Dr. King Says There is No Anti-semitism in Negro Community in Historic Sense

Dr. Martin Luther King, the Negro civil rights leader, told the 68th annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, association of Conservative rabbis, that “there is absolutely no anti-Semitism in the black community in the historic sense of anti-Semitism.” Dr. King, who was given an ovation, said that such anti-Semitism as does exist among Negroes “is almost completely an urban ghetto phenomenon and virtually non-existent in the South.”

This anti-Semitism, he said, emerges in the northern ghettoes because the Negro “confronts the Jew in two dissimilar roles” — one of them that of the Negro’s “most consistent and trusted ally in the Negro’s struggle for Justice in the civil rights movement” and also the Jew as landlord and as “owner of the store around the corner where the ghetto-dweller pays more for less.” He said that “the irrational statements” made by some Negro spokesmen “were the result of these confrontations. I think the only answer for this is for people to condemn injustice wherever it exists.”

Responding to a question about anti-Israel and pro-Arab stands of some of the more militant young black leaders. Dr. King said that this did not represent “the position of the vast majority of Negroes. I think it is necessary to see that what is basic and needed in the Middle East is peace. Peace for Israel is one thing and peace for the Arab side of that war is another thing. Peace for Israel,” he continued, “means security and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity.”

On the other hand, he asserted, “we must see that peace for the Arabs means, in a real sense, security on another level. Peace for them means a kind of economic security they so desperately need.” He urged a “Marshall Plan” for the Middle East which would “lift those who are at the bottom of the economic level and bring them into the mainstream of economic security.”