White Biocentrism

Fifty years after Freedom Summer, civil rights volunteers reflect on activist lives
By Dina Weinstein

At the Freedom Summer anniversary conference in Jackson, Miss., the activists who registered black voters and taught in Freedom Schools under the threat of violence 50 years ago stood up to introduce themselves.
It took three hours to hear what they did in the Magnolia State back in 1964 and have gone on to do in the half-century since.
“Almost everyone had a social justice connection,” said Heather Booth, who went to Mississippi as a college freshman from New York before moving on to a career as a nationally prominent liberal activist. “The former volunteers went on to work as teachers, environmental activists and in the field of health care.”
Organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, Freedom Summer sent mostly white college students to Mississippi to confront the violent racism in the state.
In the summer of 1964, some 1,500 volunteers worked registering blacks to vote, teaching in Freedom Schools and organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which aimed to challenge the state’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention that year.

Jews were represented among the young civil rights volunteers in numbers far exceeding their share of the population.
Debra Schultz, the author of “Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” said that like other SNCC activists, Jewish Freedom Summer volunteers were motivated by a desire to hold the country to its full promise of democracy. Many were inspired as well by their Jewish and often left-leaning backgrounds.
“Among particularly ‘Jewish’ motivations, we can cite: an identification with another racialized people and a passion for racial justice, born of the recent experience with the Holocaust,” Schultz told JTA via email.
Booth said that she came to Mississippi a year after visiting Israel, where she made a commitment at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial to struggle for justice. Schultz noted that her synagogue had funded the $500 bail money required to participate in Freedom Summer in the case of an arrest.

The first days of Freedom Summer saw the murder of three civil rights workers — Jewish New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and black Mississippian James Chaney, who had been investigating the burning of a black church. During the weeks-long search for the workers, the bodies of eight murdered black men were found in the Mississippi countryside before the discovery of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner’s remains.
Tension and danger lurked throughout the summer.
There were another four people critically wounded, 80 activists beaten, 1,000 arrests, 37 churches and 30 black homes or businesses bombed or burned.
Booth recalls feeling frightened all the time that summer.
“But it was also very exhilarating,” Booth said. “There were nightly meetings at black churches, with a lot of singing.”
In Shaw, Miss., where blacks were neglected, Booth said she felt honored that her hosts generously gave up their beds for her and three other volunteers.
“In the black part of town, there were no toilets, no sewers and no street lights,” Booth said.
Booth continued her activism after Freedom Summer. She became involved in the women’s movement, founding Jane, an underground abortion counseling and referral service in Chicago. She went on to serve as the founding director of the NAACP National Voter Fund and Americans for Financial Reform. She also coordinated grassroots efforts to win passage of President Obama’s first budget.
Based in Washington, D.C., she currently consults for and advises a variety of liberal advocacy groups.
At the anniversary conference in late June, Booth was one of more than 200 former Freedom Summer volunteers in attendance. They met with nearly 2,000 younger activists.
Larry Rubin, a veteran labor movement activist who came to the reunion from Takoma Park, Md., worked on the SNCC staff as a young man from 1961 to 1965, first in southwest Georgia. In early 1964, he went to Mississippi to set up the infrastructure for Freedom Summer.
Rubin said that when he trucked donated books to the Freedom Schools, he was pulled over, roughed up and arrested by police who expressed anti-Semitic sentiments. (But when he came back to Mississippi later as a labor organizer, he recalled, a policeman who had once threatened to kill him if he ever again showed his face in his town praised his efforts to unionize a local business.)

When local blacks faced harassment, he said, all the civil rights workers could do was offer to report it to the federal government.
Rubin left the SNCC in 1965 as it was turning toward Black Power and whites were being pushed out of the organization. Rubin recalls feeling a sense of relief, like he was dismissed and could go home.
He returned to university studies to learn more about his Eastern European Jewish roots, just as the Black Power movement was encouraging African-Americans to embrace their heritage.
Rubin, who grew up in Philadelphia, said his civil rights work was influenced by his parents, who taught him to fight for social justice because of what his grandparents went through fleeing Europe.
But while many volunteers were Jewish, their backgrounds were not necessarily at the forefront within the movement.
“In the 1960s we didn’t discuss being Jewish, and we didn’t bring up our motivation for getting involved in the movement,” Rubin said. “There was no space to discuss Jewishness.”
Bob Moses, the well-known black civil rights leader and Freedom Summer organizer, told JTA that he was not aware at the time of participants’ Jewish identities.

