Leading Negro Newspaper Urges Black Organizations to Condemn Anti-semitism

One of the nation’s leading Negro dailies urged the major national Negro organizations and civil rights groups this week to issue an unqualified condemnation of anti-Semitism in the black community.

The Chicago Daily Defender said in an editorial, “Though anti-Semitism among Negroes is on a minimal scale, we think the NAACP and the National Urban League and other civil rights organizations such as CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership (founded by Dr. Martin Luther King) should issue a strong statement either collectively or individually, denouncing in no uncertain terms any and all anti-Semitic agitations among black people.”

The plea by the Defender was made at the conclusion of an editorial which praised the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform) for its recent call to American Jews not to abandon their traditional support of the Negro struggle for civil rights, despite the anti-Semitism of some black militants.

The Defender said, “It should be brought out that such racism is not only injurious to the Negro cause per se, but is equally harmful as an impediment to the whole democratic process. Let’s not forget the old Scriptural injunction: He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.”

A view that the white community was not adequately informed of the dimensions of black anti-Semitism was presented in a letter published in another major Negro daily, the Amsterdam News of New York. The author, Robert B. Hill, a research associate in the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, cited two studies of the issue which, he said, provide “a more balanced perspective.” One was the 1964 study conducted by Gary Marx for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith which found that Negroes on the whole were less anti-Semitic than whites, that Jews were not being singled out by blacks as scapegoats and that Negroes had more, not less, favorable attitudes toward Jews than toward any other white ethnic group. The second study, which largely agreed with Mr. Marx’s findings, was completed in 1968 for the American Jewish Committee by Carolyn Atkinson of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, Mr. Hill said. “The findings from this study to my knowledge, have never been made public,” Mr. Hill wrote.

Hyman Bookbinder, the Washington, D.C. representative of the Committee warned, in a letter published in the Washington Post today, that the anti-Semitism of a relative handful of blacks who also cry for separatism, segregation and Negro nationalism is playing into the hands of white racists in America. “Never before have we had so classic a case of opposite extremes ending up advocating the same programs,” Mr. Bookbinder wrote.