[ID: Two black and white photos of Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael, a young Black man, saying into a microphone with a sardonic expression, "In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none, has none." End ID.]
In 1964, on the same day the FBI found the bodies of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, singer Harry Belafonte heard the SNCC needed at least $50,000 to survive. His friend and fellow activist Sidney Poitier delivered $70,000 raised to the Mississippi Delta. When they landed at the Greenwood airport after dark, a pickup filled with white men pursued and rammed them. The two performers made it to their destination, delivering the money to keep Freedom Summer going. “We knew if we never did another thing together,” Belafonte recalled, “this was to be forever cherished.”
On recent far-left attacks on the Anti-Defamation League
Before we start:
- I think the ADL is wrong about Musk's salutes.
- I think the ADL's Israel advocacy sometimes comes into conflict with their mission in the diaspora. I think their methodologies for data collection and reporting need improvement.
- I think that the ADL is flawed, imperfect and does much more good than harm.
---
Christopher Hitchens put into words what academics used to live by:
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence".
The burden of proof is on those making the claim, and the claims of droptheadl.org aren't supported with primary sources or evidence.
For example:
To support its claims about the ADL and SNCC, droptheadl.org offers a link, presenting it as a citation.
This is a link to a Google Books entry. There's no actual text, no citation, no chapter, no page, just the claim that somewhere in this 300-page book exists proof of the ADL denouncing SNCC as racist.
However, that's not in the book. Chapter two talks about this incident in detail, so I read it.
In reaponse to a SNCC newsletter (this is what a primary source looks like!) containing many factual errors about Israel,
...Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), summed up their outrage: “Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism whether it comes from the Ku Klux Klan or from extremist Negro groups
[For those who haven't studied the era: at this point, "Negro" was still the word which the black community preferred. The transition to widespread identification as 'black' got going in the 60s and finished in the 70s. The use of the word 'Negro' here is not a slur. I state this in advance because I know how the illiberal left weilds its willful ignorance]
...
Abram was also careful to echo what the ADL had said: that SNCC’s article put it in the same anti-Israeli trench as the Arab world and the Soviet Union.
That's verifiably, unquestionably true. That's the position SNCC took, because that's where they got their information.
Droptheadl.org lied. This book doesn't say what they claim it says, which is why they didn't quote it or offer a specific citation. Why let facts get in the way of the narrative which makes them feel good about themselves?
The book, which I recommend reading, isn't about the ADL. It's a scholarly examination of the relationships between the wars the Arab world launched on Israel and the US Civil Rights Movement. This requires much discussion of the impact on the complex relationships between black communities and Jewish communities in the US in the context of their views on Israel and Palestine.
It's fascinating. Here's another excerpt illustrating why many Jews saw SNCC as taking an antisemitic turn:
One day in May of 1967, [Stokely] Carmichael and [H. Rap] Brown were in Alabama chatting with Donald Jelinek, a lawyer who worked with SNCC.
Jelinek, who was Jewish, expressed his positive feelings about Israel and his concerns about the Jewish state’s situation in that tension-filled month as war clouds were on the horizon in the Middle East.
“So it was a shock to me,” Jelinek later recounted, “when my SNCC friends mildly indicated support for the Arabs.” Mildly stated or not, their sentiments prompted Jelinek to reply, “But they may wipe out and destroy Israel.”
Carmichael adroitly changed the subject with some humor, and the men began laughing.
Jelinek thereafter overheard Brown quietly singing to himself, “arms for the Arabs, sneakers for the Jews.” When Jelinek asked him what that song meant, an embarrassed Brown explained that he had learned the song as a student in Louisiana. It implied that the Israelis would need sneakers (tennis shoes) to run from the Arabs, who were armed with weapons from abroad.
My qualms with this, my disappointment in and disagreement with both Carmichael and Brown doesn't make me a racist. It doesn't make the AJC or the ADL racist and it doesn't make Jelinek, the Jewish lawyer working with SNCC, a racist or a poor ally.
Zionism is the belief that Jews should have self-determination in their homeland.
Nazism was the belief that racially superior Aryans own the world, should be organized through fascist methods, and that the genocide of the Jewish people was explicitly required because they were the source of all evil and the obstacle to progress.
These are not the same. Suggesting they are the same, as Carmichael did, is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Pointing this out doesn't make me a racist. It makes me literate.
I still own a copy of Carmichael's book, Black Power. Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture) was a complex person. Like every other historical figure, he was neither a saint nor a demon.
I can admire a lot about the Black Panthers without falsely claiming that nothing they ever did or said was troubling, poorly reasoned, or bigoted. The world is more complex than that.
There are no saints. Learn this important truth and use it to guide your understanding of the world around you. There are no saints.
