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........

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