To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement
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To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement
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Overview
In 1966, a young rabbinical student named P. Allen Krause conducted interviews with twelve Reform rabbis from southern congregations concerning their thoughts, principles, and activities as they related to the civil rights movement. Perhaps because he was a young seminary student or more likely because the interviewees were promised an embargo of twenty-five years before the interviews would be released to the public, the rabbis were extremely candid about their opinions on and their own involvement with what was still an incendiary subject. Now, in To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement, their stories help elucidate a pivotal moment in time.
After a distinguished rabbinical career, Krause wrote introductions to and annotated the interviews. When Krause succumbed to cancer in 2012, Mark K. Bauman edited the manuscripts further and wrote additional introductions with the assistance of Stephen Krause, the rabbi’s son. The result is a unique volume offering insights into these rabbis’ perceptions and roles in their own words and with more depth and nuance than hitherto available. This exploration into the lives of these teachers and civic leaders is supported by important contextual information on the local communities and other rabbis, with such background information forming the basis of a demographic profile of the Reform rabbis working in the South.
The twelve rabbis whom Krause interviewed served in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, and the substance and scope of their discussions cover some of the most crucial periods in the civil rights movement. Although some have provided accounts that appeared elsewhere or have written about their experiences themselves, several new voices appear here, suggesting that more southern rabbis were active than previously thought. These men functioned within a harsh environment: rabbis’ homes, synagogues, and Jewish community centers were bombed; one rabbi, who had been beaten and threatened, carried a pistol to protect himself and his family. The views and actions of these men followed a spectrum from gradualism to activism; while several of the rabbis opposed the evils of the separate and unequal system, others made peace with it or found reasons to justify inaction. Additionally, their approaches differed from their activist colleagues in the North even more than from each other.
Within these pages, readers learn about the attitudes of the rabbis toward each other, toward their congregants, toward national Jewish organizations, and toward local leaders of black and white and Protestant and Catholic groups. Theirs are dramatic stories of frustration, cooperation, and conflict.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2016 |
| Series: | Jews and Judaism: History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Mark K. Bauman is a retired professor of history from Atlanta Metropolitan College. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s and Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History. As the founding and current editor of the journal Southern Jewish History, he received the Proctor Award for Outstanding Career Scholarship from the Southern Jewish Historical Society as well as fellowships from the American Jewish Archives and the College of William and Mary. Bauman investigates individual and inter- and intra-group behavior through the study of religious, ethnic, and immigrant minorities.
Stephen Krause is an attorney in the San Francisco Bay area and an award-winning singer/songwriter. He graduated magna cum laude from the Boston University School of Law in 1996 with a concentration in negotiation and dispute resolution, and he was also an editor of the Boston UniversityLaw Review journal. Krause’s law review article, “Punishing the Press: Using Contempt of Court to Secure the Right to a Fair Trial,” published in 1996, has been cited around the world as a primary authority in cases of media indiscretion in high-profile criminal trials.
Read an Excerpt
To Stand Aside or Stand Alone
Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement
By P. Allen Krause, Mark K. Bauman, Stephen Krause
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9021-1
CHAPTER 1
P. Irving Bloom
Mobile, Alabama, and Its Jewish Community
First settled by the French in 1699, Mobile quickly became the capital of French Louisiana. England took the city in 1763 only to be supplanted by Spain seventeen years later, which relinquished it to the United States in 1813. It became part of Alabama, the twenty-second state, six years hence.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the city served as a key distribution site for the cotton and slave trades. Following the Civil War, it remained a busy hub for cotton brokers to the Gulf of Mexico. World War I brought steel factories and shipbuilding to Mobile, while the Second World War witnessed the influx of almost one hundred thousand people to meet the needs of the shipyards and Brookley Army Air Field, a major supply base. Pulp and paper industries substantially offset the economic upheaval caused by the closure of the airfield in the mid-1960s.
Regardless of its cosmopolitan influences, to some extent Mobile remained a southern city in relation to racial segregation. The first desegregation case filed in Mobile County did not come until nine years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ordering the end of "separate but equal" schools. The matter went before the United States District Court in March 1963 after the school board rejected a petition presented five months earlier to begin the desegregation process. District Judge Daniel H. Thomas granted the school board fifteen months to implement the Brown ruling, but in July the Court of Appeals overruled him and called for integration to begin at the start of the 1963–1964 school year. Additional litigation delayed the process further, even though city commissioner Joseph Langan, a former state senator and five-time mayor of Mobile, advised that it was everyone's responsibility to abide by the rulings of the courts. Langan's opinion drew a hostile salvo from Governor George Wallace who reminded Langan that "it behooves any state or local official to use all his ingenuity and ability to prevent integration rather than to bring it about."
