Negro Leader Says Nazis Did Not Kill Enough Jews; Jewish Congress Acts

The executive director of the American Jewish Congress resigned today from the national advisory board of the Congress of Racial Equality in protest against the “tepid and ambiguous response by CORE to a vicious anti-Semitic outburst” by a CORE official in Mount Vernon, N.Y., last week

Will Maslow, a member of the CORE board for the past five years, said in a letter to James Farmer, national director of CORE:

“I cannot continue an association with a group whose moral fibre is so flabby as to respond in an equivocal manner to the horrifying and racist public statement” made by Clifford A. Brown, education chairman of CORE in Mount Vernon.

Last Thursday evening, at a meeting of the Mount Vernon, N.Y. Board of Education, Mr. Brown, a Negro, reportedly told an audience of 100, including a number of Jews, that “Hitler made one mistake when he didn’t kill enough of you. ” Yesterday a CORE spokesman disavowed Mr. Brown’s statement and ordered an investigation to determine the “context” in which Mr. Brown made the remark.

In his letter of resignation, Mr. Maslow said the CORE official should have been “immediately suspended. ” He added; “Can you conceive of any context that would make Mr. Brown’s outrageous statement permissible? Can you conceive of any situation that would justify the kind of tirade that calls for more acts of genocide?”

The CORE statement Monday said that the “delaying tactics” of the Mount Vernon school board in ending de facto segregation in the city’s schools were “also intolerable. ” Mr. Maslow commented on this statement in his letter by asking: “Does CORE feel that it must palliate Mr. Brown’s remarks in some way by equating what he said with what the school board did or failed to do? Or does it believe that insults worthy of a Nazi are the fit coinage of debate over social issues?”

Mr. Maslow, a lawyer, was named executive director of the American Jewish Congress in 1960, following 15 years as director of its Commission on Law and Social Action. During World War II, he served as director of field operations for President Roosevelt’s Committee on Fair Employment Practices, He said that his resignation from the CORE National Advisory Board “does not mean that I will in any way lessen my efforts in the struggle against racism to which I have devoted a good part of the last 20 years. “