Black Reporter Recommends Kibbutz Way of Life As Example to Black Communities

An American Negro journalist has recommended Israel’s kibbutz way of life as an example for the black community in America. Dick Edwards, writing from Israel in the New York Amsterdam News, declared, “if the Israelis can make deserts bloom, it seems as if blacks with more fertile land and water, could follow the blueprints of the kibbutzim and carve out the good life in America. All it takes is togetherness.” Mr. Edwards was one of a group of ten American Negro Journalists invited on a fact-finding tour of Israel recently under the auspices of the Israel Government and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. He wrote that of all the things he saw in Israel, “the most dramatic and useful to blacks in America is this community way of living which we would do well to imitate. The people who formed these communities came to Israel with a rag and a bag, but they had a will to be self-supporting even though it meant conquering some of the poorest land in the world. With their bare bands and sheer determination these immigrants made the desert bloom.”