“I didn’t know if Freedom Summer people were Jewish,” he said.
At the anniversary gathering, however, it was a topic of discussion, with a breakout session focused on Jewish participation. Also, concurrent with the reunion, the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life organized events on Jewish involvement in civil rights and social justice activism.
Freedom Summer volunteer Annie Popkin said her family was very aware of discrimination because her father was shut out of Harvard Medical School due to quotas that limited the numbers of Jewish students. At times her family embraced their Jewishness. Other times they turned away from it, seeing it as a painful liability, she said.
She said she was “so ready to go” south when organizers recruited students like her at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass.

Popkin started early in her activism. When she was 12 or 13, Popkin said, her mother took her to a picket line to demand fair housing in her hometown on New York’s Long Island after a black family who moved into the white section had their house burned.
Later, in ninth grade, she and a friend organized pickets of Woolworth’s in New York City in support of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South. Once when she was picketing, Popkin said, a woman shouted at her, “You’ll make my husband lose his job, and that’s not nice of you!”
“I realized I was not going to be a nice 1950s girl,” Popkin said in a telephone interview from her home in Portland, Ore., where she works as a counselor.
By the time of her Freedom Summer orientation in Oxford, Ohio, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had already disappeared. Freedom Summer organizers feared the worst.
But Popkin remembers feeling optimistic as hundreds of black and white SNCC volunteers locked arms, held hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
“Just imagine if everyone in the country could feel this spirit and see this vision. Wouldn’t people want to end segregation?” she recalled thinking.
Popkin calls her optimism naive.
“It was so moving to be part of the embodied vision of beloved community we were creating in working together, singing together, risking our lives together, believing together,” she said. “We knew what was right, and we spent our days and nights organizing for it.”
She went to Vicksburg, Miss., where she gathered signatures for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She witnessed the threats and reprisals — economic and physical — that kept blacks from attempting to register to vote.
“We got to see the strong consequences of what we were doing,” Popkin said.
Popkin, who went on to become involved in the women’s movement and teach women’s studies at various universities, pointed to the value of recalling the experiences of rank-and-file civil rights activists like her.
“There’s been a media emphasis on leaders in the civil rights movement and not the individuals who participated,” Popkin said. “All of our stories can be inspiration. If we could make change at 18, 19, 20, so can others today.”

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During the 20th century, the United States Congress passed many laws that negatively affected White Americans in one way or another. However, none of those laws delivered as much cultural damage to White America as did two back-to-back laws passed in the mid-1960s: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965.

The purpose of this essay is to show that people of a certain ethnicity were instrumental in the creation of the 1964 and 1965 laws.

Background

In the late 1950s, a civil-rights revolution spread throughout America - including within the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. Various legislative proposals, all designed to benefit racial minorities in one way or another, were tossed around by lobbyists, Senators and Representatives. Throughout the country, civil-rights groups demanded the passage of laws that would give minorities equal rights.

Although America's civil-rights groups appeared to be led by Blacks, in reality they were usually led -- or at least steered -- by Jews. Most of the men who founded the NAACP were jews, and for decades it had a jew as president. Martin Luther King Jr.'s chief advisor was jew Stanley Levison. The major civil-rights groups were funded mainly by Jewish donations. Furthermore, important civil-rights cases were argued and won in the courts by skilled Jewish lawyers. For example Jack Greenberg, who was a key figure surrounding the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Another Jewish attorney, Nathan Margold, produced the in-depth report that became the NAACP's blueprint for its legal strategy in outlawing racial segregation. In fact, it could be said that the Margold report virtually ended racial segregation in America.