Mobile's White Citizens' Council, focusing on preventing or at least delaying school desegregation, distributed flyers and leaflets attesting to the "intellectual inferiority of the Negro," the "Communist manipulation of the civil rights movement," the "unconstitutionality of the rulings of the courts," and the role that Jews were playing in the effort to enforce "mongrelization." To support their cause, the council brought in segregationist luminaries including Eugene "Bull" Connor from Birmingham, Leander Perez from New Orleans, and Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi.
The city's two newspapers, the Birmingham (AL) Register and the Birmingham (AL) Press, owned by the same corporation, spoke with one voice regarding the evils of integration. The Register editorialized that "if this nation is to escape dictatorship, it will be necessary to bring an end to usurpation of power by the executive and judicial branches of the federal government." Six weeks earlier the Press had warned, "It is clear that there has been a major conspiracy involving highest government officials, members of the Congress and myriad left-wing pressure groups ... to create a national police state as powerful as ever existed in this world."
Despite the concerted efforts of Mobile's White Citizens' Council, press, school board, and the state government, two African Americans, Henry Hobdy and Dorothy Davis, entered Murphy High School on the morning of September 10, 1963, and remained part of the student body, in defiance of harassment by students, parents, and other racists. Nonetheless, according to Rabbi Bloom, "Murphy ended its first week of desegregation with 'relative calm' prevailing and with attendance near normal."
The traumatic nature of school desegregation was somewhat out of character for Mobile, in that it had already quietly integrated its public parks, libraries, transportation, and lunch counters without demonstrations, sit-ins, or great public angst in comparison with other Alabama cities. Mobile was able to do this in a relatively painless way because of its cosmopolitan atmosphere and the influx of northerners who manned the steel mills, shipyards, and army airfield. These factors, coupled with a mayor who outspokenly opposed massive resistance and who had open channels of communication with the African American community, made Mobile a city where it was relatively easier and less dangerous to integrate than in Birmingham, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, and to openly accept the inevitability and possibly even the desirability of racial equality.
The oldest such enclave in Alabama, Mobile's Jewish community traces its origins to physician Solomon Mordecai's arrival in 1823. Seven years later Solomon and Israel Jones relocated from New Orleans. The Jones brothers subsequently held seats on the city council, and Israel briefly served as acting mayor. Jacob Cohen won election as city marshal only two years after his arrival in 1839. Philip Phillips, an 1835 transplant from South Carolina, won a seat in the state legislature, became chairperson of the State Convention, and was sent to Washington in 1852 as a member of the House of Representatives. Jews of Mobile, although few in number, were thus quickly accepted into civic life.
By June 22, 1841, Mobile's Jewish population had reached sufficient size to purchase land for a cemetery. Three years later, Congregation Sha'arai Shomayim (The Gates of Heaven) was formed. Two years after that it engaged its first rabbi, Dutch-born Benjamin da Silva, and purchased its first building.
The influx of Jews from Eastern Europe beginning in the early 1880s led to the creation of an Orthodox synagogue, Congregation Ahavas Chesed (Love of Kindness) in 1894. When its members gathered to lay the cornerstone for their new building in 1911, the mayor of Mobile, Lazarus Schwarz (who was Jewish) spoke at the ceremony. Forty years later, reflecting the acculturation of the children of its founders, the congregation affiliated with the Conservative movement.
By 1912, approximately 1,400 Jews lived in Mobile. Their presence was obvious when one read the names of the downtown retail stores along Dauphin and Government Streets. With Eastern European immigration continuing into the early 1920s, the Jewish population swelled to 2,200. As the decades passed, however, these numbers dropped, ultimately stabilizing at approximately 1,200 to 1,500 individuals. Thus in 1960, Jews comprised about seven tenths of 1 percent of the city's estimated 191,000 total. Beginning in the 1940s, they steadily migrated to the western suburbs followed by the Jewish communal institutions including the synagogues and what became the Jewish Community Center. With its move to the suburbs, Sha'arai Shomayim became known as the Springhill (Spring Hill) Avenue Temple. In 1960, five years after their new facility in the suburbs had been dedicated, P. Irving Bloom came to Mobile to serve as the congregation's new rabbi.
