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7 “HUMANITY UMANITY IS S ONE NE GREAT REAT FAMILY AMILY” Jews, Catholics, and the Achievements of Racial Reform O n August 12, 1957, Mayor George Christopher presided over the swearing-in ceremony for the seven members of San Francisco’s new Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO). Approved by the Board of Supervisors after more than a decade of lobbying by civil rights activists, the CEEO became the first such agency in a major city in California. Three years later, the commission ceased operations when the state pre-empted its duties after the California Fair Employment Practice Act of 1959 went into effect.1 In the twenty-year period prior to the passage of the state’s fair employment act, as the world reeled from a global conflagration followed by a Cold War, the practice and preservation of civil rights and civil liberties became an increasingly pressing issue in both world affairs and domestic politics. In San Francisco, site of the dramatic signing of the United Nations Charter at the War Memorial Opera House on June 26, 1945, the campaign for civil rights took center stage in municipal politics and policymaking. The participation of white Jewish and Catholic reformers in a multiethnic/racial coalition for civil rights contributed new dimensions to the debate about how to define the public interest in San Francisco during World War II and the early Cold War years.2 During the late 1930s and the 1940s, Jews and Catholics in San Francisco shared the nationwide outrage at the murderous consequences of Adolf Hitler’s European and North African wartime regime and the postwar repression practiced by Joseph Stalin in Poland, Hungary, and other Soviet satellite countries. Jewish and Catholic calls for combating racism and anti-Semitism took on a new urgency beginning in 1938 after the Nazi Anschluss (connection) with Austria on March 12 and Kristallnacht on November 9–10.3 Even before the 126 CHAPTER 7 Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, San Francisco Jews, operating on the assumption that no one can be safe unless everyone is free, played the leading roles in assembling a racial justice coalition that also included Catholic liberals, as well as those who were neither Jewish nor Catholic.4 Like their counterparts in Los Angeles, the white racial reformers coalesced with non-white civil rights organizations in the early 1940s and created an interracial council that revitalized the civil rights movement in the Bay Area. A new Bay Area Council against Discrimination began its work in early 1942, making San Francisco one of the first cities in the nation to establish a citywide interracial and multiethnic civil rights organization during the war years.5 According to Hilda Taba, who conducted interracial human relations workshops throughout the nation during the late 1940s and 1950s, some 400 civic unity councils sprang up during the war years, but nearly all of them had expired without tangible accomplishments by the end of the 1940s. However, the civic unity movement proved successful in San Francisco.6 The San Francisco Council for Civic Unity (CCU), which succeeded the Bay Area Council against Discrimination in 1944, made legislative gains in the 1940s and 1950s, and it created the institutional and ideological foundation for the later civil rights work of the 1960s.7 The city’s tradition of religious toleration played a role in shaping the character of Jewish and Catholic participation in the civil rights movement in the 1940s and 1950s.8 To Americans today, influenced by events since the 1960s, San Francisco may appear to be a “natural experiment in the consequences of tolerating deviance.”9 In fact, until after World War II, San Francisco—for all its vaunted reputation as a raucous wide-open port city—did not welcome racial diversity, gays, lesbians, or political radicals any more than did the rest of urban America. However, the city’s reputation for religious toleration was well deserved.10 In 1931, Archbishop Edward Hanna of San Francisco received the annual American Hebrew Award for the Promotion of Better Understanding between Christians and Jews in America. In 1950, Earl Raab visited San Francisco and interviewed residents for one in a series of articles on “The American Scene” for Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee . “San Francisco, for cities of its size,” Raab concluded, “is the nation’s ‘white spot’ of anti-Jewish prejudice,” with a “startling poverty of anti-Semitic tradition.”11 Raab described how Jewish residents had created a remarkably assimilated, and unusually...

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