Presentation by Gabrielle S. Edgcomb to Howard University
Transcript
- --all of you to this evening's panel.
- We have a nice and not so nice seating problem
- so that as we proceed, folks will be coming in.
- And chairs, when acquired, will be
- made available to people still coming.
- The Department of Afro-American Studies here at Howard,
- for the last month or so, has been celebrating its 20th year.
- And we used Black History Month also as an occasion
- for underscoring our existence and the unfinished business
- of American democracy.
- Part of our activity in February consisted
- of a series of panels.
- We had one panel dealing with the options
- that the United States might face
- with regard to South Africa.
- And on that panel, we had Representative Howard Wolfe,
- Michigan, and his predecessor in that same seat, Charles C.
- Diggs.
- In the next panel we had, which dealt with US domestic policy,
- as options for the 1990s, we were
- lucky to have the participation of Attorney Sharon Pratt
- Dixon, who is vice president of Pepco, as some of us know,
- and also a potential candidate for the mayor
- job in Washington, DC.
- We had Isiah Leggett, who is a member of the Montgomery County
- Council, and Congressman Mike Espy
- of the state of Mississippi.
- In another panel, we--
- an occasion, we had representatives of the DC
- Rastafarian community and their adherents explaining,
- both in film and in presentations,
- the Rastafarian movement and what
- it means as an alternative religious option.
- And then last week, we participated as co-sponsors
- with the department of classics in a program
- dealing with the movie Black Orpheus, transferred
- from Greek mythology to Afro-Brazilian life.
- And that was a well-attended activity.
- Saying these things to say that Afro-American studies, as we
- could see it here at Howard, is not
- a matter of persons of color looking in the mirror
- and seeing only their faces, but looking
- in the orbit of the world, really, and seeing people.
- And it is in that spirit that we put this program
- together this afternoon.
- A little-known episode in Black higher education in the South
- has been the participation of emigre refugee Jewish scholars.
- And that is the occasion for being here,
- to explore this little-known aspect of Black education.
- I must say, by way of setting the stage for that,
- that persons who are not of African descent
- have always been involved in Black education,
- even prior to emancipation.
- The groups that were involved after emancipation
- were basically Protestant congregationalists.
- Howard University was founded by the American Missionary
- Association, which, at that time, was a congregation of--
- and still is-- organization, which grew out of the Amistad
- Affair, by the way.
- History buffs might remember that the Amistad Affair was
- an occasion where 55 Blacks revolted on the ship Amistad
- and ended up in New London, Connecticut.
- And a committee was formed to assist in their return
- to their homeland.
- Cinque was among those.
- And out of that [? Mindy ?] committee
- came the American Missionary Association.
- And out of that came the kind of involvement
- in Black education that started in the 1830s
- and was greatly amplified after the Civil War ended.
- The Yankee school mom was more than just
- a writer's attempt to summarize the activity of these women.
- There were some 5,000, almost in a peace corps fashion,
- white females who went to the Deep South
- amid all kinds of difficulty, hostility,
- and rejection to assist in the final presentation
- of formal education to ex-slaves.
- Black education in the 20th century
- has been involved with white America a lot.
- One of our courses, as a matter of fact,
- deals with the philosophy of Black education,
- as well as Black educational philosophy.
- But we use the term Black education
- as a shorthand way of saying, education
- is an emphasis on the perspectives, values,
- and ideas connected with African Americans
- in this Indian territory occupied by Europeans.
- Let me not get political on you, but proceed as we have agreed.
- Mr. Ethelbert Miller, who is known to many, many persons
- in this state and many other cities
- will introduce the moderator of the evening.
- We call Mr. Miller, who is a member of the department
- and has been virtually since its inception,
- the literary switchboard for Washington.
- People come from all over, even folks who don't write.
- Some come and simply sit at his desk.
- And we are delighted to have him introduce the moderator.
- And then the activities of the panel
- will proceed as indicated on the program.
- Mr. Ethelbert now.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Thank you, Dr. Evan.
- Welcome to our evening panel discussion.
- This evening, our topic is a fruitful encounter,
- German Jewish refugee scholars of that college.
- Thanks to Gabrielle Edgcomb, I can reach you
- as a founding member of the DC Community Humanities Council,
- an organization that has provided
- partial funding to make this evening's program possible.
- My role here this evening, however,
- is not one of simply representing the Council.
- I'm here to introduce a very close friend, a woman who
- has been a mentor and a fellow poet,
- a woman I admire because of her commitment
- to social change in our community.
- Gabrielle Edgcomb has done a lot work over the years
- to make this evening possible.
- This is what makes Gabrielle Edgcomb remarkable
- and so dear to our state--
- her ability to complete a journey, to fulfill a dream,
- and promise.
- I have learned from Gabrielle Edgcomb
- that there is such a thing as working coach.
- Coach is working together--
- individuals and groups coming together
- to create something wonderful and new,
- something needed and essential in our world.
- There are many types of encounters.
- There are close encounters, as well as proof of them.
- It's important that we pick documents and learn from that
- which is good in our history.
- We must restore history to memory.
- This evening, thanks to Gabrielle Edgcomb, the District
- of Columbia Jewish Community Center,
- and Howard University Department of African-American Studies,
- we can examine the past, ask questions
- about race, religion, immigration, and education,
- we can share in the knowing, as well as the learning.
- I'm happy to introduce my friend, Gabrielle Edgcomb,
- a person I respect, admire, and love.
- Gabrielle?
- [APPLAUSE]
- Thank you, Ethelbert.
- If I didn't know better, I'd be embarrassed.
- I hope that most of you, or at least many of you,
- remember Julius Hobson, a great civil rights
- activist in this city, who died tragically and prematurely.
- Julius spoke before his death, shortly before his death,
- of coming here from Alabama, working
- for the federal government, and going to school here at Howard
- at night, and how important it was in his development
- and in his, as he put it changing,
- the way he looked at the world because some faculty
- here was so extraordinary in terms
- of his educational experience.
- The man he singled out was named Otto Nathan, or Nathan
- in German, an economist who had fled from the Nazis.
- And he also was a pacifist and Einstein's very good friend
- and executive.
- Dr. Nathan died a couple of years ago.
- And that was the trigger to start me wanting to investigate
- the scope of this episode.
- I had known some other German Jewish refugees
- who taught at Howard.
- And I thought I knew that this had happened.
- But I didn't know.
- The Smithsonian Institution did a colloquium
- on the centenary of Einstein's birth, called "The Muses Flee
- Hitler."
- The project director was my friend Carla Borden.
- Are you here, Carla?
- Where are you?
- And she enabled me--
- right there-- to begin the exploration, together with her,
- of whether or not this really happened, and if so, how much
- of it happened.
- I eventually identified and documented some 50
- of these people who came here between 1933
- and the beginning of Second World War,
- or shortly before that, at which point,
- it was almost impossible for Jews
- and opponents of the Nazi regime to get out.
- And they had to make a new life elsewhere.
- And a number of them came to this country.
- One of the people in this category who was a survivor,
- his name is Ernst Menatzer, whom Dr. Adams knew
- at North Carolina Central, was invited to come.
- But he recently had a pacemaker installed.
- And he felt that he wasn't well enough.
- He has written me two letters, which
- I'm going to quote from because I think,
- had he been here to speak, he might
- have said something like that.
- The first letter was when we began the project,
- and Carla Borden wrote to him.