The stage for the civil-rights revolution within the federal government was set by Jewish Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-NY), via his groundbreaking Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil-rights law since the Civil War era. Celler wrote and sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which came from his House bill, H.R.6127, which was signed into law by President Eisenhower in September 1957. That law led to other minority-benefiting laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Congressman Celler was a powerful force in the creation of the major civil-rights laws, the main reason being that, during the late 1950s/early 1960s, civil-rights advocates had learned to "use" the House of Representatives to advance their legislation. Thanks to Celler's chairmanship of certain House committees, civil-rights bills sailed through the House. Furthermore, civil-rights advocates were often able to use Congressional rules to allow their bills to bypass anti-civil-rights committees in the Senate, which increased the chances of their legislation becoming law. In other words, the House of Representatives was the "secret weapon" that was used by civil-rights advocates to create civil-rights laws, and Celler was the gatekeeper, so to speak, on the path that was taken by the civil-rights bills as they moved around the House.

Now we will highlight the 1964 and 1965 Acts, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Part I: the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Do you know why a private employer must -- by law -- hire Blacks, Mexicans and women? If you don't, the reason is: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - specifically Title VII of that Act, which outlawed any type of discrimination in employment. In other words, with the passage of that Act, private employers were no longer free to hire whom they wanted. In the name of freedom and civil rights, the Constitution was subverted, and genuine civil rights were taken away.

That 1964 Act, which came from Congressman Celler's House bill H.R.7152, was introduced in Congress on June 20, 1963, and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964. It is the most far-reaching civil-rights law ever created in America. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created, among other things, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which penalizes private businesses if they don't hire a certain number of racial minorities or women. The EEOC today functions as a medium through which organized coloreds can exact tribute from hard-working white men and the companies they found. The real "civil right" the 1964 act created was the right of the jewish bureaucrat and the black man to shake down the hated white.

It is worth mentioning that President John F. Kennedy was sort of responsible for the 1964 Act. He proposed a new, upgraded civil-rights law in the summer of 1963 and submitted it to Congress. The end result of that was Celler's bill H.R.7152, which was actually a stronger civil-rights bill than Kennedy wanted. (The idea for a strong civil-rights bill did not come from Kennedy himself but from many others, including the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights [see below] and Senator Hubert Humphrey).[1]

Many people feel that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional. They feel that it infringes on private-property rights by forcing private businesses to bend to the federal government's employment rules, and that it violates states' rights, since it compels the government to involve itself in civil-rights matters within the various states. The law also clearly infringes upon the freedom of association desires of White people. In effect it became illegal for whites to protect themselves from blacks, or in any way to refrain from mixing with them. Today anyone who calls for a return of the true civil right of free association will be attacked by the media as a racist who wants to return to the bad old days before civil rights.

It is true that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by gentiles in Congress, and signed into law by a gentile as well. But that Act needed to be conceived, written and lobbied-for first -- otherwise it would never have come into being. That's where these notable Jews came in:

Arnold Aronson (1911-1998) was founder and leader of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR).2 The LCCR, a powerful coalition of political and religious groups, organized major, countrywide lobbying efforts to aid passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Aronson was an icon within the Black civil rights movement. He received an award from President Bill Clinton, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his civil-rights work. Indeed, civil-rights activist Clarence Mitchell Jr. once noted: "There would not have been a civil rights movement without the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and there would not have been a Leadership Conference on Civil Rights without (Arnold) Aronson." LCCR has been called the "chief lobbying force" for the 1960s civil-rights acts.[3] Curiously, the building occupied by the LCCR was owned by a Jewish organization.[4] The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was written at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C., under the watch of the LCCR.

Now we again mention Congressman Celler (1888-1981). Not only did Celler introduce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into Congress, he oversaw the general creation of the Act within two committees in the U.S. House of Representatives. Celler not only chaired the Judiciary Committee but also House subcommittee No. 5, which considered H.R.7152 [5]. Subcommittee No. 5 was said to be the "most aggressive" entity in strengthening H.R.7152 [6]. Furthermore, Celler handpicked some of the members of Subcommittee #5, ensuring that the 1964 Act had plenty of "teeth"; and he also was the floor manager in the House during debate on H.R.7152. Additionally, Celler put more teeth into H.R.7152 than were needed, in case the bill was watered-down later by its opponents - which it was, via a compromise bill called a "clean bill," which was the same bill with a few words changed to ensure more Congressional support for it. Celler employed tricks to get H.R.7152 through Congress, such as using a discharge petition to aid passage of the bill through the congressional committees. Of significance is that Celler lied about the intent of the 1964 Act when he denied that it would prevent employers from hiring whom they wanted:

