Decades earlier, another Sears executive engaged in activism of a different sort. Julius Rosenwald began promoting civil rights causes while he was still president of Sears, before he became its chairman in 1924, leading some to call him the “first social justice philanthropist.” He helped fund fellowships for black artists and academics, including W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. He worked with Booker T. Washington to open more than 5,300 schools for black children in the Jim Crow South. Some of them were burned down by the Ku Klux Klan.
There’s also this article titled “A Peculiar Alliance: Julius Rosenwald, the YMCA, and African-Americans, 1910-1933″ from American Jewish Archives that touches on this further. Here’s an excerpt:
“The alliance between Rosenwald, the YMCA, and African-Americans seems rather peculiar at first glance. Why would a Jew support the establishment of Christian facilities for African-Americans? David Levering Lewis, who examined the collaboration between AfricanAmericans and Jews during the 1910s and 1920s~ has suggested that some of the wealthy Jews who aided African-Americans had ulterior motives. According to Lewis, they reasoned that their assistance to the African-American struggle for racial advancement would spare Jews “some of the necessity of directly rebutting anti-Semitic stereotypes,” for white America would perforce conclude that if “blacks could make good citizens…all other groups [including Jews] could make better ones.” Yet Lewis’s highly interpretive study offers no evidence to support this contention.
Julius Rosenwald certainly never said that his support of AfricanAmerican causes was stimulated by a desire to refute anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the contrary, Rosenwald claimed that he was motivated by sympathy for the victims of discrimination. Having experienced the indignity of anti-Semitism, he felt compassion for those who suffered from racism.
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