- This was in June '84, which shows you
- how long I've been at this.
- And I'm going to quote this to you now.
- I want to emphasize that whereas a number of people
- are inclined to say friendly things about the contributions
- we refugee scholars made to the growth and development
- of several predominantly Black colleges, both my wife
- and I felt that the experiences we had at these institutions
- changed and enriched our lives in significant ways,
- both intellectually and emotionally.
- Yesterday, I received a letter in which he told me,
- he unfortunately couldn't come.
- And I'm going to quote from that as well.
- I need not tell you how much I regret
- not being able to participate in a program whose--
- which constitutes my life's work.
- It is the first and perhaps the only time
- that the task which filled my and my wife's
- lives for many decades, and which constantly
- expanded our worldview--
- and while it pains me to miss it, the fact of this event
- alone provides a great satisfaction for me.
- And I hope that the issues involved here
- will be illuminated and will contribute to awakening
- greater human insight.
- I translated this from the German.
- And if some of it is awkward, that's why.
- Now, the research was just about complete
- when I was appointed a research associate with the German
- Historical Institute here.
- There are many wonderful stories and audiotapes
- which I have collected from a very few
- of the principals and scholars, who have--
- just very few of them alive anymore,
- but also of students, and colleagues,
- and other associates, some of whom are here.
- And when we have the discussion, I'm
- going to call on them to say something, if I can find them.
- But I owe a special debt to the director of this institute
- because he is the one who was interested in having
- this project backed by the German Historical Institute
- and his constant support has been of enormous importance
- to me.
- Dr. Herzig Lehman, the institute's director,
- will give a presentation of the conditions
- in German universities and in Austrian ones
- after '38 to show what Nazi takeover did to the faculty.
- Thank you.
- The muses fleeing Hitler, scientists and scholars
- flee Nazi Germany.
- It's an honor for me to participate in this panel.
- I've been asked to provide some of the historical background.
- As time is limited, I want to concentrate on six points.
- The first point-- how many people
- were forced out of Germany in the 1930s
- and how many came to the United States.
- Second point-- among emigrating academics, which field they're
- representing.
- Third point-- why did scholars and academics have to leave?
- Fourth point-- what kind of repression
- were they subjected to?
- Fifth question-- which options did they have?
- Where could they go?
- And the sixth and last question--
- what was their destiny in their countries of choice?
- First numbers-- in the 1930s, after '33
- and after '38 Austria, about 400,000 people
- were forced out by the Nazis.
- Of these, about 250,000--
- this is a quarter million--
- came to the United States.
- And of course, not all of them were academics.
- If one classifies the people with professions
- and some academic degrees, one could say, roughly,
- of these 400,000, 50,000 were very well trained.
- And people in real university positions,
- there were about 1,500 to 2,000.
- And of these 1,500 to 2,000, about 1,000 or 1,200
- came to the United States.
- Now, you may think, that is not much, not much
- in total numbers.
- But on the other hand, among these 1,000 or 1,200,
- there were some scholarly giant-size ones, to call them.
- Take for example, Renaissance history,
- to give just one example--
- Paul Oskar Kristeller, Hans Baron,
- and Felix Gilbert-- the three main minds in this field--
- were forced to emigrate.
- Renaissance studies virtually ended in the United States
- after they had left.
- And they came to this country and established this field
- here.
- So numbers alone don't count.
- And 1,000 to 1,200 may mean a great deal.
- The second question-- from which university did they come?
- And which fields did they represent?
- Well, they came from all universities across the board.
- And they represented all fields--
- law, and medicine, archaeology, and theology,
- and so on, and so forth.
- Perhaps the two fields least represented,
- at least for some time, were Protestant and Catholic
- theology.
- There was some-- fewer were forced to leave
- these faculties than others.
- But aside from that, actually, all the fields were affected.
- And in some universities, 10%, 15%, 20% of the faculty
- were forced to leave after '33.
- Now, not all universities were affected in the same degree.
- There were some exceptions where there
- was an especially high number of people forced out.
- For example, my home university, Kiel, in northern Germany,
- which was a provincial university in the 1920s
- and was considered as a stepping stone for Berlin University,
- and there in the 1920s, quite a few younger socialists,
- liberal-minded, left liberal-minded professors
- had been appointed.
- And they were overrepresented in the faculty, one could say so,
- in 1933, which meant there were an equally high number
- or a higher proportion of people was forced out
- by the Nazis, which in turn meant that in the mid 1930s,
- Kiel was an especially Nazi-affected, Nazi-determined,
- and Nazi-influenced university.
- Why did scholars have to leave?
- Well, there were political reasons and there
- were ideological reasons--
- and political and ideological reasons
- as defined by the Nazis, political reasons
- whom they considered as their enemies--
- the socialists, liberals, and all
- those whom they considered not reliable to rebuild Germany,
- which they claimed as their aim, to take part in Germany's
- new quest for glory.
- All those who were considered unreliable were forced out.
- And ideological means that they had their own definition
- of who was a Jew.
- And they-- those people of the Jewish faith
- were to be excluded from the renewed
- German quest for power, or at least
- what they believed that that was.
- There was a tool, a legal tool, the Gesetz zur
- Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums,
- the Law for the Restoration of the German Civil Service, which
- was passed in the spring of 1933,
- and which gave a formal means of forcing people out
- of the universities.
- But that was not all.
- There were other ways and means of repression.
- And this is my fourth point.
- There was student harassment and student boycott,
- starting before '33--
- starting '31, '32, the harassment
- of some professors by students, boycott of lectures,
- and of course, the early climax, then, the book
- burning in April '33.
- There were the Nazi colleagues.
- Some faculty had joined the Nazi Party before '33--
- not many, but after the takeover by the Nazis, quite a few.
- And they denounced and deserted their colleagues.
- There were the Nazi authorities, who expelled and dismissed.
- And then there were the non-Nazi colleagues,
- who were intimidated and withdrew,
- who did no longer socialize, no longer invite,
- no longer talk, who looked at these people
- as if they had the plague.
- And that was, for some, perhaps the worst of all.
- They knew what was a Nazi.
- But they saw many could be intimidated.
- That was even worse.
- And finally, there were the younger faculty, younger
- Nazi colleagues, dissatisfied junior academics,
- who had not advanced fast enough, as they thought,
- and who were so eager, overeager, to fill
- in the new positions.
- And quite a few of them were involved
- in the acts of denouncing.
- So there was a whole environment which came together
- to force people out and to show them
- that there was no future for them in a Germany governed
- and ruled by the Nazis.
- What were the options?
- My fifth point.
- Well, there were not many options.
- One was early retirement, chosen by some in their early 60s.
- One sees people retiring in February-- as early as February
- 1933, March, April '33.
- Of course, if you are 50 or 40, that was no way out.
- Then there was the Nazi themselves,
- they transfer some of the professors
- to Frankfurt University, which was sometime in spring of 1933.
- It seems like a holding place.
- It was conceived like a temporary holding
- place for some of the nonconformist, especially
- the Jewish faculty.
- But that was only a temporary element in the whole picture.
- There were few academic positions offered abroad.
- The main country where new positions were available
- was Turkey.
- And quite a few of the early emigrants left for Turkey
- and stayed there all through the '30s and '40s.
- There were few countries to offer passports.
- A country offering passports very long on
- was China, passports to Shanghai.
- And then there was the emigration
- to all those countries in Europe, as--
- which did accept.