P. Irving Bloom
Paul Irving Bloom was born on November 30, 1931, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. His father, Herman David Bloom, had emigrated from Lithuania to Hattiesburg when he was eighteen or nineteen. His mother, Florence Kaplan Bloom, arrived in Hattiesburg from Poland as an infant. Shortly after Irving's birth, the family relocated to Thomasville, Georgia, where Herman Bloom served several communities as shochet (ritual slaughterer) and Hebrew teacher, and performed other rabbinic roles as a kolbo, or Jewish master of many trades. In the early 1940s the family moved to Vidalia, Georgia, where his parents took over a small dry goods store that his maternal grandparents were no longer able to run effectively.
Irving spent his childhood and teen years in Vidalia, where he felt comfortable and never experienced anti-Semitism. Although Irving grew up in a community with only half-a-dozen Jewish families and feeling at home, when he crossed the threshold of his house he found himself in "extra-territorial Lithuania," a place infused with Jewish culture and religion. Irving and his older brother, Samuel, were instructed by their father on the Torah (the first five books of Hebrew Scriptures), a little Mishnah and Gemara, and Rashi's popular eleventh-century chumash commentaries, as well as how to translate Hebrew into Yiddish. It was thus a natural transition for Samuel and Irving to enter Jewish seminaries and become rabbis. After graduating from Vidalia High School in 1948 and attending the University of Georgia for one year, Bloom moved to Cincinnati where he continued to pursue his college degree at the University of Cincinnati while beginning rabbinic studies at Hebrew Union College.
Bloom received his BA with honors with a major in political science from the University of Cincinnati in 1952, then continued until his ordination at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion four years later. While a student he served small congregations in Charleroi, Pennsylvania (1952, 1955–1956) and Anniston, Alabama (1953–1955), receiving valuable congregational experience in the process. Bloom married Patricia Frankel in August 1955, and the next fall, fresh from the seminary, entered the Air Force Chaplaincy School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Upon completion of the two-month course, Chaplain Bloom received assignment to the 12th Air Force headquarters in Ramstein, Germany, where he remained until July 1958.
Next, Bloom served as the assistant to Rabbi Julian Feibelman at Temple Sinai in New Orleans. Feibelman became a life-long friend. While in New Orleans Bloom and his wife welcomed their first child, Jonathan, born in 1958. He also pursued a master's degree in political science, graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1964. After fulfilling his two-year commitment in New Orleans, Bloom accepted an invitation to become the rabbi of Spring Hill Avenue Temple in Mobile, where his second child, Judith, was born in 1960. During his thirteen-year tenure, he served on the boards of a number of civic organizations and was active in dialogue with members of the African American community. In 1973 the Blooms moved to Temple Israel, a larger synagogue, in Dayton, Ohio, where he spent the next twenty-four years until retiring as Temple Israel's emeritus senior rabbi in 1997. Upon retirement he and his wife relocated to Fairhope, Alabama, across the bay from Mobile. Living in Atlanta as of this writing, Bloom conducts monthly services at his one-time student pulpit, Temple Beth El in Anniston, and at Temple Beth Israel in Gadsden, Alabama.
Editor's Introduction to the Interview
In the following transcript, Rabbi P. Irving Bloom paints a picture of Mobile as a relatively progressive southern city able to integrate early and peacefully so long as Alabama's segregationist governors did not interfere. A port city with a substantial Catholic minority, Mobile benefited from forward-looking leadership that gradually integrated the city without fanfare and that kept lines of communications open with the local African American community. Neither the Ku Klux Klan nor the White Citizens' Council established a secure presence in the city. Still, some Protestant clergy who spoke out in behalf of civil rights shortly before Bloom's arrival lost their pulpits, and he usually worked with only a select few ministers to achieve peaceful integration. Bloom acted through organizations, several of which he helped found, and behind the scenes to keep the schools open and promote gradual integration. Yet when the occasion warranted it, as was the case with the murder of the Rev. James J. Reeb, the rabbi stood out as a voice of courage. He neither sought nor received much assistance from national Jewish organizations and viewed their resolutions in favor of civil rights as appropriate but ineffective.
