Conference on Religion and Race Urges Americans to Fight Bias

The First National Conference on Religion and Race ends today with adoption of an urgent “appeal to the conscience of the American people” to end all kinds of racial discrimination and creation of a follow-up group to mobilize America’s three major faiths for that goal.

Both actions were approved unanimously by the 1,000 Christian and Jewish clerical and lay leaders. While the conference was directed primarily to the Negro problem in America, the final declaration was interpreted, particularly by the major Jewish participants, as presaging a new day in Christian concern for anti-Semitism, as well.

A series of recommendations were adopted at the closing session of the four-day conference, proposing that organized religion, Christian and Jewish, use its economic resources to fight racial discrimination. The recommendations have the force of the resolutions customarily adopted by conventions.

One recommendation urged church and synagogal organizations and institutions to use the economic power of their substantial pension funds and endowments to promote inter-racial housing projects as well as for the promotion of equality of opportunity in all fields for all races and minorities in the United States.

As organizations which engage in much construction work, the churches and synagogues were urged to exact from building contractors strict pledges against racial dis crimination. As employers, the religious organizations were urged to remove racial barriers in their own employment practices. The conference also called for removal of all racial barriers in such religion-linked institutions as hospitals, homes for the aged, child care agencies and other welfare organizations.

TEN CITIES CHOSEN FOR PILOT PROJECTS IN INTER-RELIGIOUS WORK

In another recommendation, Christians and Jews as religious adherents, lay and clerical, were urged to help Negro families obtain homes in all-white suburbs, to aid stabilization of the character of changing urban neighborhoods and to work for federal and state laws against discrimination in employment and housing. They also were asked to act to assure that all of the country’s educational resources and facilities be used to help eliminate all racial prejudice and barriers.

The delegates then approved plans for a follow-up committee of Catholics, Protestants and Jews to oversee implementation of the recommendations on the local level, The follow-up plan was presented by A, Harold Murray, director of the Community Affairs Department of the American Jewish Committee. The conference also set up a national steering committee of representatives of the three faiths with the Synagogue Council of America as the Jewish religious representative body.

As one of its first steps, the follow-up committee chose 10 cities for pilot projects in inter-religious and inter-racial work for each of the recommendations. The cities chosen were Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland (Calif.,) San Francisco, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Antonio and Seattle. Plans also were considered for convening another national conference on religion and race in the next two or three years.

Evaluations of the conference included a description by Rabbi Philip Hiat,executive vice president of the Synagogue Council of America, of the conclave and the declaration as “a milestone in Jewish, American and world history. ” Arnold Aronson, of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, said that the organized Catholic and Protestant religions had undertaken an “inescapable obligation to combat anti-Semitism” as well as to battle anti-Negro racism. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaurn of the American Jewish Committee, said that the widespread commitment by the Conference to work seriously to overcome bigotry is “a development of the greatest potential significance to the Jewish community.”