movement its real muscle, and it was in this area that African-American leaders stepped up.

Here’s what I mean by “real muscle.” The Bergson Group was trying to change U.S. foreign policy. It didn’t have the political power to directly influence the Roosevelt administration, so it had to bring pressure from other directions, that is, Congress and public opinion.

This was not at all like mainstream Jewish organizations, which sought to wield influence by virtue of their claim to represent some segment of the Jewish community. The Bergson Group, by contrast, was a new organization, without a membership base in the Jewish community, so it couldn’t claim to represent American Jews. Nor did they want to. Instead, they deliberately staked out a position as an ecumenical organization, and they claimed to represent the feelings of a large part of the American public. How could they demonstrate this was so? By presenting individuals of prominence, especially non-Jews, who supported them.

This was what made such a strong impression on Members of Congress, the media, and ultimately some officials in the Roosevelt administration--the fact that the Bergson Group represented the feelings of enough people, and enough people of political or cultural importance, that they could not be ignored.

Which brings us back to the significance of African-American support for Bergson. It was not that the black community as a whole was a powerful electoral force to whom politicians had to pay attention, although its numbers were starting to grow. But it was certainly true that the African-Americans who supported Bergson were the African-Americans who commanded the most respect among America’s political and cultural elite. So their association with Bergson gave the Bergson Group some additional credibility and publicity. Their involvement made the cause even more interesting, more worthy of public attention, and therefore more of a potential political nuisance.

When a White House aide or a Congressman or a State Department official looked at the long list of names on the Bergson Group’s letterhead or the signatories on their newspaper ads, some of the names they found were:

* Black labor union leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

* W.E.B. DuBois, the leading African-American intellectual of that era.

* John Gandy, president of the Virginia State College for Negroes.

* Canada Lee, one of the most famous black actors of the day.

* Two of the most famous African-American authors of that period, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, were sponsors of the Bergson group’s July 1943 Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The conference, which was held in New York City. More than 1,500 delegates listened to panels of experts on transportation, relief methods, military affairs, and other fields, discussing specific, practical ways to save Jews from the Holocaust. This was an extremely important event because it directly challenged the Roosevelt administration’s claim that rescuing Jews from Hitler was physically impossible.

The entire question of whether the U.S. would rescue Jewish refugees revolved around this issue, and the Bergson Group was throwing down the gauntlet. It was thus especially important to show that the conference represented a wide cross section of American public opinion, religiously, ethnically and racially diverse in its composition. Thus it was particularly impressive not only that Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston lent their names as co-sponsors, but that Walter White, the widely-respected executive director of the NAACP, was one of the featured speakers on that panel.

Our initial research in the NAACP Papers, which are housed in the National Archives, and in the various collections of Bergson Group documents, has not turned up the actual text of White’s speech. Hopefully it will yet be located as our research continues.

And there were other prominent African-Americans who likewise went further in their support of the Bergson Group than lending their names. For example,
the famous singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson, and band leader Count Basie were among the stars of a Madison Square Garden “Show of Shows” organized by the Bergson Group in 1944 to raise money for its rescue campaign.

I should also mention Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem, the first African-American to represent New York in the U.S. House of Representatives, who was also a Bergson supporter. At one Bergson group rally in 1948, Rev. Powell and the Irish-American lawyer Paul O’Dwyer stood backstage and watched while an ineffective speaker sought vainly to raise funds. “Powell became impatient,” O’Dwyer later recalled, “and whispered to me, ‘This guy is blowing it. Paul, I think this calls for a Baptist minister and an Irish revolutionary. You handle that microphone over there and I’ll handle this one.’ In unison we rose and and in unison we took the microphones gently away from [the speaker]. We collected $75,000 from the crowd that night.”

In emphasizing the significance of Walter White’s role at the Emergency Conference, or Robeson and Count Basie at the benefit concert, or Congressman Powell at the aforementioned rally, let me be clear that I am in no way minimizing the significance of those who only lent their names to the Bergson Group. It is no small matter to put one’s reputation on the line by signing on to a controversial newspaper advertisement or event. This is especially the case with celebrities, whose endorsement of a product or cause are in constant demand. Celebrities know that their names alone have power. Allowing Bergson to use their names was, in fact, a very significant contribution for Hughes, Hurston and the others to make.

