Fruitlessly, I have been trying to think of a single contemporary galvanizing black leader who would stand up today for under-siege Jews the way Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Jews with towering profiles and thousands of faceless Jews were at Dr. King’s side throughout his dozen-year gallop across America’s darkest corners, helping him to illuminate and largely eliminate racial bigotry.
When Dr. King took to the streets and when the Freedom Ride started, Jews were at his side. He repaid their valued loyalty with ringing displays and words of support. He spoke of his unwavering friendship and back at conventions of religious Jews, synagogues, more secular gatherings, and not least about Soviet Jewry.
How we have shamefully backpedaled.
On this national holiday to remember Dr. King’s courageous, unprecedented accomplishments, ugly streets are jammed with crude, obscene black and white voices claiming racism.
Racism is not dead. Anti-Semitism is not dead. Historically, blacks and Jews have been the two most enduring American targets of bigotry. But because of Dr. King, instances of both have been reduced more sharply than any time before.
America is the most racially blended and balanced country in the history of the world, largely attributable to the bravery, the vision, the miraculous strength of will, the historic magnetism of Dr. King.
Inarguably, he was the most galvanizing, influential figure of the last century – a universal accomplishment that is blatantly ignored by the American black community and by white liberals. Many take their dreadfully misdirected cues from the word-game man in the White House, an embarrassment to Dr. King’s memory.
Dr. King’s open-faced commitment to prominent Jewish friends, the Jewish people and Judaism may not have been the most important cross-cultural relationship he forged in his meteoric short life – but it is the most appreciated and lasting. We owe him a debt.