Most rabbis worked through ministerial associations, although in Mobile this organization failed to accomplish much. As Bloom indicates, the name was changed from Protestant to ministerial shortly before he arrived so that rabbis could join. He joined as the only Jewish member and quickly became president. The selection of the Reform rabbis to such a position was typical, as will be illustrated by most of the rabbis interviewed. In Mobile, Jews were accepted before Catholic priests and African American ministers. Yet three ministerial associations existed: one white, one black, and a third attempting to integrate. The latter, although avowedly against discrimination, had to reach out to African American ministers to secure their membership and participation.
The story of Mobile and its Reform rabbi suggests that gradual integration was possible in the Deep South, given the right circumstance. Nonetheless, federal court cases, executive orders, and congressional legislation almost certainly forced more change that would not have taken place otherwise for the foreseeable future.
Historians have been virtually unaware of some of the rabbis, including P. Irving Bloom, who Allen Krause interviewed. These profiles, along with others gradually coming to light, provide evidence that the involvement of southern-based rabbis in the civil rights movement was far more extensive than previously understood. Their tendency to work quietly behind the scenes probably contributed to their anonymity in historical annals.
In numerous cases these rabbis witnessed gradual, positive change, albeit often sparked by the forces of the federal judiciary, Congress, and African American pressure. Because they witnessed relatively peaceful change in a region in which violent confrontation was viewed as the norm, they tended to perceive their communities — New Orleans, Louisiana, Mobile, Alabama, Columbus and Atlanta, Georgia — as unique. Yet these experiences proved to be perhaps as normative as the violent confrontations. This point reinforces the argument against a monolithic regional paradigm. There were many Souths as well as many types of southerners in each location.
— Mark K. Bauman
P. Irving Bloom Interview
June 23, 1966
P. Allen Krause: In what period did you see a marked change in the amount of civil rights activity in your community?
P. Irving Bloom: Oh, I would say the fall of 1964 actually would mark an intensification in Mobile of this type of activity.
PAK: What about the Supreme Court decision of 1954? Did that have any major effect on your community?
PIB: Not until 1964. It took that long a period, you see. The attitude of Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi and a few other states as you know after the Supreme Court decision of '54 was one of total rejection, was one of never. That this is the law of the case, and not the law of the land. This is the argument, and technically I suppose it has some merit. Each decision of the Supreme Court is the law of the case, based on the particular facts upon which the case had been adjudicated. But, of course, the '54 decision was a very broad, general one: one which certainly was applicable to all of the states of the Deep South, which maintained a distinctly segregated twofold school system, one for Negroes and one for whites. But there was no real activity; the Negro community did not push any requests for actual implementation of the Supreme Court decision of '54. It sort of, it was just there, and nothing was done about it.
PAK: What was it in 1964 that started this moving again?
PIB: It was earlier than '64 — I think it was about '60 or '61 — a suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, which sits in Mobile. A suit was filed asking for an order of the court to desegregate the school system in Mobile County. That suit bounced around in the courts in the United States District Court for the southern part of Alabama for a couple of years and was finally adjudicated and desegregation of the twelfth grade was ordered, effective the fall of 1964. I believe it was 1964; it might have been 1963; I'm not sure.
PAK: What was the response on the part of the non-Jewish white community of Mobile to the Supreme Court decision and the civil rights activism in 1963–64?
PIB: Well throughout the period it was simply a refusal to accept as law the decision of the Court. The political leadership of the state insisted it was not the law and we would not have to comply with it. In fact I wrote, and you may be interested in this, a paper about two years ago going over the legislative acts and the reaction of Alabama to the decision of the Court as seen through resolutions and laws passed by the legislature, and about other influences of the governor and so on during that ten-year period. It was submitted to the University of Cincinnati as a thesis to fulfill the requirement for an MA in political science there. The laws passed by the legislature during this period and the resolutions which it passed indicate very clearly the attitude of total opposition, total antagonism, and a total refusal to accept.
PAK: Was there any kind of visible minority that spoke up with a more moderate approach?
PIB: No.
PAK: There wasn't any?
PIB: No, none in Alabama.
PAK: What about the press and the mass media in Mobile? Are they also in this completely segregationist approach?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Stand Aside or Stand Alone by P. Allen Krause, Mark K. Bauman, Stephen Krause. Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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