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BLACK PERCEPTIONS OFJEWS Shortly before 6 A.M. on December 20,1956, Rev. Martin Luther KingJr. boarded a bus in downtown Montgomery, Alabama,chose aseat toward the front, and sat back to enjoy the journey. After more than twelve months, the Montgomery bus boycott was over. The triumph over segregation on the city's buses served as the blueprint for future campaigns of nonviolent direct action against Jim Crow lawsacross the South. It alsopromoted King, the twenty-seven-year-old head of the Montgomery Improvement Association , to the pivotal role of figurehead for the national civil rights movement . In the words ofJet magazine, the world had just witnessed the arrival of "Alabama's Modern Moses," the man who would lead his people from the inequities and oppression of the southern caste system to a Promised Land of racial equality.1 All of this seemed rather ironic given the refusal of Montgomery's own Jewish community to support the boycott. Anxious to enlist the influential support ofwhite liberals, the boycotters had turned instinctively to localJews. They were wrong in assuming, however, that the Jewish people would naturally embrace the civil rights struggle. In the midst of the campaign, King confessed, "Montgomery Jews want to bury their heads and repeat that it is not aJewish problem. I want to go on record, and agree that it isnot aJewish problem, but it is a fight between the forces of justice and injustice. I want them to join with us on the side of justice." It wasnot to be. During the 381 days of the boycott, the local Jewish community activelyavoided any association with the Montgomery Improvement Association.2 Years later, as he assessed the astonishing civil rights victories of the 19608, King enthusiastically acknowledged the contribution of Jewish activists. Some had suffered arrest and abuse, such as the sixteen rabbiswho joined his campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. Others, most notably Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered by Mississippi police officers, 2 24 FIGHT AGAINST FEAR had made the ultimate sacrifice. "It would be impossible to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negro's struggle for freedom," asserted King, "it has been so great."3 Those Jewish activists who had braved the vicious assaults of white segregationists were almost overwhelminglyfrom the northern states. Suchwasthe importance of their contribution to the civil rights cause as to cast a shadow of suspicion on those Jews who refrained from any active involvement. This was especially true of the small minority of Jews who actually lived in the South and were acutely aware of the racial injustice throughout the region. King continued to express hisdisappointment with southern Jewsthroughout the campaigns of the 19608. As he wrote in September 1967 to friend and fellow activist RabbiJacob Rothschild: "I think we allhave to admit that there are Jews in the South who have not been anything like our allies in the civil rights struggle and have gone out of the wayto consort with the perpetrators of the status quo. I saw this in both Montgomery, Alabama, and Albany, Georgia. And I must confess that I, too, wasgreatlydisappointed because we always expect our Jewish brothers to be our strongest allies if for no other reason than the fact that they have had a common oppression."4 Kingwasnot alone in holding high expectations about the role Jews should perform in the civil rights movement. Unprecedented as the scale of their suffering had been during the Holocaust, Jews had experienced enormous persecution throughout history. Endless encounters with anti-Semitism across the globe had instilled Jews with an extreme sensitivity toward discrimination . Hence the presupposition of so many civil rights leaders that Jews instinctively empathized with their struggle against segregation. "We were hoping that they would at least share or support the blacks," observes Charles Phillips, a former member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Forrest County, Mississippi."Jews, in many instances, were also pushed aside." Ozell Sutton, associate director of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations during the late 19608, recalls attending a civil rights symposium at which Little Rock rabbi Elijah Palnick spoke of hiswillingnessto marchalongside civil rights demonstrators. "I want to remind Brother Palnick," Sutton suddenly intervened, "that according to what I know about his religion, he has the responsibility to walk and to fight the good fight, whether anybody else does it or not. I said, not only must he walk with . . . the white community, he must...

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