On the Occasion of the Observance of the Commemo-rative Holiday in Honor of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 2012
In the early 1960s I was a student at the High School of Music and Art, now called the Fiorella LaGuardia School of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The school was located uptown at Convent Avenue and 135 St. at the crest of Morningside Heights, on the campus of City College.
Like many people my age I was beginning to be aware of the issues of racism in American society, including the ugly racist words which were used, as well as the segregat-ed communities, euphemistically referred to as ‘bad’ neighborhoods and the poverty of these areas which seemed to perpetual.
We rarely talk about an ingredient of racism which is called ‘fear’. The fear factor means that society, the media, possibly your family and friends have a collection of things which make you wary of someone who is different. This is not a surprise to someone who is Jewish, since that is what has always been used against Jews – ‘they are not like us.’
It is difficult to believe in looking back at those years, that I attended a public school in the middle of Harlem which, while it had African American students represented in small numbers along with Hispanic New Yorkers, in total they amounted to a very small number of students.
Imagine, a school for the arts in NYC where only a handful of students of color were accepted. Things were very different back then, and it was just a a decade or more before this that Jackie Robinson had broken the race barrier when he was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The March on Washington occurred in 1963 and cap-tured the attention of our country and the world. A man stood out who sounded like an ancient prophet trumpeting a message: I have a dream…
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: – ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
He also said:
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish to-gether as fools.
My mother in law, Norma Nissenson, took a train, the Freedom Train, from Chicago, to be part of the ‘March on Washington’. Norma, a distinguished Child Psychologist, had been involved in this struggle for many years. When she, and her husband, Marc Nissenson, were stationed in Denver while he was in the Army Air Force, Norma had the chutzpah to invite African Americans into their home on the Army base. She founded the first Human Rights council in Denver in 1942 to raise awareness of the treat-ment African Americans in the military and elsewhere. As a result the FBI began a file on her and Marc. Marc was shipped out to Papua, New Guinea, where towards the end of the war he eventually had to sign his own discharge or-ders to leave the Island after everyone else in his unit had returned to the United States.
When he returned to the US he eventually earned his PhD in Clinical Psychology and became the youngest head of a Mental Hospital in the United States. Norma, was a big band singer and later a folk singer, in addition to being a clinical psychologist, she taught at Roosevelt University. It was through her music contacts that she began entertaining at rallies, including rallies in Chicago where Dr. King was the featured speaker. She rode the Freedom Train with Dr. King to Washington, DC for the rally.
Back to NYC, generally oblivious to much of this, one morning I showed up at high school, and hundreds of stu-dents were outside, boycotting the school. A citywide boy-cott of the New York City School System had been orga-nized. NYC was the largest school system of about one million students, and in 1963-64 like most other systems it was a segregated system. That is why my school in the middle of Harlem was mostly made up of Caucasian stu-dents. We could never figure out why most of the schools in Harlem didn’t send students to audition for the school, which was an outstanding school for voice, instrumental music, composition, visual arts, as well as dance and acting at the sister school, the High School of Performing Arts.
About ten students, including your rabbi, took signs and we marched uptown. Now this seemed illogical at first since uptown was the center of Harlem. Why did we need to demonstrate for desegregation in Harlem? It didn’t make much sense to me. However, as we marched through street after street of Brownstones, people would open their doors, stand in the doorway and applaud. They let their neighbors know we were doing this, because by the time we reached the next street, people were in their doorways applauding.
A simple gesture of ten students, marching through Harlem, was sending the message that segregation in NY was about to end. Were there ugly fights against this? Was it all good? However, it was necessary because it became the law. I don’t know how many blocks or miles we walked that day, nor can I describe how exhausted we all felt, along with the exhilaration of the march, yet, that day I learned what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described as ‘I felt I was praying with my legs’, when he marched in Selma, Alabama with Dr. King.
These are some of the memorable quotes of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who we are commemorating throughout the United States:
All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutu-ality. Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumi-nates it.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personali-ty and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.In 1969 Rabbi Harry Halperin expressed his concern that “There are Jews who suffer from a sense of guilt to-wards the Negro community…Judaism does not discrimi-nate against anyone because of the color of his skin. Can other religions or ethnic groups say the same?” Harry Halperin was correct in that this is so within Judaism, yet he was wrong in his lack of insight into the causes of the Negro problem and its revolving door dilemma.
Another Rabbi, Bernard Mandelbaum was more astute in his observation that Maimonides ‘principals for helping those in need relate directly to one of the most effective responses to needs of the Black community, our obligation to help people become self-reliant.”
We also have to remember that since Segregation was legal, this unjust law, needed to be changed. Heschel set out for us to improve community relations, to build bridges and to walk across them together. His concern was with the injustice of racism: “If I am for myself alone, what am I?”
We know that not everyone in those times looked at the Jewish community and said we welcome you or your help. Yet, in order to be true children of Heschel we need to overcome racism in our society.
As we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I hope that you’ll consider using this time to do some good at a shelter, for a tzedakah project, demonstrate with us to free Alan Gross who is in Cuban prison, and go to the mall to ponder the monument to a human leader who parted the waters for our country on a road to greater freedom for all citizens.