- And for some time, many did not accept enough.
- So we have a stream of people going
- into Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Poland, Switzerland.
- Even fascist Italy accepted some-- the Vatican,
- from where they sometimes went on to South America.
- And then, of course, there was, again, and again, and again,
- the hope, and the wish, and the dream
- to go to the United States.
- This was the major option.
- For many, this was the land of the new opportunities,
- the land for which so many hoped so hard.
- My sixth question, finally--
- what was the impact of these people
- in their new environment?
- This is, I think, above all, the question of research.
- And we are very grateful that Gabrielle Edgcomb has taken up
- this question, has done very solid research on this topic.
- So far, researchers have mainly concentrated
- on what I would call the spectacular cases,
- on the enormous impact of the German celebrities coming over
- here, what one could call the Einstein or the Thomas Mann
- syndrome.
- But aside from that, there are many, many others-- dozens,
- hundreds of others.
- And their destiny still awaits to be researched thoroughly.
- And then there are these neglected areas of research.
- One has to see, those who came over here-- hardly anyone
- had been in the United States before.
- They did not know the country.
- Furthermore, they did not know the language.
- They knew Greek, they knew Latin,
- they knew some French or Italian.
- But their English was poor.
- And in some cases, the English remained poor.
- And still, they had an impact.
- And then there was the period of unemployment for many
- after they came.
- Positions were not readily available.
- For others, finding a position meant a career change.
- They had to go into a new field in order to make a living--
- the lawyer who ended up as a clerk in a hospital,
- and so on, and so forth.
- And then for some, there was a continuation
- in their own field, but in lesser positions.
- So there is a lot one can talk about in this context.
- And there's a lot which we have to find out before we can fully
- grasp the whole range of experience
- and the impact on all levels-- not only on the very
- high level, but also on the other levels inside
- and outside the universities.
- And it is in this context that the contribution
- of the Jewish refugee scholars at Black universities
- and Black colleges is the most important one,
- and one which has not been given due credit so far.
- Thank you.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Our next speaker is Dr. Max Ticktin,
- who is the chairman of Judaic studies at George Washington
- University, and who will talk to us about the condition
- that the refugees found in this country,
- particularly with respect to whatever was organized
- by the Jewish communities and organizations
- to help with money, and housing, and jobs,
- and you name it because most of the people who
- came without much of anything.
- And it was an extremely difficult time
- for many of them.
- There is one friend here, [PERSONAL NAME],,
- who is doing the research about the women,
- which has never been done before,
- and which is very revealing.
- Because as often happens with professional people,
- it is the women who were able to make a living because they knew
- how to cook, and to babysit, and to sew, and to clean house,
- and that's what they did to a large extent in the beginning.
- So that's a very valuable contribution
- I have to say something about.
- Dr. Ticktin will tell us a little bit
- about what these folks found in the Jewish community
- and in the organizations when they came to this country.
- Dr. Ticktin?
- Thank you.
- We're gathered to note several phenomena--
- one of which is how far we have advanced
- in our battle against prejudice and racism in some 50 years.
- And one way to note that from which
- we can derive some lessons, I discovered in an excerpt
- from a recently published book by Jonathan Kaufman,
- called Broken Alliance-- the Turbulent Times
- Between Blacks and Jews in America.
- He tells us the story of April 1945, just 44 years ago.
- The United States Army was still segregated.
- Blacks fought in separate companies,
- commanded by separate officers.
- And as the war was coming to an end,
- General Eisenhower was determined
- to see that the war would end by June.
- And there was a Black sergeant from Indianapolis,
- who one day got a call on April 29, 1945,
- and was told to move his platoon to Dachau.
- As they entered, Jews began drifting out of the barracks,
- looking almost like ghosts.
- So we may see it, as were they.
- They ran up and began to hug the Black GIs.
- The Blacks were stunned by what they saw.
- The ovens were still warm.
- Some soldiers became sick.
- Others were afraid to embrace the Jews, for fear
- that they might break their bodies.
- The reason the Blacks were sent into this part of Dachau
- first became clear.
- Within hours, the American high command
- would ship in medicine and food to the concentration camp
- survivors.
- But the first priority was to clear away the dead bodies
- the Germans had left behind.
- The sergeants' Black platoon, at the bottom of the army
- hierarchy, was the army burial squad.
- I cite this to show you that 44 years ago may seem a long time.
- But it isn't so far in the distance.
- Our task is to learn from the past, the subtleties,
- and the intricacies of our recent history
- so that we can identify what are the next frontiers
- in the battle against hatred, collusion,
- idolatrous bias against any minority,
- and thus to try to reestablish a true American pluralism,
- to strengthen our moves to a fuller economic and political
- democracy, and also, though we see some achievements
- over 40-odd years, to mitigate any sense
- of self-congratulation that we may have for our achievements.
- Our purpose is also, this evening, it
- seems to me, to study the lives of individuals,
- or at least take note of them, and to remind ourselves
- that there was, as Dr. Lehman has put it,
- a Mann-Einstein syndrome, in which we paid attention
- to the spectacular adjustment of some of the great ones,
- but that the power of the individual, the individual host
- of these Black colleges, the individual newly arrived guest
- scholar should never be underestimated when
- we talk about social change.
- This means much to me if I may be
- personal for just a moment or two
- because I'm old enough to remember
- some relevant circumstances here in this country in the 1930s.
- I went to school in Philadelphia in a public school
- in which Blacks and whites were students together.
- But I remember being told that in Baltimore, in Washington,
- the schools were segregated.
- I did not understand that.
- And then, like many other Jews in big cities,
- I moved into a neighborhood where
- I had little contact with Blacks and was indifferent
- for many years.
- But I remember my high school teacher telling me
- of the events that some of you saw, as noted in the newspaper
- just the other day--
- Marian Anderson being excluded from the GI hall in 1939.
- I also remember seeing individuals in Philadelphia
- in the late 1930s in Nazi uniforms, American Nazi Party.
- I recall hearing Hitler on the radio.
- I remember the Jesse Owens incident in the Olympics.
- These things stay very much with me,
- as do some other personal reminiscences
- a few years later, when I was a student in New York City.
- And I volunteered to work with a church in Harlem, which
- was trying very hard to keep kids off the streets.
- But I was a bad basketball player.
- And so they put me in charge of teaching
- Black history to 12-year-olds.
- And I had to bone up very fast the night before.
- I think I would do a little better now.
- I'm not so sure.
- There's much that's happened in these years.
- If we are to learn from the past,
- we're to remember that there were some 575,000
- Jews in Germany in 1933, less than 1% of the population.
- They had benefited from the emancipation from the ghetto
- a century and a half earlier.
- Liberalism had permitted them to move ahead socially,
- economically, educationally.
- There was a disproportionately large number of them
- who were academics, intellectuals,
- and professionals.
- But when the idolatry of the [? volk ?] came to be,
- for which they were not prepared,
- despite all the things we can see retrospectively,
- they indeed had to flee.
- And as you've heard, many of them came to the United States.
- And when they came to the United States,
- their contact with the Jewish community was mixed.
- We cannot judge from the 50 individuals,
- whom Gabrielle Edgcomb is studying, for most of them,
- with the exception of those who came to Howard, perhaps,
- ended up in very small communities in which there were
- very few Jews.
- The larger number of Jews lived in big cities.
- And in the '30s, the Jews constituted some 3.7%
- of the population of the United States--
- much less now.
