There is a lot more to the complete story of white Jewish Americans in the Civil Rights movements. Honest Jews are often written out of the leftist histories of the CRM, such as in the Scottsboro Brothers trial, and other legal issues.
Many communists used their Jewish ethnic heritage as a cover for their Party operations of infiltration the CRM, putting their own people, both white and black, in as heads of CPUSA front organizations, and of getting “face time” in the news media (who usually didn’t know the backgrounds of those individuals they were reporting on).
The Schwerners, whose son was murdered by the Klan, had a direct connection to several Communist Party USA fronts, including NECLC, a front that had direct ties to the KGB.
Both Schwerner and Goodman belongs to leftist civil rights groups that the CPUSA tried to take over. Whether the kids were communists or not, I don’t know. I think they had good hearts but were guided by evil people.
Rabbi Heschel was a good man but a little naïve on some issues. However, his presence with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on various marches was a genuine show of support for black civil rights.
The whole story has not yet been told but the Left definitely has flooded the book market with their versions of history, while covering up Communist infiltration and subversion of the Civil Rights Movement, esp. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Prof. David Garrow’s works on MLK (and the FBI) are informative but far from complete. He left out key people and organizations but I don’t know whether it was design, ignorance, or incompetence.
I would love to see his works expanded to fill in these major gaps. Then you would have something much more serious to read.
Negroes, Jews and “civil rights”, who can forget the early work of Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky). Fresh from the Bolshevik revolution Leon was writing to Claude McKay, who just returned from the Kremlin. The goal: use the negro as a weapon to overthrow America.
“Negroes, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution”
“The American Negros, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary element of the population. They are designated by their whole historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the
proletarian revolution.
The SWP therefore, while recognizing the limitations and pitfalls of a mass organization without clearly
defined political program, and while retaining its full liberty of action and criticism , welcomes and supports any attempt by Negroes themselves to organize for militant action against our common oppressors, instructs its Negro members to work actively towards the formation of such an organization, and recommends to the party members to follow closely all such manifestations of Negro militancy.”
Source: Marxist org
I also don’t agree with the author’s premise that Jewish presence in the civil rights history is an unknown story. Living in NYC, I’ve heard it for decades - oy, have I heard it - you’d think NY Jews were the only ones involved.