Did Jews HELP Blacks in Civil Rights?
by Tingba Muhammad
Today if one needs to find the most “virulent Black anti-Semites,” it is not hard at all. Just survey the programs offered by the leading Black organizations for the one[s] that seek ECONOMIC empowerment. Look for those that advocate the building of Black businesses, banks, hospitals, neighborhoods, schools, and colleges, and you will find the “ANTI-SEMITE” label affixed to their front door. And it has nothing to do with the words they say—it is all about the money.
New research shows just how dependent Jews were on Black slavery and sharecropping for their own wealth. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia:
“During the seventeenth century the sugar industry was monopolized by the Jew….In fact, the cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them.”
Indeed, they became the richest white subgroup in the richest nation in the history of the world through their investments in Black slavery and economic dominance of Black labor. So when Black leaders seek to disconnect Blacks from that master–slave relationship, it is taken by Jews as a DIRECT attack on their livelihood—which, in fact, it is. So around the turn of the century, Black leaders were speaking rather boldly about Black economic empowerment, which alarmed Jewish leadership. So they actively worked to derail this potent leadership agenda and replace it with a more suitable doctrine of subservience.
It is no longer a secret that the modern bi-racial Civil Rights Movement was the brainchild of white Jews who needed access to the inner sanctum of American business, education, and housing but had no legal way to pry open that door. They feared that unilateral Jewish pressure in those areas would very likely create an “anti-Semitic” backlash. They had harmoniously tucked themselves in amongst the hordes of ethnic Europeans arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and saw no value in negatively distinguishing themselves by protesting against the WASP power structure. They formed a “strategic alliance” with Blacks, started “civil rights” organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL), funded them, and sent the Black masses out to take the physical and psychic abuse that resulted from their protests.
The Jewish leadership’s legal strategy involved arguing cases involving Black plaintiffs to establish legal precedents and political rights that all groups could then use for their own advancement. Blacks seeking basic human rights and economic relief from crushing poverty and unremitting exploitation were largely ignored and ultimately abandoned as soon as the legal tools were in place and available to Jews, women, and gays. Blacks took the beatings, racism, lynchings, and insults to pry open the doors; white Jewish “allies,” briefcases in hand, slipped in. End of “alliance.”
Blacks who were in the freedom movement (as distinct from the civil rights movement) were not fooled by the ploy and castigated the negroes who collaborated with this ruse as handpicked Uncle Toms. As early as 1918, even white people saw this deceptive trend in its infancy: “The NAACP…claims a membership of only 9,500,” wrote Edward Byron Reuter. “Of this membership many, perhaps the great majority, are white persons. Certainly the organization has always been financed and largely managed by white persons.” A horrified Marcus Garvey saw so many whites in the offices of the NAACP that he decided to come to America to start a true BLACK organization. A half-century later another writer noted that while the NAACP is white-controlled, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), “has a staff that at least maintains a Black façade.”
The “Non-economic liberalism” Scam
Another indicator of the Jews’ self-interested involvement in the early civil rights movement was their rejection of economic goals for Black empowerment—even though that was what Blacks truly needed and wanted. Moreover, the centerpiece of the Jews’ own empowerment strategy was almost ENTIRELY focused on economics. Instead, these Jews “forged a peculiar anti-economic philanthropy specifically designed for Black causes, married it to their integrationist legal strategy, hired some learned negroes to believe in it, and had them sell this patchwork philosophy to the Black masses under the name ‘civil rights.’” The architect of this “non-economic liberalism” was none other than the founding board chairman and second president of the NAACP, the Jewish Joel Spingarn, whose approach to Black advancement his biographer described thus:
“the black man’s struggle for full civil and political rights must take precedence over any program of economic advancement, for once color discrimination had been swept away, the black man would be able to compete successfully with his white counterpart in jobs, education, and other avenues to economic stability.”
Professor Harold Cruse provides an excellent analysis of the origin and application of “non-economic liberalism” in his Plural But Equal (pages 75–98), especially on p. 79:
“the guiding white philosophy of noneconomic liberalism was an insidiously debilitating leadership ideal to have been imposed on a nonwhite minority group seeking racial parity under American capitalism. Worse than that, noneconomic liberalism was a seductive entrapment into a fixed psychology of dependency, underdevelopment of social intelligence, and intellectual subservience.”
Spingarn and his white liberal comrades, who had gained control over Black affairs, “were well aware that the building of an independent economic foundation was the first order of business for every immigrant group seeking the ‘American dream.’ European newcomers had always found a ready market for the businesses they formerly operated in the old country, among the poor Black masses in America. A succession of new ‘ethnic’ Americans benefited from the capital generated by the Black laboring class—capital that, to this very day, is funneled directly into the hands of non-Black merchants, who, just as quickly, use the profits to build a sturdy economic infrastructure for their own people.”
