On January 17, 1987, Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led a small procession of demonstrators through Forsyth County, Georgia. They were there to protest the total exclusion of black residents in a county where the Ku Klux Klan had established its headquarters.

Seven days later, they returned. But now, instead of seventy black demonstrators walking through the all-white neighborhoods of Forsyth County, there were over twenty thousand, both black and white. It was the largest civil rights march in twenty years.

The involvement of so many concerned citizens owed much to the organizational skill of local...

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the racial attitudes of southern Jews were determined above all else by their relationship with the white Gentile majority. Anti-Semitism has never been a pervasive force in southern life. As a result, Jews secured widespread acceptance within the white community. As the historian John Higham observes, the South has been “historically the section least inclined to ostracize Jews.”¹

Several factors account for this. Among the most significant are the Old Testament roots of southern Christianity. The fundamentalist Protestantism of the South was deeply ambivalent in its depiction of Jews. Jews were vilified as Christ...

Shortly before 6 A.M. on December 20, 1956, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. boarded a bus in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, chose a seat toward the front, and sat back to enjoy the journey. After more than twelve months, the Montgomery bus boycott was over. The triumph over segregation on the city’s buses served as the blueprint for future campaigns of non-violent direct action against Jim Crow laws across the South. It also promoted King, the twenty-seven-year-old head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, to the pivotal role of figurehead for the national civil rights movement. In the words of Jet magazine,...

By the early 1950s, Jews appeared to have carved a comfortable niche in southern society. The years immediately after the Second World War witnessed a resurgence among American Jews. After the troubled interwar era, when institutional anti-Semitism had spread throughout the United States, Jews reestablished their patriotic credentials through loyal service on both the battlefield and the home front. Southern Jews shared in this success. Predominantly city dwellers, they continued to constitute only a fraction of the total population. According to the census, of the 40 million people who resided in the region, only 265,000 were Jewish. Particularly through their...

If any good can come of tragedy, it is the determination that it will never happen again or, if it should, that at least one will be prepared for it. In the early twentieth century, American Jews organized a number of agencies designed to combat the resurgent forces of anti-Semitism. Founded in 1906 by a group of wealthy German Jews, the American Jewish Committee sought to provide relief for the thousands of coreligionists who had suffered during the recent Russian pogroms. As anti-Semitism increased at home, the organization further resolved to combat prejudice in every walk of life. Eight years...

Since the late nineteenth century, Jews have played a prominent role in the southern retail trade. Some of the more successful merchants appear to have achieved the American dream. Having started out as poor immigrant peddlers, they eventually established prosperous department stores.¹

The owners of these stores were obliged to observe existing laws about the separation of the races. Signs establishing the exclusive use of “whites” or “coloreds” were erected over every water fountain and rest room door. African Americans were similarly excluded from any but the most menial employment.

On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen at North Carolina...

Looking back on the desegregation crisis, the white liberal journalist Pat Watters observed, “One of the sadder phenomena across the South was the figure of the lonely, fearful Jew who sought to outbigot his white neighbors, not merely a member but a leader, often, in the Citizens’ Councils.” Council membership lists are hard to come by. What evidence there is suggests that Jews did not join in large numbers. Although it would be absurd to claim scientific credibility for such a statistic, of some seventy-six identifiable applications to the Capitol Citizens’ Council of Little Rock, none, for instance, were signed...

It seemed a familiar story. On March 20, 1955, members from across the country assembled in New Orleans for the twenty-first annual convention of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). At an unspecified point during the proceedings, a resolution was proposed, pledging support for the immediate integration of public schools throughout the South. Despite dissent from several southern members, the resolution was adopted.

In an unusual display of solidarity with the national body, delegates from the Greater New Orleans section of the NCJW agreed to issue a statement in support of the resolution. According to this statement, the New...

In January 1956, delegates from across the southeastern states assembled in Birmingham, Alabama, for a regional meeting of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. The keynote address was delivered by Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn of Boston. As he stood before the assembled audience, Gittelsohn issued a “powerful and uncompromising” statement in support of the civil rights movement. The speech delighted some but dismayed others. As the meeting descended into acrimony, one of the delegates, a rabbi, stood up and shouted that he would not risk a hair on the head of any one of his members for the life of every...

By the early 1970s, the relationship between African Americans and Jews in the South had changed. For the first time, that relationship was shaped by national rather than sectional concerns. Three factors explain this transformation.

The first was the emergence of black nationalism. By the late 1960s, impatience among young black radicals at the pace of racial reform had provoked an often violent resentment against the white establishment. Much of that anger was targeted at Jews. Tensions were stirred in the summer of 1967 when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee launched a scathing attack against Israel for provoking the Six-Day...