NAACP Black Leadership Meeting, Crisis Magazine Article, Nov. 1979

Black civil rights leaders were incensed at Andrew Young’s firing and saw it as an underhanded act by Jewish leaders. They convened a “Black American Leadership Meeting” at the NAACP’s national office in New York. Out of this came a “Declaration of Independence” from Jewish control of Black organizations.

“Co-convenors of the historic meeting,” as they themselves described it, included Jesse Jackson; Vernon Jordan, then president of the National Urban League; Coretta Scott King; the Rev. Joseph Lowery of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Maxine Waters, then a California state assemblywoman, among 200 others “representing the leading civil rights organizations, civic groups, churches and some of the most prominent [fraternities] and sororities…”

Georgia state senator Julian Bond read the summit’s statement on “Black/Jewish Relations.” It was unanimously adopted and said in part:

[I]t is a fact that within the past 20 years some Jewish organizations and intellectuals who were previously identified with the aspirations of Black Americans…became apologists for the racial status quo….Powerful organizations within the Jewish community opposed the interest of the Black community in the DeFunis, Bakke, and Weber cases up to the United States Supreme Court. Beyond that, some Jewish intellectuals gave credence and policy substance to such concepts as “reverse discrimination” and “quotas” as reasons for restricting further attempts to continue to seek remedies for present discrimination against Blacks.

The term “quota” which traditionally meant the exclusion of Jews was now being used by Jews to warn against attempts to include Blacks….To many Blacks, this seems to be a most perplexing Orwellian perversion of language.

Black America is also deeply concerned with the trade and military alliance that exists between Israel and the illegitimate and oppressive racist regimes in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.[i]

[i] Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1993), pp. 23–24. In fact, rather hypocritically, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith had in 1961 complained to the New York attorney general that quotas were not being applied to Jews. The ADL’s own study of New York banks revealed that of 844 top officials, only 30 (or 3 ½ per cent) “were Jews, in a city where 25 per cent of the population was Jewish.” Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the ADL, pressured the banks to take “vigorous and effective action” to comply fully with “the spirit and the letter of the law against discrimination…” See Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, Aug. 9, 1963, p. 1. See also Jewish Affairs, Feb. 15, 1946, for Jewish quotas in medical schools.