"[T]he charge has been made that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be established by title VII of the bill would have the power to prevent a business from employing and promoting the people it wished, and that a 'Federal inspector' could then order the hiring and promotion only of employees of certain races or religious groups. This description of the bill is entirely wrong..." [7]

Celler had a long record of pro-civil-rights activity in Congress. In fact, Celler could be called one of the biggest Congressional cheerleaders for legislation that somehow benefited racial minorities.

And finally, the main author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was Jewish assistant attorney general Norbert A. Schlei (1929-2003). (Schlei also wrote the Voting Rights Act of 1965).


1. On Kennedy as being prompted by others to shift to a stronger civil-rights stance, see the essay "A Brief History of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," by Robert D. Loevy; online at: http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~bl ... ActOf1964/ . Here.

2. Aronson is also called a "co-founder" of LCCR - a significant understatement. For example, the City College of New York mentioned, on its website, that one of its students received an Arnold Aronson Fellowship, a fellowship that is "named for the LCCR's founder."

3. On LCCR as chief lobbying force see "Papers of the NAACP, Part 13, 1940-1955," preface titled "Scope and Content Note," page xi

4. On LCCR building as being owned by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, see Broken Alliance: the Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America. (New York; Charles Scribner's Sons); by Jonathan Kaufman; p. 98.

5. On Celler as heading both the House Judiciary Committee and House Subcommittee No. 5, see article "LBJ Champions the Civil Rights Act of 1964" by Ted Gittinger and Allen Fisher; U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Summer 2004; and "The Background And Setting of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," Chapter 1, by Robert D. Loevy, online.

[6] On subcommittee #5 as the most aggressive entity in stiffening the 1964 Act, see working paper "Southern Roots of the New Right: John C. Stennis and Federal School Desegregation, 1954-1972," by Joseph Crespino; online; to be formally published in 2006.

[7] from the opening speech in support of H.R.7152, made by Celler on the House floor, June 1963

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Part II: the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (aka the Hart-Celler Act, the Immigration Act of 1965, and the Immigration Reform Act of 1965)

Like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the idea for serious immigration reform appeared to the public to have come from President John F. Kennedy. After all, Kennedy had officially called for the reform of America's immigration laws in a letter that he presented to Congress on July 23, 1963.

A liberal immigration law, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 -- which came from House bill H.R.2580 -- was written by Congressman Celler and gentile Senator Philip A. Hart (D-MI; 1912-1976), although Celler acted as the pointman for the Act by introducing it into Congress in January 1965. (Only Celler was mentioned by President Lyndon Johnson when he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law in October 1965, which highlights Celler's major -- as opposed to Hart's minor -- involvement in the creation of the Act. It seems as though Celler simply used Hart as a co-sponsor of the bill).[1]

Celler had a long history of advocating liberal immigration laws, so much so that he was the subject of a 1994 research paper bearing the telling subtitle "Leading Advocate of Liberal Immigration Policy."[2]

The Hart-Celler Act amended the McCarran-Walter immigration act of 1952. The McCarran-Walter law had mandated that immigrants be admitted into America based on their national origin. The Hart-Celler law abolished the national-origin rule and replaced it with family reunification, aka chain immigration, i.e. the close relatives of immigrants already living in America were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. as well.

For his part, Senator Hart worked closely with a group called the American Immigration and Citizenship Conference in an effort to get the 1965 Act passed. That Conference included 12 Jewish groups and the heavily-Jewish ACLU.

The Hart-Celler Act significantly changed the ethnic make-up of immigration into America. Before the Act was passed, the majority of immigrants coming to America was White. After the Act, the majority of immigrant arrivals was non-White (roughly 80% of the immigrants came to the U.S. from non-White countries). In other words, the 1965 Act reversed the racial make-up of immigration into America.

