A chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, several of whose members are under a city investigation on charges of anti-Semitic behavior, issued a manifesto here comparing Negroes in the United States with the Jews in Nazi Germany, asserting “as it happened to them, it can happen to us.”
The Brooklyn chapter of CORE made the comparison to explain why it planned to leave the ghetto to “establish a new world.” The document declared that “the German plan was to exterminate the Jewish culture and the Jews. Whitey’s plan is the same” for the Negro. “We Black Militants note the similarity” between Negroes in the United States “and the Jews in Germany. We pray that the hand of death will pass us by. As it happened to them, it can happen to us.”
In recent months, members of the CORE chapter had been active in a struggle for better schools for children in slum areas. That struggle brought a charge from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith that CORE members in Brooklyn and Queens had been guilty of “blatant and vicious anti-Semitic outbursts and racist behavior in four school-community controversies in largely Negro sections in the two boroughs.
At the ADL’s request, the City Commission on Human Relations ordered on August 7 that two commission members investigate the charges of anti-Semitism.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
