I'm doing some research for a digital history project in my hometown of Pittsburgh, and it seems like there was a pretty healthy and fruitful relationship between our black and Jewish communities from the turn of the 20th century until the late sixties (MLK riots seem to have fractured the relationship between these groups in 1968). This has me wondering if the relationship between these marginalized groups ever fostered some sort of large-scale cooperation when it came to agitating for civil rights on a national scale.
Is there any evidence of significant Jewish involvement as partners or allies to black civil rights activists nationally? And either way, can any historians advise on some good sources to consult on the subject?
There certainly were a number of Jewish activists in the civil rights movement. One example I feel I know enough to speak on was the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project, a joint activity between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Congress of Racial Equality, NAACP, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as several other local and national civil rights groups. Freedom Summer was initially a campaign to register black voters; in 1964, Mississippi had the lowest percentage of registered black voters in the country (under 7%, if memory serves) as a result of the state's exceptionally aggressive poll test enforcement against blacks.
As a nationally-organized event, Freedom Summer recruited volunteers from across the country. Despite efforts to the contrary, a very large number of the volunteers were upper-class white students from Northern and Western cities - close to 90%, actually. Just under 50% of them were Jewish. Two of them - Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner - were murdered by Klansmen and local law enforcement, along with James Chaney, a black volunteer from Mississippi.
The murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner tell us something else about the role of Jewish Americans in the civil rights movement: that the Klan and other segregationists & white supremacists perceived Jewish people to be part of an anti-white, anti-Southern agenda that sought to impose equality on Southern whites against their will - possibly to a greater extent than the actual involvement of Jewish activists in the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, one of the murderers (Bowers, I think) was also later charged with a pair of firebombings of synagogues in Mississippi.
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