- They were immigrants, children of immigrants,
- or grandchildren of immigrants, for there
- had been a migration of two and a quarter million Jews
- between 1880 and 1921, '24.
- They lived in big cities.
- They tried to move up in the social-economic ladder.
- 1933 was an important year, best exemplified by the fact
- that I remember that most Jewish homes, time when I was growing
- up, had a picture of Franklin Delano
- Roosevelt, a framed picture of Franklin Delano
- Roosevelt in the living room.
- That meant something to those Jews,
- for whom America was a land of promise.
- There was much accommodation to this new world.
- But there was also an effort, as we moved in to new positions,
- to try some political pressure.
- And in the 1930s, when the Nazis had come to power,
- and American Jews were concerned about brothers and sisters
- in Europe, not in any sense being
- able to perceive that six million would be exterminated,
- and the thousands of Jewish communities in Central
- and Eastern Europe would be destroyed,
- some Jews in New York City tried an anti-Nazi boycott.
- It failed.
- It failed miserably, retrospectively.
- We understand that the Jews, even in New York City,
- were too new at the political game
- and did not know how to build coalitions.
- And that was in a measure because,
- like other immigrant groups, they
- were so self-absorbed in their efforts to move up the ladder.
- It was also because there was antisemitism in the United
- States.
- Most public opinion polls until 1946
- showed considerable hostility to Jews.
- And one wonders, if there had been some change in American
- public opinion, what would-- really would have meant for all
- of us, all of us for--
- since there were results from these polls which
- indicated hostility to possible immigration
- in large numbers of refugees, the Roosevelt administration
- dragged its feet, participated in refugee conferences,
- and did nothing--
- essentially denied the dangers to the individuals, and held up
- many people who sought to come.
- This means much to me, for my own wife languished
- with her family in Europe in '39 to '40, waiting for the visa
- to the promised country.
- It was also the time when the radios were filled
- with hostility, expressed by Father Coughlin of Detroit,
- repudiated by other Catholic clergy,
- but continuing to spew out hatred
- for months and even years.
- It was a difficult time for many people,
- difficult for Jews and non-Jews here,
- when it came to welcome the refugees.
- Someone has put it--
- one refugee was a novelty.
- 10 were boring.
- 100 were a menace.
- We can translate that to other circumstances in our own time.
- There had been efforts to build urban ethnic coalitions
- among several immigrant groups and with Blacks in New York
- City, which showed some results in the elections of 1928,
- 1932, all three gubernatorial elections in New York State,
- and then the presidential elections.
- But in many ways, we have to admit that they didn't-- that
- that coalition building didn't really succeed outside of New
- York City.
- And so we have to look at the past
- and understand that there was welcome and non-welcome
- at the same time.
- It is true that the American Jewish community,
- with all of its marginality, still
- had continued the tradition that it
- had from Eastern Europe of concern
- for members of its group, members of its own faith
- tradition.
- And so many Jewish organizations blazed a path
- in philanthropy and in refugee assistance,
- learning methods of aiding refugees, especially
- in the big cities, and perhaps even
- only in the big cities, which would
- be of help to similar groups after the war, groups
- beyond the Jewish community.
- But the self-absorption, the fear of antisemitism itself,
- frequently limited, as I indicated
- when I mentioned the boycott, what Jews could really do, even
- for their own people.
- The exceptions are remarkable.
- The exceptions do include the significant number
- of artists, and scientists, intellectuals,
- whose record of acceptance has been documented
- in the Smithsonian conference.
- We should, however, not allow that to be the whole picture.
- And so the research that Gabrielle Edgcomb
- has brought to our attention fills out the picture,
- for she speaks primarily of the smaller communities
- in the South, where, with all their insecurity,
- the few Jews who were available in the small towns
- welcomed some of the Jews who had
- come from Germany and Austria and tried
- to make them feel at home.
- But from what I've heard from her
- and what I've heard from other sources,
- the real welcome came from the leaders
- of the colleges who appreciated what the interchange would mean
- with the scholars, who appreciated what
- the erudition could mean for their own students
- and the anecdotes that you can hear surrounding
- the story, surrounding Otto Nathan and others,
- are the story of individuals who really made a difference.
- Thank you.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Thank you, Dr. Ticktin.
- Our last speaker is someone you all know,
- Dr. Russell Adams, chairman of Afro-American
- studies department here at Howard University.
- He will talk about the situation in the historically Black
- colleges in this country.
- Whom [INAUDIBLE],, as I said before, welcomes the refugees.
- Dr. Adams and David Posner, [INAUDIBLE],, and myself
- have been working together to make this occasion.
- And it has been a pleasure and a privilege.
- Dr. Adams?
- I'm not Sammy Davis, so I'm Baptist.
- For the folks who look more like me than like Ms. Edgcomb,
- in order to make this occasion emotionally
- and intellectually sharper than it might be,
- because I see some eyelids very heavy in the back,
- imagine this scenario.
- Lee Atwater is president.
- Ryan [? Quist ?] is in charge of the Justice Department.
- The Ku Klux Klan has won the American South
- and is working on New York.
- The survivalists of the far Northwest
- are looking at the big boats to exile Blacks.
- Imagine that scenario.
- Imagine that scenario, and you can feel a little more
- the connection between what you've heard so far
- and the African-American experience.
- It's so easy to think that one's own group's troubles are
- unique to the group.
- And it's so easy to say, it can't happen here.
- This is not a prologue to paranoia.
- But one of the dynamics that made the Holocaust
- with the Jews in Europe, in my judgment, so catastrophic
- was the belief almost until the last moment that it couldn't
- happen there, especially those Jews
- who had arrived at a middle class status
- in Germany and in Austria, and to some extent in Italy,
- and who had at least superficial acceptance
- by the non-Jewish population, and academia, and industry
- at the managerial level to some extent until 1933.
- Some folks were not really awake until 1938, the night--
- that Kristallnacht night, when the glasses were broken,
- and books burned, and so on.
- We haven't had that quite in America with regard to Blacks.
- But there's a complacency that I wish to warn all of us against.
- And so for those of us who think that this discussion might
- be a bit distant, it is not distant at all.
- Let me move into my topic more directly.
- And my presentation will be a mixture
- of reminiscence and analysis.
- Born in Baltimore, I grew up in South Georgia.
- And I did so in the '40s.
- A lot of my students think I'm younger than I am.
- I'm too old to vote.
- But I rode the trains with my parents
- from Baltimore to Quitman, Georgia,
- which is named after John Quitman, who wanted Cuba
- to the Union as a slave state, in the front, where Blacks
- were compelled to sit by law.
- That had been ordered there by custom during slavery.
- Because Blacks, in case you were puzzled
- about the pattern in terms of why Blacks were placed
- on the front of the trains--
- the slaves who had to fire the old wood-burning engines,
- and later, the coal-burning engines,
- were housed near their work in the front of the train.
- So that became the practice of Blacks.
- When I left South Georgia to go to Morehouse to school,
- I rode the back of the bus, the trailway.
- Came through Quitman twice a day--
- in the morning going west, in the evening going east.
- And that was the schedule for that town.
- My first conscious knowledge of Jews in the Deep South
- was in that little town--
- Isaiah Calen and Peter Lazarus, the dry goods stores.
- Were tiny stores, but we thought they were grand
- because you'd see many pairs of overalls over here, many straw
- hats over here.
- And you could do stuff on credit.