Jewish Senator Jacob Javits (1904-1986) also played a key role in the creation of the Hart-Celler Act. And Jewish attorney Schlei (see Part I above) conceived the idea of putting a "first come, first served" immigration rule into the Act, to replace the previous national-origins rule [3].



(Revealingly, an action by Jewish Senator Herbert H. Lehman (1878-1963) -- the son of an immigrant and a major player in pro-immigration legislation -- showed how important the issue of immigration reform can be to Jews: in the early 1950s, in what might be described as 'Jewish networking on immigration matters,' Lehman helped to install a Jew, Harry Rosenfield, as the executive director of the President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. Then Lehman, his Jewish aid and Rosenfield endeavored to help pro-immigration Congressmen with matters pertaining to the liberalization of immigration laws. The chairman of the President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization was also a Jew, Philip Perlman. And telling of Jewish attitudes toward the McCarran-Walter law were Senator Lehman's remarks that it had a "racist" and "xenophobic" aura. Apparently for Lehman, a post-WWII Zionist, such an aura surrounding immigration law was okay in Israel, but not in America.)

Powerful Jewish organizations also greatly aided the passage of Hart-Celler by, for example, issuing formal statements of support for the Act to the Congressional committees. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee played "major" roles in supporting the Act [4].

The Hart-Celler Act has, in just a few decades, transformed America into a mixed-race country teeming with Africans, Asians, and Latinos. And that was exactly what the American Jewish community intended all along, since Jews can theoretically avoid "anti-Semitism" by blending into racially-diverse populations.[5][6]

1. Celler mentioned as co-authoring the 1965 Act: the President's Initiative On Race, Advisory Board, Meeting, held at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C., September 30, 1997, in the recorded minutes of the meeting. (Note: contains a typo in the mention of Celler's name.)

2. "Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn: Leading Advocate of Liberal Immigration Policy, 1945-52," by Bernard Lemelin, Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 24, No 1 (1994), pp. 81-111

3. On Schlei conceiving the "first come, first served" idea: paper "Old Blood, New Blood, Weak Blood: The Nature of U.S. Immigration Laws" by Ronald Fernandez, Ph.D., Central Connecticut State University, Occasional Paper No. 63, July 2001

4. On the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee's role in the 1965 Act: essay "Jews And Immigration: Steinlight Soldiers On," by Marcus Epstein; published online at VDARE's website, June 19, 2004.

5. Regarding Jews and immigration policy, see Dr. Kevin MacDonald's report "Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965: A Historical Review" (1998); online at http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-immigration.html

6. Details of the 1965 Act can be seen here: http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/aboutu ... st/526.htm .

Summary

In the late 1950s/early 1960s, a political movement appeared in America demanding that new laws be created to benefit racial minorities and liberalize immigration laws. That political movement spawned two important laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965.

Whites in Congress passed those laws, but Jews laid the foundation for the laws, built the laws, and lobbied for them, both inside and outside of Congress. Jews took advantage of standard White benevolence and used Whites to help them pass those laws not because the Jews necessarily cared about the welfare of Blacks and non-White immigrants, but because the Jews wanted to make their new home safe from "anti-Semitism." The Jews -- always a clever people -- knew that they could go unnoticed in a multicultural America, and in recent years they have (almost). Whether the multiculturalizing-of-America-to-benefit-the-Jews was good for Whites was beside the point, for as the late President Harry Truman said, the Jews are "very, very selfish."

The 1964/1965 Acts damaged America's White culture like no other laws in U.S. history. In fact, the odds are that they damaged American culture beyond repair. Thanks to those acts, the United States has gone from being a White republic to being a racial "melting-pot" (a term coined by the late Jewish writer Israel Zangwill), a "democracy" of racial and gender "equality," a place in which Blacks, Mexicans and Asians vote for minority or female politicians; a place in which the government decides who you may hire; a place in which White women commute over long distances to work in big-city office buildings instead of raising children at home. Jews, as the prime mover behind these two malignant acts, bear a heavy responsibility for the cultural debasement that those laws produced for White America.

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