Gandhi, for instance, was a great leader for Indian self-rule and a visionary of nonviolent protest. He was also a racist as a young man who said black people "...are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals." Read about his work in South Africa. He was also really weird about sex and slept naked with his grand niece, which we rightly recognize today as sexual abuse. He wasn't a saint or a demon, he was a person.
People are complex and flawed. If you want to understand people, history, and movements, wrap your head around this as keep it with you: People and their movements are complex and flawed.
But the depth of reasoning I see from the illiberal left is "ADL criticized SNCC, so they're Nazis."
No, child. The world is much, much more complex than that. Why did you go to college if you weren't going to learn anything there?
My 14yo is right. US leftists (not liberals, leftists) are allergic to nuance and discard the facts contradicting any narrative which makes them feel good about themselves.
Selah
Deep breath in, slow breath out.
The book is really delves into some of the factors contributing to the deteriorating relationship at the time between Jewish Americans and Black Americans. It points to this essay by James Baldwin, titled "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White." I urge you to read it, it is a fascinating artifact of its time and place.
And this:
Jews had long advocated for black liberation by, for example, playing a role in the foundation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Jewish support for blacks was well known; as early as February of 1942, the American Jewish Committee published a study titled “Jewish Contribution to Negro Welfare.” Having experienced the sting of anti-Semitism, many Jews believed they were fighting in the same trench against discrimination alongside African Americans. When the civil rights struggle grew to become a mass movement in the 1950s and early 1960s, Jewish moral and financial support was crucial, and Jews were disproportionately well-represented among those whites who lent their support to the cause. Jewish financial contributions to civil rights groups were also significant. Jews even were the subject of criticism from some southern whites for the high-profile role they played in helping blacks win their freedom. All this compounded a sense of betrayal by SNCC that was felt by many Jewish Americans.
It should not be surprising or taken as racist that Jews objected to SNCC's advocacy against Israel's existence and I maintain that any call for Israel to be destroyed is innately, inarguably antisemitic. No other nation endures calls for its destruction. Just the Jewish one.
There was unquestionably tension between SNCC and the entire spectrum of non-black Americans who supported SNCC when SNCC ejected non-black members. From our perspective, decades removed, I can understand both why SNCC members narrowly voted for this AND why non-black members of SNCC were hurt and disillusioned. All of those perspectives were (and are) valid.
When I was an undergrad studying African American Political Thought, we discussed these tensions head-on, using primary sources, and evaluated them dispassionately.
We concluded that there are no villains in this story. SNCC got a bunch of facts wrong about Israel, their staunch Jewish allies were profoundly disappointed, saw hypocrisy in SNCC's position, and said so.
I think that far left Americans overlaid their feelings about a domestic struggle on a foreign one where they don't fit...and then discarded the facts and the complexity which got in the way of a satisfying narrative which made them feel like the good guys instead of forcing them to grapple with an uncomfortably complex reality.
I think that's what the illiberal left still does. It doesn't like complexity, it doesn't like academic rigor, it likes stories it can tell itself about its moral purity and discards facts, complexity, or rigor which threaten their view of themselves as saviors.
The world is complex. People are complex. Movements are complex. Organizations are complex. History is complex. Justice is complex.
The ADL isn't perfect, its leaders haven't been and are not saints or tzadikim, but the good they do for all Americans radically outweighs their failings and I'm going to keep supporting them while yelling at them to do better.
If you're an ADL hater and have any actual evidence and primary sources on racism from the ADL, I really want to see it, because this weak sauce from droptheadl.org doesn't make the case the illiberal left thinks it makes. And they'd know that if they had learned anything in college about how scholarship works and how arguments are constructed.
The illiberal left perhaps forgets how the ADL responded when Trump called for requiring American Muslims to register.
“If one day Muslim Americans will be forced to register their identities, then that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim. ”
- ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt
Anti-Defamation League head vows to sign up to registry Trump promised while campaigning, legally obligating Muslim Americans to be tracked
We are saddened to hear about the passing of Dorie Ann Ladner, lifelong voting rights activist. 🕊️🗳️
Ms. Ladner participated in every major civil rights protest of the 1960s, including the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. She was a key organizer in her home state of Mississippi, with contributions to the NAACP and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In June 1964, she launched a volunteer campaign called “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” with a goal of registering as many Black voters as possible.
We remember and honor Dorie through the words of her sister and fellow activist, Joyce Ladner: as someone who “fought tenaciously for the underdog and the dispossessed,” and “left a profound legacy of service.”
Strategist Diane Nash was catapulted to notoriety in her early twenties, when she stepped up and organized sit-ins at lunch counters in the South during the civil rights era. Lean more about her journey at: https://www.petervintonjr.com/blm/lesson52.html
Random decks of twelve of these trading cards are available for the asking --as many decks as you need, to share with your classroom, congregation, or workgroup. No cost, no strings attached. Email the artist for details.
BHM100*: Celebrating Unsung Civil Rights Champion Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, 1st and Only Woman Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
