by Reggie Williams and David M. Shribman
When Black leaders proceeded from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1965 to demonstrate for voting rights, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched beside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “I felt my legs were praying,” he said.
When 11 Jews were gunned down at prayer at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the Rev. Eric S.C. Manning, whose Mother Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, was the scene of the murder of nine parishioners during Bible study in 2015, rushed to Pittsburgh to offer support. “The ministry of presence means so much,” he said.
With the approach of the end of Black History Month, the two of us — David a white Jewish journalist, Reggie a Black retired NFL standout who played in two Super Bowls, presences in each other’s lives for more than a half-century — have been talking about the ties between African Americans and Jews.
We met in college, nurtured our friendship over the decades, learned an enormous amount from each other — and have been moved by the documentary miniseries “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History” by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. on PBS this month.
That series opens with this sentence: “Even as outsiders in their own country, Blacks and Jewish people reshaped almost every corner of American popular culture in the first half of the 20th century.”
In our conversations, we classmates at Dartmouth College — an alma mater we love even as we deplore the history that once kept both of our peoples from attending to a minimum — have reflected on how these two minorities in America have been reviled and then have rallied, often together.
We’ve spoken about how our birth year of 1954 shaped us both, for it came only nine years after the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe, a shadow that has preoccupied David. That year also provided the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that set in motion the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, a powerful landmark for Reggie.
We’ve talked about how the Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed four Black girls in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church three days before Rosh Hashanah in September 1963 prompted Rabbi Milton Grafman to say in his High Holidays sermon that “Anybody with a shred of humanity in him could not have been but horrified by what happened.” We have lingered over the fact that the Ku Klux Klan murder of two Jewish and one Black civil-rights workers, who were killed a year later in Neshoba County, Mississippi, prompted Rev. King to say, “Their deaths involve all of us.”
We know that the perpetrators of the Holocaust drew on the philosophy and tactics of Jim Crow segregation. We know that today’s stresses on Black families and the current spike of antisemitism have broken the promise of America, even as they have broken our hearts. And we believe that just as, in the words of Professor Gates, “the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish commitment to social justice would help to forge a remarkable coalition with Black Americans in the 1960s,” this moment in history calls for a vigorous reprise of that sentiment.
Our own history tells us this.
When Reggie was young with speech problems, a Jewish doctor, Julius Gutow, monitored his treatment at what then was infelicitously called the Michigan School for the Deaf and Dumb — an experience Reggie called “more spiritual than medical.” It was Dr. Gutow who counseled him not to cry before a vaccine injection because, in words the future NFL Man of the Year and Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year pledged to live by, “If it doesn’t hurt, you don’t need to cry.”
When David was young, he heard tales from his Uncle Charlie Shribman, a big band-era music agent, about how he booked Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong in the New England jazz circuit. For years, Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant around his neck.
Decades later, David would be marked by the Tree of Life massacre three blocks from his home and by Rev. Manning’s compassionate response to the tragedy.
When Reggie was drafted for the pros, he experienced his first Shabbat dinner at the home of his agent, Mike Slive, then a district court judge in New Hampshire and later the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference college-sports powerhouse. As a young player for the Cincinnati Bengals, the linebacker who spent his honeymoon in Israel moved next door to Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk, who as a boy collected sodden shreds of Torahs desecrated during Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht and later became the president of Hebrew Union College. Four decades later, David’s daughter Natalie would be ordained a rabbi at Hebrew Union College.
“Both groups have lost a lot of power, influence and respect in the last few decades, and that makes it clear that we are both desperately in need of allies,” Susannah Heschel, Rabbi Heschel’s daughter and, in a remarkable coincidence, chair of the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth, told us. “For a white public intellectual like my father to speak the way he did, and to march the way he did, was quite extraordinary, and the passion of his voice is something we need to feel today. At a time when we need hope, it’s important to recognize that hope in America almost always has come from the Black community.”
The civil rights leader and writer Roger Wilkins told friends that his uncle, NAACP president Roy Wilkins, believed Rev. King’s “I Have a Dream” address was the second-best speech given at the famous 1963 March on Washington. He thought the best one came just before the King speech, delivered by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who fled Berlin in 1937 because of the growing danger to Jews in Nazi Germany.
“Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom,” he said, explaining that Jewish support for the civil rights movement was “not merely sympathy and compassion for the Black people of America.” He added, “It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.”
We know that both our peoples are guilty of sotto voce expressions of intolerance toward the other. But we know, also, that the times we have stood together, and marched together, have lifted us both, and us all. We know we can do better, to make for a better country. ** ** **
Reggie Williams, a 14-year veteran of the Cincinnati Bengals and a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, served as Cincinnati city councilor and as vice president of Disney Sports Attractions. David Shribman, for a decade the Boston Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and led the newspaper’s coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre that won the Pulitzer Prize.
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