Soltz wendy unheard voices and unseen fights

Unheard Voices and Unseen Fights: Jews, Segregation, and Higher Education in the South, 1910–1964 Dissertation Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University Wendy Fergusson Soltz, BA, MA Department of History The Ohio State University 2016 Dissertation Committee: Robin Judd, Advisor Steven Conn Matthew Goldish Isaac Weiner Copyright by Wendy Fergusson Soltz 2016 Abstract Jewish involvement in civil rights for African Americans has often been shrouded in myth. Typical tropes declare that Jews built an alliance with African Americans based on a sense of common oppression but that Southern Jews stayed quiet concerning civil rights issues fearing antisemitic repercussion. This dissertation uses archival research and builds on past scholarly work to overturn these tropes and reveal the complex situation of Jews in the South who promoted higher education for African Americans. Jews interested in civil rights between 1910 and 1965 did not formally build an alliance with African Americans, and those who lived in the South were not quiet; however, they operated in different and unorganized ways compared to their coreligionists in the North.

Southern college campuses provided a unique site for Jews to take part in the struggle for enabling African Americans to pursue higher education. By its very nature, the college campus fostered a liberal atmosphere but was surrounded by a landscape riddled with antisemitic, antiforeigner, and anti-Communist sentiments. Jews who chose to take part in this struggle in the South simultaneously questioned their own identity as both nonwhite and nonblack and also American (insider) and foreigner (outsider). This constant negotiation hindered their ability to make inroads, thus Jewish contributions in the South were neither obviously nor immediately successful.

ii Dedication To my grandparents (of blessed memory) who emphasized, and my parents who continually reemphasize, the importance of higher education. iii Acknowledgments Throughout my graduate work, I repeatedly declared that I had the best advisor at Ohio State University and I sincerely meant it. Thank you Robin for your wisdom, patience, guidance, and friendship. Thank you for believing in me more than I believed in myself and putting up with overwhelming amounts of passive voice and unnecessary (but, I still argued, interesting) archival material of which I just could not let go.

Thank you to Matt Goldish and Isaac Weiner at OSU and Steve Conn now at Miami University for serving on my committee and offering advice on the dissertation that follows. I want to thank Mark Bauman, Patrick Potyondy, and Leslie Soltz for reading and providing feedback on this dissertation and to my copy editor, Michael Levine. The 2014 American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Conference participants were also crucial in providing feedback. I am indebted to many archivists for their mental catalogs and guidance during the research phase: Gary Zola, Kevin Proffitt, and Dana Herman at the American Jewish Archives; Jeremy Katz and Mickey Harvey at the Breman Archives in Atlanta; John Bence and Kathleen Shoemaker at Emory University Archives; Kayin Shabazz at Atlanta University Archives; Matt Turi at University of North Carolina Archives; Amy McDonald at Duke University Archives; Kevin Ray and Thomas Land of University of Alabama Archives; and Aisha Johnson at Fisk University Archives.

To my friends: thank iv you Corinne Warrener Catalano for your continued hospitality in Atlanta and Daniel Parmer for your assistance with quantitative analysis. To my interviewees: thank you Fred Leffert, Larry Pike, and Joel Shurkin for speaking with me about your experiences at Emory. It took incredible resources to travel and conduct my research, but first I must express my gratitude to the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at OSU for continued assistance and support of my work. Other funding assistance for this project came from the OSU Department of History, the College of Arts and Sciences at OSU, the OSU Alumni Grant, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion Grant at OSU, the American Academy for Jewish Research grant, and the American Jewish Archives Marcus Center Fellowship.

To my daughter, Eleora Margalit: thank you for conveying to me the urgency to complete this dissertation and to my sisters, Katy, Liz, and Sheryl: thank you for watching her so I could write. Finally, thank you to Micah, my ever-present calm voice of reason and simultaneously my loudest cheerleader.BA, Anthropology, minor in Spanish, Indiana University 2001–2002 .Summer 2003 Graduate Student in Hebrew Program, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel 2004 .MA, Anthropology and Museum Studies, The George Washington University 2007 .MA, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women and Gender Studies, Brandeis University Fields of Study Major Field: History Primary Field: Modern Jewish History Secondary Fields: Modern US History and Public History vi Table of Contents Abstract .1 Chapter One: “I Regret To Inform You…” Jewish Job Applicants to Fisk University and Atlanta University, 1910-1954 .22 Chapter Two: Just Miles Away but Worlds Apart: Jewish Participation in Integration Programs at Black Mountain College and Highlander Folk School, 1933–1964 .73 Chapter Three: Imagining Jewish Activists and Activism at the University of North Carolina and the University of Alabama, 1945–1964 .125 Chapter Four: Town and Gown: The Complicated Triangle of Desegregation, the Private University, and Jewish-owned Stores and Businesses, 1945–1964 .252 Appendix A: Discussion on Terms .266 vii Introduction “And Jews were involved in that? In the South?” This was the response I received from an historian over coffee one morning when I described my dissertation research. I was accustomed to this response—people typically expressed surprise when I explained that I was writing about Jews who both lived in the South and advocated for higher education for African Americans beginning in 1910. Some individuals were surprised that Jews even lived in the South; others were baffled by their early involvement in civil rights work; and a few shared their knowledge of Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago philanthropist who built thousands of elementary schools for African Americans.