- And we noticed that those two stores
- allowed Black women on Fridays and Saturdays to try on things.
- To try on things.
- Some of us don't realize that many stores,
- including those in DC--
- that include Woody's in the old days--
- you had to work with the eyeball method of selecting clothing.
- And when we-- in South Georgia, we'd go to town,
- I'd see a lot of Blacks with their shoes slit
- at the bunion section and at the toe section
- because their eyes were inaccurate as to the size.
- You could not try on the shoe.
- You had to stare at the shoe and make a choice.
- And once your Black foot went inside, that was yours forever.
- And on it went.
- But you could try on shoes in Calen's and in P. Lazarus.
- And so much so that the store became
- known as the Black hangout.
- Folks would go to the stores and hang out in the front,
- drinking their knee-high and eating
- their naps in those days.
- So I'd take the bus to Atlanta, to Morehouse,
- where I encountered my first non-Black teachers.
- We're talking prior to Brown versus Board.
- We knew where the white school was equipped majority.
- It was on the good side of town, where the lawns were green,
- and our cousins were cutting them, and keep them that way.
- At Morehouse, there was Frau Hannah, who taught German.
- There were two refugee males in the physics department,
- I do believe.
- At Atlanta University, there was [PERSONAL NAME]
- [? Wilna ?] in psychology talking about the subconscious.
- In those days, the South had trouble dealing
- with psychological questions.
- You either were all right or you were crazy.
- There was no middle ground.
- You didn't have mental disturbance.
- It was mental breakdown, but no gradations.
- And this is where I first heard the name of Sigmund Freud.
- We used to call him Thinking Man Freud.
- And then we started doing curbstone analysis of the ids,
- the ego, the superego.
- I didn't hear that kind of talk till we got to her class.
- And I think that was true in many, many such situations.
- What I'm driving at is that, as a first point,
- one of the effects of the presence of non-Southern
- whites, generally Jewish, in those Black schools was
- to raise the intellectual targets--
- we had the aspirations, we didn't have the targets--
- to break away from the Sunday school morality in terms
- of psychological analysis.
- If something is worrying you, you must have sinned.
- Or as we said in South Georgia, God's punishing you, boy.
- But to realize that it is far more complex than that,
- that the mind is a roiling, boiling, calculating entity,
- and that there was such a thing and is
- such a thing as the subconscious,
- such a thing as displacement, projection, scapegoating.
- We knew this crudely, but not the way [PERSONAL NAME]
- [? Wilna ?] laid it out for us.
- And she did such a job that when I got to Chicago
- for grad school, a lot of the titles that we had at Morehouse
- were recommended as readings for people
- at Chicago, which is another long story that I maybe
- will touch on later.
- But raising the targets in those schools, raising the targets
- then gives me a chance as a phrase
- to talk about the conditions that tended to prevail.
- And I'm painting with a broad brush,
- as we all have been doing.
- If one had to argue what was the agenda of public Black colleges
- in the South in the 1940s and early '50s,
- I'd say these things.
- First, to produce a class of teachers
- for the public schools.
- Education must be in all of those places, pretty much.
- The Department of Education was where the prestige was--
- to teach some people to go on to graduate school,
- perhaps, to replace their teachers in terms of college
- transition and replacement.
- The second objective was to build
- a petty petite bourgeoisie, especially Tuskegee, where
- the motto, for many land grant colleges among Blacks
- was to teach the heart, the head, and the hands
- humility status quo, to give some Calvinistic virtue
- to the Black community--
- Calvinistic virtue meaning, que sera sera-- what will be,
- will be.
- Do not push for social change, but push for respectability
- as defined by modest, slightly above Booker Washington
- technical training and facilities,
- to serve as a buffer in terms of the college products
- coming out of those institutions between those Blacks
- who would never get to college and the white community.
- I think those were some of the agendas
- for the public institutions.
- The private institutions were another matter.
- They were not Southern-funded because the public
- was worried by definition, the state legislatures,
- and their budgets, which they used with great viciousness
- in keeping things in order.
- But the private Black colleges were funded halfway
- from Black religious support, and
- from Northern Protestant philanthropy,
- and to some extent, beginning in the mid '30s,
- from Jewish philanthropy.
- And those colleges had a little more leeway
- in choice of curriculum, in choice of faculty,
- and in the lifestyle.
- Make it concrete by illustration.
- A typical practice for the publicly-supported Black
- colleges in many-- especially Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama,
- the Gulf States--
- would be when the state legislatures taught,
- came out to do an inspection, a look-see as to how Black folks
- are handling this money, and is anybody getting too uppity,
- a standard way of measuring the control was to ask the chorus--
- the choirs to sing some of those good old darky songs.
- And if you did not sing those songs,
- you would have your preparations cut because that's insolence.
- You have been asked to do this.
- They did not do this at Spelman.
- They did not do it at Morehouse.
- It was not done at Talladega.
- The Fisk Jubilee Singers did their singing
- at their own decision and not by a fiat of someone who
- says, if you do not sing well for your supper,
- in terms of endowment, we will punish you.
- Let's focus on Atlanta and Morehouse a little more--
- and of course, the other schools around Morehouse.
- And we do this by pointing out several things
- in terms of Black colleges, generally, that were private.
- There were clusters of these colleges.
- If we take Morgan, Coppin, Howard, and Bowie of 30
- years ago, they make a cluster.
- And there was a sort of isolated academic life
- for Blacks and for whites working
- with them in these clusters.
- There's another cluster in Atlanta that consists,
- of course, of Spelman, Morris Brown, Clark--
- I guess those are the big three in that location-- and Atlanta
- University.
- There is a smaller cluster, much smaller, in New Orleans
- and around New Orleans--
- Dillard, Southern University at Shreveport, Xavier.
- The contrast between what was permitted
- in the public institutions and the Black institutions
- was dramatic.
- A Benjamin Mays could not have survived as president
- of Savannah State College.
- But he did survive, as we all know, for a long time
- as president of Morehouse.
- A Matilda Reed, who was president of Spelman
- for a very long time, if she had been appointed
- as head of a public college, could not
- have survived with the kind of ideas that they were promoting,
- and that the Jewish scholars helped to amplify.
- Morehouse, in particular, was devoted to training us
- for things that didn't exist.
- I studied political science in the late '40s
- with no intention of becoming a lawyer.
- The rule at Morehouse was make sure you cannot get a job with
- four years of college.
- That was the understanding, that you would not
- become a lifetime employee of the Atlanta Post Office
- or a schoolteacher in Swainsboro, Georgia
- upon finishing the place.
- So we had only two or three people
- in the area of education.
- But we had people in political science, which
- was a no-no, fundamentally, in the state-supported schools
- in those days, colleges.
- We had people in sociology, including a Marxist--
- not a card-carrying, Lenin-quoting brother.
- But my sociology teacher could quote those fellows.
- I heard of Engels, and Lenin, and Trotsky, and Bolsheviks,
- and the Mensheviks, sitting in Sale Hall basement
- in the sociology class in the late '40s,
- when to utter that off that campus would
- be to invite all kinds of trouble
- by healthy Southern white cops.
- The curriculum in political science
- was such at Morehouse, and that environment that supported it,
- that when I went to do the MA at Chicago without any breaks,
- except for that summer of graduation,
- for the first two quarters at the University of Chicago,
- where I was the one Black person in political science,
- in those years, I used the syllabus that Robert
- Brisbane, who just retired from Morehouse, had us go through.