“The income from their highly profitable retail establishments in the Black neighborhoods across America is soon converted into tuition for their own children, into investments in their own racially exclusive suburban enclaves, and into deposits in banks with exclusionary lending policies. The liberals knew that Blacks would need to establish the very same type of internal foundational support established by the white immigrants, in order to grapple with and overcome the crushing poverty and ignorance that slavery had wrought. Whites have always feared, however, that if Blacks adopted this method of economic empowerment for their own uplift, the traditional American formula for white elevation and control would be undermined.”
So “civil rights” served two Jewish goals: (1) removing legal barriers to their own growth and (2) sabotaging Black empowerment by steering Black leadership toward social and political “integration” and away from economic pursuits. Indeed, ANY and EVERY Black leader that seeks to establish economics as a goal is branded as an “anti-Semite” and marginalized. Ask Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan. In fact, ask Jesus. When the leading Jewish rabbis confirmed that Jesus was preaching land reform, according to Reza Aslan’s book Zealot, they decided to murder him. They were so upset with Jesus that—to this very day—the Talmud calls for him to be boiled in excrement!
Upon their passage in the 1960s, the civil rights laws would become the bludgeon by which Jews struck down the remaining barriers to their own access. Once they arrived in the upper echelons of corporate America, Jews joined their fellow white racists to effectively exclude “the Negro.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was referring to white liberals generally when he observed:
“White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro….When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.” [See Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos Or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 3–4.]
The day before Dr. King was murdered he spoke of “economic withdrawal” to bring “pain” to the enemies of Black freedom. One need only read his “Mountaintop” speech to understand his full embrace of an economic strategy. He had to be killed.
Dr. Tony Martin’s book The Jewish Onslaught addresses the subject. Also, David Levering Lewis’s Journal of American History article “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist strategies of Afro-American and Jewish elites from 1910 to the early 1930s” deals with the subject. Recent works are questioning the extent of the role actually played by Jews on the front lines of the struggle, suggesting that much of their involvement was through press releases and public relations.
Jews became top-heavy in the legal leadership of the “civil rights movement” and used the plight of Blacks suffering under Jim Crow discrimination as legal fodder to eliminate legal barriers against Jews—even though, according to Dr. Jeffrey Melnick, Jews
“had achieved the measure of economic and political power by 1915 that would make it impossible for them to be broadly oppressed through legal mechanisms such as Jim Crow laws. Nor was it likely that the sort of organized violence or threat of violence that terrorized African Americans would be leveled at Jews, Leo Frank notwithstanding. …. [A]s they eased up on their own claims for inclusion at the highest level of American society, Jewish leaders would discover that working for African American liberation would help them gain access to just that place.”
Jews could fight anti-Semitism “by remote control,” as David Levering Lewis points out, using Black suffering as the moral weight behind their own drive for legal reforms that would first and foremost benefit Jews. The strategy would push the “negro” issues to the front, whilst concealing the Jewish agenda. American Jewish Committee leader and NAACP board member Louis Marshall was always adamant about the benefits of Jews operating behind the scenes and thus using Black Americans as the Jews’ social and political shield, battering ram, and lightning rod. Jews would craft civil rights legislation in broad enough language to ensure its usage by all “minority groups.” Marshall was clear about this when he remarked in 1924 that he hoped the success of Black civil rights organizations “may incidentally benefit Jews.” Jewish Community Relations Council official Earl Rabb, writing in the late sixties, admitted: “Whatever the Jews have done, as Jews, in civil rights and antipoverty campaigns, they have done for themselves not for the negroes.” Moreover, as Lerone Bennett pointed out in 1964, Jews and whites “have played huge roles in shaping and braking” policies concerning Black people.
Sources: Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vols. 1-3 (Chicago: Historical Research Dept. of the Nation of Islam, 1991–2016); Lerone Bennett, “Structure: The Black Establishment,” in The Negro Mood and Other Essays (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964), 24-45; Harold Cruse, Plural But Equal (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987); Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006); J. Craig Jenkins and Craig M. Eckert, “Channeling Black Insurgency: Elite Patronage and Professional Social Movement Organizations in the Development of the Black Movement,” American Sociological Review 51 (Dec. 1986), 812-13, 815-16, 823-25, 828; David Levering Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 71, no. 3 (Dec. 1984), 543-564; Jeffrey Melnick, Black–Jewish Relations on Trial (Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2000), 125-26; C.E. Wilson, “What Ever Happened to the Negro’s Friend?” pts. 1 & 2, Liberator, May 1964, 17-19 & June 1964, 14-16; Reese Cleghorn, “The Angels Are White: Who Pays the Bills for Civil Rights?” New Republic, August 17, 1963, 12-14; “White Liberals & the Manufacture of Uncle Toms” and “The Jewish Factor in the Negro Establishment,” in American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms (New York: CBIA, 2002), 87-106, 107-20.