Denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution the opportunity to sing at their Constitution Hall in segregated Washington, D.C., Marian Anderson gave an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial on this date in 1939. The event was arranged by her Jewish manager, Sol Hurok, with the backing of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who resigned from the DAR in protest), Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and Walter White, president of the NAACP. An audience of 75,000 (including 10-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.) attended, and the concert was nationally broadcast. Anderson, by then a world-renowned contralto, had previously been subjected to racial discrimination, including in Princeton, New Jersey, where she was turned away from hotel accommodations during a concert tour in 1937 — and ended up being hosted by Albert Einstein, who became her fast friend. To see her singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (after an introduction by Harold Ickes), see below.
Hurok “understood that booking Constitution Hall was a matter of toppling centuries of oppression in Washington, DC, and he enlisted the help of the city’s two most experienced civil rights leaders: NAACP President Walter White and Howard University professor Charles Cohen. While Hurok gradually created inroads with the DAR, White and Cohen planned the Anderson camp’s response to the eventual refusal, from courting alternative concert venues to contacting Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes about the concert. In January 1939, Hurok finally revealed to the DAR his goal for Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall, but the management of the hall denied the booking.” —Persephone Magazine
Anti-racist consciousness seems to be stirring anew in our country, reawakened, at least in part, by the best-selling success of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by civil rights attorney and law professor Michelle Alexander (The New Press, 2012). The New Jim Crow has been talked about all over the media, and is being studied in activist circles in several states. The San Francisco Chronicle has described it as “the bible of a social movement.” (See Cheryl Greenberg’s review of the book.)
Alexander argues, with tons of data to back her, that the War on Drugs launched by President Richard Nixon more than forty years ago has targeted and decimated black and Hispanic communities, even though illegal drug use actually occurs at the same frequency across racial and ethnic lines. With non-whites arrested and convicted for drug crimes at much higher rates than whites, Alexander observes, some 60 percent of the world-record 2.3 million people in prison today are non-white — out of a U.S. population that is about 13 percent African-American and nearly 17 percent Hispanic. The result, Alexander says, is a justice system that is more about social control of people of color than about protecting society from crime. After all, [click to continue…]
Imagine that police routinely set up road blocks and conduct blood-alcohol level tests on nearly every driver. They raid bars to find underage drinkers with fake IDs, then move to the parking lot to test drivers getting into their cars. They interrupt college parties to arrest those under 21 holding a drink in their hands, and scour dormitories for those drinking in their rooms. Every underage drinker, every driver with a DUI, is tried and imprisoned with a mandatory minimum sentence, and their cars are impounded. Each bartender and owner is arrested and sentenced as well, and their places of business are seized by the police and sold to benefit their departments.
Imagine hundreds of thousands of non-violent people, many of them young and with no prior records, finding themselves behind bars for years on end, disenfranchised for life, excluded from many jobs and universities, barred from receiving public aid or housing, and permanently stigmatized. Their families would be destroyed, their futures poisoned. Many would end up on Skid Row.
We would all be up in arms.
This is the reality, every day, for young black and brown people in America, thanks to the forty-year-old War on Drugs. Michelle Alexander, formerly the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California and now an associate professor of law, has written a powerful, moving book about the mass incarceration engendered by that war, and the many political pressures and economic and social realities behind it. Her basic argument is that an interlocking complex of law enforcement discretion, conscious and unconscious racial bias, mandatory sentencing policies, inadequacies of the legal system for indigent defendants, Supreme Court decisions limiting appeals, and the economic importance of the prison and parole apparatuses, combine to create and maintain a system of racial control — a system that has replaced Jim Crow in our now supposedly colorblind society. While not every aspect of the current system is rooted in, or relies on, racism, its genesis and many of the reasons for its expansion have been explicitly racist, Alexander suggests. “The nature of the criminal justice system has changed,” she writes. “It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.” [click to continue…]
Charles Silberman, who wrote best-sellers on criminal justice, education, race relations, and the status of the American Jewish community, died in Sarasota, Florida at 86 on this date in 2011. In Crisis in Black and White (1964), he reviewed America’s history of slavery and racial oppression and traced its effects on the lives and psychology of African-Americans today. In Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (1970), underwritten by the Carnegie Foundation, he described the bleak and oppressive condition of the American public education system. In Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (1978), he documented the racism built into the prison and criminal justice systems. In A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (1986), he presented an optimistic view of American Jewish life that challenged the hand-wringing stance of most American Jewish leaders. Silberman, a co-founder of the Reconstructionist movement’s West End Synagogue in New York, was an engaging, personable writer and thorough researcher.
“It takes guts to bring good news to the Jewish community.” —Charles Silberman
JEWDAYO ROCKS! Al Kooper (Alan Peter Kuperschmidt), founder of The Blues Project, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the Super Session recordings with Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills, Carlos Santana and others, was born on this date in 1944. To see him playing “I Can’t Keep From Crying” at a Blues Project reunion, see below.
By Rabbi Jonathan Kligler Woodstock Jewish Congregation I want to describe two reasons why the New Jim Crow, the system of mass incarceration, is a Jewish issue, and why I wanted our synagogue to host this gathering. The first reason should be self-evident: the central Jewish narrative is our story of how we originated as [...]
Anti-racist consciousness seems to be stirring again in our country, reawakened, at least in part, by the best-selling success of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by civil rights attorney and law professor Michelle Alexander (the New Press, 2012). The New Jim Crow has been touted all over the media, [...]
Remember our friend (I use that word as sarcastically as possible) Pamela Geller? You know, the one who put up the ads in the transit systems of several cities that read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, defeat Jihad.” Well, she’s at it again, this [...]
Anti-apartheid activist and politician Helen Suzman was born on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa on this date in 1917. Suzman was a member of Parliament from 1953 to 1989. She founded the liberal Progressive Party in 1959 and was its lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years, during which time she often [...]
I recently watched the documentary Monumental Myths, in which filmmaker Tom Triney rides across the country to visit different historical monuments and examines what kind of stories they tell. Overwhelmingly, they are the stories of (surprise!) white people, often to the denigration of American Indians and Black people. It’s worth a watch, but if you [...]
by Alyssa Goldstein Anyone who’s been paying attention to the news and to the presidential campaign probably knows that this is an increasingly scary time to be an American woman. Not only are many states passing laws which are making abortions difficult or impossible to obtain, but even contraception has become a contentious political issue. [...]
Denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution the opportunity to sing at their Constitution Hall in segregated Washington, D.C., Marian Anderson gave an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial on this date in 1939. The event was arranged by her Jewish manager, Sol Hurok, with the backing of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who resigned from the DAR in protest), Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and Walter White, president of the NAACP. An audience of 75,000 (including 10-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.) attended, and the concert was nationally broadcast. Anderson, by then a world-renowned contralto, had previously been subjected to racial discrimination, including in Princeton, New Jersey, where she was turned away from hotel accommodations during a concert tour in 1937 — and ended up being hosted by Albert Einstein, who became her fast friend. To see her singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (after an introduction by Harold Ickes), see below.