- The one difference that I thought
- was a major difference was the vocabulary.
- We did the big talk in the dormitories
- in terms of throwing out the old Webster business, I mean,
- crossed the language and the jargon.
- But we didn't think anybody else did in general conversation
- until I got to the University of Chicago
- and became aware that all this fancy talk around me
- of guys who just started shaving was really dictionary talk.
- And so I matched the big word for big word,
- as the cliche puts it, and had a good time.
- But it was that kind of preparation
- that the private schools made possible.
- And I suspect that the clusters that I mentioned
- were the concentrations of the greatest number
- of German refugee scholars.
- And let me say something more directly than about race,
- as there were two things about the control of these colleges
- beyond what I've said.
- Despite the amount of freedom that a Morehouse had
- and that the other places did not necessarily have,
- a Black college generally is an autocratic operation.
- My dear friend, Mr. Miller, was quoted in the Post
- as describing this place in plantation terms.
- Plantation terms meaning, there's an overseer,
- there's a boss, and orders are unilateral, top-down.
- This was extraordinarily the case
- in the public Black colleges, where
- there were no countervailing power influences and groups
- in the Black community to give pause to a Black college
- president, a white board of trustees
- that is giving the Black college president its orders.
- There was no balance.
- In talking to some people to try to--
- well, in preparing for this evening,
- one person who has been in education much longer than I--
- he's retired--
- said, as an example, the president of West Virginia
- State, Bluefield, which is now beiged
- into whiteness instead of blackness
- in terms in enrollment--
- we do have some flip-overs, by the way-- not too many,
- but some--
- that the president was so dictatorial
- that he would pay the faculty on a one-by-one basis.
- He was the paymaster as well as the president.
- And they would line up.
- And if you had displeased him, he
- would cite his displeasure and fine you.
- I taught at North Carolina Central,
- which was founded as the North Carolina College for Colored
- by James E. Shepard.
- And Marshall Shepard, brilliant Black fellow, as president,
- would make the rounds in the evenings, especially Friday
- evenings, with a warden's keys, literally key ring.
- He's used the big rigs for you young folks who haven't
- been down to check out Lord--
- these large key rings to lock up every building,
- to lock every building himself.
- Not physical plant, no, Mr. President
- would make the rounds.
- There was paranoia about subversive ideas
- in the public colleges.
- There was less paranoia about it in the private ones.
- Give you an example of what happens in the private--
- WEB Du Bois was fired twice from Atlanta University, which
- was obsessively private, but depended heavily
- on a stipend from the Georgia state legislature.
- The first time, he was fired for giving a series of--
- conducting of studies on the empirical conditions of racism
- in the South, with an emphasis on the state of Georgia.
- And these are called the Atlanta University studies, about 20
- of them.
- And they're excellent.
- And parenthetically, there's a lot
- of people regard Du Bois as the first truly social scientist,
- American-born, even though he was trained in Germany,
- as were many of the leading scholars of whatever
- hue at the turn of the century were trained.
- The second time he was fired from Atlanta University
- was a suspicion that he was too red
- in the Red Decade, the '30s.
- And of course, near the end of his life, he said,
- since I've been accused of being a fellow traveler,
- why not sign up the hell with it?
- Tuskegee, which has had a very fascinating history
- in the development of Black education,
- had a man who was a first-rate social critic, Oliver Cromwell
- Cox, who in the '40s did a very penetrating economic analysis
- of racism in America, showing its profits to those
- who were at the top of the system of racism.
- He was told by the college that as long
- as you expect to draw a check from this place,
- you will never publish it.
- In retirement-- and he was a person with a physical
- handicap, who was crippled--
- he completed his work and published it
- under the title "Caste, Class, and Race in the South."
- It's a classic.
- So you had an environment in which German refugee scholars
- left the Holocaust of Europe and encountered the Holocaust
- of racism in the South.
- You see, antisemitism, racism are
- reverse sides of one another.
- The same mindset of mindlessness and irrationality
- that characterizes one characterized the other.
- I would see Frau Hannah walking around the Morehouse campus
- smiling all the time.
- I did not know what she was smiling about.
- I suspect it was a mixture of relief at being alive,
- a pleasure at being among folks who truly were fond of her,
- and smiling in self defense.
- Because you see, the German refugee scholars
- were not only strangers to us as Blacks,
- but also exotic creatures to Southern whites, especially
- the Bible Belt fundamentalists.
- If you were not of the old Jewish settlement in terms
- of population and location in the South,
- you were never quite trusted.
- You have to put in many, many years.
- My dissertation advisor, Ted Laurie, from Gadsden, Alabama,
- has a very fine article on the old and new Jewish population
- in the American South.
- And then to be refugee, and broke, and Jewish, but also
- highly educated, especially by Southern, like Sanders,
- not to mention what was happening
- in Black America in the Deep South, was to be a strain--
- a creature of suspicion, a creature of tension,
- a creature to be observed and contained.
- We must not forget, despite what I said about Atlanta being
- by implication comparatively liberal,
- it was a place where antisemitism was healthy
- in those days-- very strong, in other words, very strong,
- especially during crisis at times.
- There are some interesting things
- to read about the Jewish communities in Charleston,
- South Carolina, the Jewish communities in New Orleans,
- the Jewish communities in North Carolina, and so on.
- But the old and the new is the general dividing line.
- And the refugees fitted really neither
- because the numbers were not big enough
- to constitute a community.
- Let me close here by making some general observations about what
- I think was the general impact of the--
- some people call it illustrious migration.
- This is Laura Fermi's characterization of it,
- and because Fermi's widow--
- I think he's deceased too at this point.
- When I think that the illustrious migration brought
- to America was a caliber of social analysis
- that forced the John Wayne Billy Sunday Protestantism to face
- itself with some honesty, one of the ways
- to check out what I'm saying is to look at the sociology texts,
- say, before 1930 or '35 and after.
- They're bland.
- They basically say, all is well, except that Blacks
- are inferior, and what they got is what nature laid on them.
- And man should not be so absurd as to try to change it
- in terms of social conditions.
- The before and after impact of the refugee intellectual
- contributions to social science is immense and has pushed--
- and I think it pushed the Black schools too--
- I'm sure it did--
- them away from the Sunday school fundamentalism
- in terms of asking how society works to the deeper
- business of social stratification, the studies
- of who owns what and who gets what, how,
- and when has led, as I said, to a maturity, certainly a greater
- maturation, of American scholarship generally.
- It's not an accident that the disproportionate number
- of Nobel prize winners are Jews.
- They are people of the book, as we all know.
- And when that book was used, as said with all due respect,
- of the Bible Belt version of the book,
- and there was growth in Black academia,
- there was growth in white academia
- in the area of sociology, in the area of philosophy beyond--
- what you call it--
- crossroads philosophy.
- I should say cracker barrel philosopher,
- but that might be a double entendre I didn't intend.
- There was a maturity in defining what we mean by science
- and scientific methods.
- In short, the glorious, illustrious migration
- contributed to widening the frame
- in which Blacks could make their claim beyond religious pieties.
- In other words, they laid a social science foundation
- that made possible rational discussion of the effects
- of racism and antisemitism.
- They took it, created a condition where
- you could not simply say, the hermetic curse is upon Blacks.
- You've heard the story that something
- happened when the flood receded, and Blacks
- were penalized for it.