And there is another reason why this African-American support for Bergson was remarkable. African-American leaders had plenty of their own problems with the Roosevelt administration. For example, in order to keep his Southern allies in Congress, President Roosevelt had refused to support anti-lynching legislation. And other items of concern to the African-American community had likewise not advanced as black leaders had hoped. Yet at the same time, African-Americans regarded Roosevelt and the New Deal far more sympathetically than they did Republicans. Thanks to the First Lady, they had greater access to the White House than ever before, and good reason to hope that at least some of their goals might be achieved. Thus it would have been understandable if a Walter White or Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. had chosen to stay away from Bergson in order to avoid antagonizing the Roosevelt administration. And yet, remarkably, they chose to embrace the Bergson Group despite the risk of being seen as supporting FDR’s critics.

As I have said, the alliance between the Bergson Group and prominent African-Americans was something of a reversal of the usual roles, since it involved blacks helping Jews rather than the other way around. But there was also another interesting chapter in this relationship, in which the two camps collaborated to advance black civil rights.

I am referring to the production of “A Flag is Born,” a pro-Zionist play authored by Ben Hecht and staged by the Bergson Group in the autumn of 1946 and spring of 1947. Later this afternoon, we will hear from the son of Celia Adler, who was the co-star of the play. After a successful run on Broadway, A Flag is Born was taken to various other cities.

It’s the one in Baltimore to which I want to call your attention. The original plan was to stage it at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., but it was relocated to Baltimore's Maryland Theater because Hecht would not permit his works to be staged at theaters, such as the National, which barred African-Americans. But Hecht and the Bergson Group discovered, just before the Baltimore showing, that the Maryland Theater restricted blacks to the balcony.

One civil rights activist at the time described this policy, of restricting blacks to the balcony, as “more vicious than total exclusion, because, as the price of attending plays, the Negro is forced to acknowledge an inferior status by accepting segregation, which more than offsets, in degradation of morale, the cultural advantage of being able to attend.”

The Bergson Group received word of this restrictive policy just the day before the show, from Baltimore NAACP leader Juanita Mitchell. Bergson leaders quickly consulted with NAACP national secretary Walter White and then presented the Maryland Theater management with a plea and a threat: rescind the seating discrimination, or face NAACP picketers with signs proclaiming "There Is No Difference Between Jim Crow in Maryland and Persecution in Palestine!"

Since the play was fortuitously scheduled to open on February 12, Lincoln's Birthday, protesters invoking the memory of the Great Emancipator would --as the NAACP put it-- "have a particular news value."

While management was mulling over that demand, the Bergson Group added a second warning: Professor Fowler Harper, former deputy to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Bergson activist, intended "to personally test this discriminatory [policy] by taking two colored persons as his guests to tonight's performance": Mrs. Dovey Roundtree, a civil rights activist and former Women's Army Corps captain, and Miss Mary Johnson, a secretary at Bergson headquarters in New York.

The pressure succeeded. The Maryland Theater management agreed to recognize the Bergson Group as the "lessee of the theatre" for the duration of the run. That made the ticket agents employees of the Bergsonites and subject to whatever seating policy the activists chose to adopt. The result: at least ten African-Americans attended the opening night performance of “A Flag Is Born” in Baltimore and, in the words, of a black weekly newspaper, "were seated indiscriminately, some holding orchestra and box seats, without untoward results." Later that spring, the Maryland Theater officially and permanently ended segregated seating.

The national office of the NAACP hailed the "tradition-shattering victory." And indeed, the victory at the Maryland Theater soon became an important weapon in the arsenal of Baltimore's civil rights activists. They were able to use it as a precedent to help bring about the end of segregated seating in other local theaters in the months to follow.

After the opening performance in Baltimore, Ben Hecht issued this statement: "I am proud that it was my play which terminated one of the most disgraceful practices of our country's history. For the first time in the history of the State of Maryland, Negroes were permitted to attend the legitimate theatre without discrimination. I am proud that it was ‘A Flag is Born’ which they attended without insult. Breaking down this vicious and indecent tradition in Maryland is worthy of the high purpose for which ‘Flag’ was conceived and written. The incident is forceful testimony to the proposition that to fight discrimination and injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group.”

Judging from the support that African-Americans gave to the fight for rescue from the Holocaust in the previous years, I would say that was a sentiment with which they would heartily agree.