Finally, a number remembered the Freedom Riders from the North: the Jewish activists who travelled south temporarily to combat segregated public transportation in the 1960s. For these individuals and others I spoke to, the history of Jewish involvement in desegregating higher education in the South, by Jews who actually lived in the South, was an unfamiliar topic. There is an important reason why: their actions were largely unknown and many were unsuccessful. This dissertation examines the ways in which Jews were involved in higher education for African Americans in the South from 1910 to 1964.

It traces their engagement at the individual level and uses eight case studies to reveal active and vocal Jews living, studying, and working on campuses in the South. My research confronts three oft-repeated scholarly assumptions about Southern Jews and civil rights activism: 1 first, the idea that Jews and African Americans built a formal alliance; second, the notion that Jewish involvement in civil rights activism was confined to the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s; and third, the idea that Southern Jews remained silent on civil rights issues because they feared violent antisemitic repercussions. This project complicates these commonly accepted tropes and reveals their inaccuracies. Significance The notion that Jews and African Americans were natural allies, an assertion that appeared as early as 1977, has been a mainstay in scholarship on this topic.

American Jewish historian Hasia Diner argues that Jews and African Americans found solidarity in oppression, and that by combating discrimination against African Americans, Jews believed they were also fighting discrimination against all groups, including themselves. According to Diner, the early involvement of prominent Jews, such as Joel and Arthur Spingarn and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) shows that the “Jewish factor” in civil rights work was not accidental or random.1 Most scholars agree that before World War II, Jewish involvement in civil rights issues increased, and that this involvement had its golden age in the 1940s and 1950s with work done by American Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Jewish Congress; scholars also generally agree that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 1 Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 149.

2 Jewish involvement in civil rights work declined due to antisemitism within the Black Power movement.2 Other scholars, however, argue that Jews did not always find a common bond in oppression with African Americans and that Jews have often incorrectly imagined the needs of African Americans. Ultimately, these scholars argue, the two groups had different experiences and thus different needs.3 While Jews faced problems of acceptance and discrimination in the United States, African Americans encountered different obstacles because they came to this country as slaves.4 These scholars argue that it is pointless to continue trying to label the complicated relationship between African Americans and Jews: “focusing only on [animosity between African Americans and Jews] tends toward reducing the two groups’ relation to a simplistic binary…. Viewing 2 Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: Free Press, 1995), 15; For a top-down approach, see Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); See also this dissertation’s conclusion. 3 Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), and Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

See also Cheryl Greenberg, “Negotiating Coalition: Black and Jewish Civil Rights Agencies in the Twentieth Century,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 153–76. In addition, several edited volumes published in the 1990s also grappled with the notion of a formalized alliance: Jack Salzman, Adina Back, and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews (New York: George Braziller, 1992); V. Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil, eds., African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998); and Maurianne Adams and John H., Strangers and Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks & Jews in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

Litwack, Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998). 3 the two groups only as enemies or comrades limits the ramifications of their relations.”5 Finally, labeling groups of people over large spans of time is inherently problematic: “to speak of ‘The Jews,’ just as to speak of ‘The Blacks,’ always distorts, and almost always offends.”6 In this project I never assume a formalized Black-Jewish alliance at any time during the twentieth century, although in a few circumstances (scattered about in all four chapters), individual Jews did empathize with the African American situation specifically because of their Jewishness. The story I tell includes these idiosyncratic Jews; it does not focus on Jewish agencies or institutions, for I show how, at the grassroots level, individual Jews grappled with their own place in American society in terms of race, ethnicity, and class outside the realm of Judaism and formal Jewish institutions. Using higher education as a window to examine this negotiation from the ground up exposes the falsehoods of the belief that Jewish involvement in civil rights was limited to its golden age from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.

In 2005, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, who coined the term the long civil rights movement, argued that the Civil Rights Movement consisted of a series of local struggles rather than a wide, sweeping national campaign, and she consequently dated the movement’s origins to the 1920s and 1930s.7 Adopting a “long civil rights” perspective, this dissertation’s exploration of Jewish engagement in civil rights activism begins as early as 1910. McGraw, Two Covenants: Representations of Southern Jewishness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 146.