- It made possible rational discussion, in other words,
- of social problems, rational discussion of social change,
- and for a kind of humanistic secularism
- that involves not only Blacks, but also the white South
- in such a way that the new South could
- have the beginnings of an intellectual foundation.
- I pause.
- [APPLAUSE]
- But there are a couple of people in the audience who should--
- whom I would like to call on-- first and foremost,
- Carla Borden, my original co-investigator.
- Carla, you have something you'd like to add?
- Well, Carla has said that she would
- like me to say a few things about
- some extraordinary individuals who were involved in this.
- And I'm looking at one whom I interviewed,
- Jim McWilliams, who was a student at Talladega
- and gave me the most wonderful tape for my oral history
- collection.
- Jim, can you come and say something?
- I will do that too.
- You got to rep the German department here.
- Come on up.
- The collection of tapes I have begins with Jim.
- And it is a wonderful tape.
- Thank you for coming up, Jim.
- Well, I was enjoying the discussion,
- not expect to participate.
- But here I am.
- I entered Talladega in 1950.
- Talladega College is in Alabama.
- And I had come from the steel mill areas of Birmingham.
- And all males other than myself had gone into the steel mills--
- one uncle, for 43 years, and another one for 39 years,
- and my father for about 27.
- So leaving that environment, and going to Talladega,
- and finding and names like Fritz Pappenheim
- and finding that a warm relationship could be possible
- when my experience had been somewhat like,
- I suspect, South Africa is, where Blacks did not
- have many associations with whites,
- except violent-type experiences.
- And here, I was in a position to meet someone
- who had come from Cologne, Germany,
- and graduated from Heidelberg, and was prepared
- to teach in this Southern town.
- And we had a lot in common because neither one of us
- felt comfortable off the campus.
- Amen.
- So he taught economics and German.
- I was at the top of the class in economics.
- But German I had a lot of trouble with.
- But the long arm of McCarthyism stretched
- into this small community.
- And I'm moving pretty fast.
- By 1952, although Fritz Pappenheim and others
- had become very popular teachers because they recognized
- that many of us had come with limited backgrounds,
- and all they really wanted to know was where was the base.
- And once the base had been established,
- they were prepared to move us forward,
- and also instilled in us some curiosity
- to learn so that we knew that beyond those four years,
- we would have to continue the process.
- So by 1952, Fritz Pappenheim, and Rasmussen, and Nussbaum,
- and people like that had made contributions
- and become friends because you had
- to socialize after class because it was unsafe off the campus.
- The Klan was all about.
- And the fact that whites and Blacks were mixing,
- and some of the whites had the nerve
- to send some of their kids to the school
- before Brown versus Board of Education
- made the place unsafe.
- But each of us had responsibilities
- to make certain that the buildings didn't
- get bombed and attacked.
- So by 1952, the board of trustees
- felt that Fritz Pappenheim and some of the German professors
- had shaky backgrounds in Europe, left leanings,
- or unexplained associations with socialist causes.
- But instead of stating it up front like that,
- they came up with the notion that instead
- of economic theory, Black students
- needed more money and banking statistics, sort
- of like the way things have gotten today.
- We didn't have computers, but if that had been on the agenda,
- we would have had that.
- So they said, people like Fritz Pappenheim,
- who were teaching economics, should not be given tenure.
- And they-- the board of trustees were
- members of the white community who come from the North
- and made this decision.
- And many of us knew that a professor like Fritz
- Pappenheim, who had graduated from Heidelberg,
- could not possibly have gotten a doctorate
- without knowing about money, and banking, and statistics.
- So if that was what they were going to shift toward,
- he would have been as capable as anyone else.
- So the board of trustees made this decision
- not to give him tenure while meeting in the gymnasium.
- And we had had an early spring/summer in the South.
- And the temperature was about 90 or more.
- And there were no air conditioning.
- And so some of us decided that we did not like that decision.
- So we locked them in that gymnasium.
- And there had been no sit-ins.
- And there had been no Howard Atwater
- experiences to draw upon.
- So we didn't know exactly what we were about,
- except that we didn't like the decision.
- And we thought that in the comfort of 90-degree weather,
- coming from the North, they would
- think about what they had done.
- And after many, many hours in there,
- since the president of the college
- had gone along with this decision
- not to give Pappenheim tenure, we were not too happy with him,
- either.
- So a rather weird negotiation took place.
- They decided to offer us a deal.
- If we would let them out, they would remove the president,
- but no tenure for Pappenheim.
- And now, as I said, we had not had a lot of experience
- because some of the older students
- thought this was about the best deal we were going to get.
- As I said, I was a sophomore at the time.
- So the senior students helped us to take the locks off the doors
- and let them out.
- Pappenheim had to go.
- The president bit the dust.
- Oh, the third concession was from this point on,
- the president would be Black.
- We had white presidents at that time.
- So the white president would have to be replaced.
- And we'd get a Black president.
- Pappenheim would have to go.
- And about six or seven other professors, Black and white,
- resigned as a protest of this decision.
- And Fritz Pappenheim, who had been there
- for years, what can I think, for about $3,000 a year,
- left with one of those side stains
- that he was left, or socialist, or whatever.
- And he ended up--
- I think Gabrielle tracked some of his work down.
- He left the school, and wrote after that,
- and I think did some--
- The Alienation of Modern Man was one of the books that he wrote.
- But the experience there, I think,
- was one that I would never be able to forget.
- And I believe that it made it possible for the rest
- of my life to do the analyzing myself as to what is appearing
- in front of me, and making some judgments about what
- is happening, and not being spoon-fed.
- Because it comes from a certain source,
- and I believe those kinds of teachings meant a lot.
- It has certainly helped me in my life
- make some sense out of things and at least have some respect
- for my own conclusions about things.
- The irony of the story was, as they went out to recruit
- for a replacement for Fritz Pappenheim,
- they went to the University of Chicago.
- And they got a Black scholar who had
- the credentials and the willingness
- to teach money and banking, and after arriving and getting
- this position, turned out to be the most
- radical, anarchist-type individual
- we had ever encountered, who, I think,
- because the board of trustees a great deal of concern
- because he laid the foundations for some
- of the later confrontations that took place in the South.
- I think we're going to be brief because people are leaving,
- and it's late.
- I'd like to open this for discussion.
- And if there's time, I'll tell a couple of anecdotes.
- But I would really like the audience to be heard.
- Yes, sir.
- Good question.
- Well, let me answer the second question first.
- That's a very interesting thing.
- Because the negative experiences will not be told.
- I'm not saying by me--
- people don't want to talk about this, with very few exceptions.
- I have had people who said, I don't want to talk about this.
- There was a refugee who came to Howard--
- not a Jew, but an anti-fascist-- who
- founded the anthropology department here,
- who left them with the most terrible fight.
- I have the copies of the newspapers of the time.
- I have never been able to figure out
- what really happened because all I've read
- is his side and the college's side.
- And I can't figure it--
- I know he was arrogant, but that's not unusual for Germans,
- Jewish or otherwise, particularly of that period,
- if they were intellectuals.
- I have heard one story that indicated a racist remark
- by one of the refugees who was otherwise very popular.
- It's almost impossible to get that because it
- makes people embarrassed.
- And they don't want to do that.
- And I haven't pushed for it.
- Your first question is-- remains something of a mystery to me.
- I have tried very hard to find out
- if there was a single thing done by the Emergency Committee
- for the Rescue of Scholars or any of the other organizations.
- I found a letter that was written by the Emergency
- Committee to seven Black colleges, asking about--
- would they be interested in a physicist
- or a French professor?
- But that didn't go out till 1941.
- I know of instances where word of mouth was the way.
- For instance, Dr. Manassa, whom I quoted early on
- had a terrible time finding work.
- He said that he applied to 100 places, heard from a man who
- taught here at Howard.
- His name was [PERSONAL NAME],, and he
- taught Romance languages.
- And Manassa knew him.
- And he wrote him and said, there's
- a position at North Central--
- North Carolina Central, I mean.
- I had hoped to find the minutes of a meeting of the people
- who did the organizing around placing refugees.
- I have found nothing.
- So far, there may be something at the Rockefeller Archives
- in New York, where I have been.
- But they have a heck of a lot of stuff I haven't seen.
- I don't know.
- It's terrible.
- Well, it varies.
- Some colleges have been able to give me a lot.
- In some instances, I have nothing--
- literally nothing, not a personnel record,
- not a catalog.
- I only have someone's word that so-and-so taught there.
- And I have had to take their word for that.
- I don't know what to do about that.
- I can't do anything more than I've done.
- I've called, I visited.
- I went to Dillard and to Xavier in New Orleans
- because I knew someone who told me they had taught there
- or had had teachers there.
- And neither college has any records.
- Archival material is very scarce in most instances.
- Even at Howard, I had a hard time.
- The two departments have nothing.
- Moorland-Spingarn has helped.
- Some individuals have helped.
- It is very difficult to get personnel records from the '30s
- and '40s, where people don't have
- resources for archival work.
- And many of the colleges are having great difficulties,
- as you know.
- And this is not a priority.
- So I don't know.
- Someone else?
- Yes, sir.
- I didn't say a word about Nobel prize.
- No.
- No.
- Dr. Adams did.
- I was wondering if there's a [INAUDIBLE]
- why that might become the case and if there are any lessons
- to be learned from it.
- Well, make your kids study, I guess.
- For one thing, Sweden is quite close to Germany.
- Yeah.
- And for another thing, the areas in which the Nobel prize is
- offered, those areas are areas deemed
- critical to let's call it the common good--
- science, the medicine, physics.
- And especially with the breakthrough,
- so to speak, by Einstein and in making
- physics the test of empiricism and a rational--
- empiricism and rational analysis.
- So those are areas, I think, not only geographically
- close to the Nobel committee, but also
- intellectually close to them, just
- as we have these strange awards in literature when
- the politics of the awardee is close to them.
- Martha?
- A Nobel prize awarded in food and agriculture.
- And [PERSONAL NAME] got it.
- And he got it [INAUDIBLE].
- They have never recognized agriculture.
- Food has been an important enough subject.
- Well, that's the work that they do in connection with what
- we call food that they look at.
- I mean, the analytical level.
- No, I'd like the panel to comment on this aspect of what
- kind of response did the clergy in some of these small towns
- was.
- Now, some of you have alluded to a rather fundamentalist view
- of some of the ministers they have had.
- But what about a kind of [INAUDIBLE] kind
- of sense of the [? government? ?]
- I found out that in some of the Southern colleges,
- it was compulsory to go to chapel on Sundays, certainly
- for the students.
- And it was customary for the professors to go.
- And I found out that most of the time, these people
- would do that.
- Most of them were not religious.
- There was one refugee, where I have a wonderful quote.
- I think it was Pappenheim, perhaps.
- Because one of the administrators said,
- I wish he were more Jewish, meaning more religious.
- I have heard nothing else about that as an issue,
- except some correspondence in terms
- of placing people, in which it was questioned
- about being Christian.
- But to my knowledge, I have heard of no episodes.
- Or you know, it's very hard to do this so much later.
- It should have been done a while ago, but it wasn't.
- Yes, Michael?
- How many?
- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
- She'll cover it.
- Can I come in before?
- Sure.
- Dr. Lehman has something to add.
- Answering your question-- this is not research.
- And it's very important to research it
- because there may be a very interesting story told.
- Catherine Epstein, who in our institute
- works on emigre historians, she has found a trace,
- I think, which is vital, that many of the historians of these
- joined the Quakers.
- And I think this may be a theme which
- is worth following through.
- Michael?
- I think that's partially answered.
- I was curious about their self-definition of themselves.
- Do they consider themselves primarily German
- or primarily Jewish?
- Because I just noticed in the reference
- Dr. Adams made about the teachers he had,
- which were very specifically Jewish teachers,
- and the other reference to Dr. Pappenheim as a German.
- I'm curious, in your exploration, to what extent--
- what was the primary self-definition?
- Second, I'm curious, Dr. Adams, to what extent
- or why were there no feelings about paternalism in--
- or were there any feelings about paternalism?
- And third-- and this is an issue that Rabbi
- Ticktin's presentation made me wonder about this--
- the time in America when Jews started being defined as white.
- It's a very good question.
- OK, three very separate--
- or somewhat separate questions.
- I'm going to start by saying that one of the things that I
- know from what research I've done
- is that there's absolutely no general anything.
- There were a lot of individuals and there are
- a lot of individual stories.
- So I can't answer your question, except to say, each person--
- I mean, I know from my own experience and my own family--
- I'm also from a German Jewish family--
- that we've got everything.
- I mean, we've got Catholics, we have Protestants,
- we have a few religious Jews, we have mostly agnostics
- and atheists.
- And I can tell you from my own experience
- that I didn't know anything about being a Jew
- until I decided it was time to find out.
- And that was very close to the Nazi time.
- And I decided that I had to deal with that because nobody
- in my family did.
- And my grandfather had been a rabbi.
- So that's one story.
- There's no general anything that I know of.
- Dr. Ticktin, do you want to elaborate?
- Well, let me give my impression on the first point, that
- certainly is a good point.
- There has been-- there's an ambivalence
- in whites teaching Blacks in the first place.
- One half of the ambi has to do with the need.
- The other half has to do with the style of delivery
- and the source of which the delivery is made.
- And impressionistically, I suspect
- that was true at Morehouse.
- We needed the service.
- And the person was there to give it.
- Now, the more adroit and insightful folks, I suspect,
- did what Southerners do so well, Black and white,
- and that is play a role that reduces
- the sense of paternalism.
- On the other hand, if you are in some of the state schools,
- where the alliance between the white faculty and the state
- legislature--
- the chairman of the finance committee is my cousin,
- and I'm teaching econ, well, I'm God over here, see--
- or Jehovah, whatever you want to call it.
- On the second question, in terms of religion,
- we had chapel every day at Morehouse
- except Wednesdays and Sundays.
- And when Benjamin Mays would say,
- and we will all be there on that Sunday,
- Frau Hannah could sit in the front.
- [? Wilna ?] will be joining her shortly.
- And we all sing "A Mighty Fortress is our God."
- Now, what they did on Saturday, we
- don't know because there is this Southern--
- Black, white-- and well, all over America,
- from Saturday night to Monday morning
- is the most sacred time, racially speaking,
- that this country has.
- I suspect if there were clusters of fellow Jews
- around, these people sought the more enlightened ones out,
- the ones who were into reading books.
- I was reading some background material for this evening
- and was amused to find--
- and also did some resonating in me--
- that in old time, Jews who were interested in things
- like the New Republic when it was good
- or the Reporter, when it was around and good,
- would keep those books as though they were on the verboten list,
- and would have US News and World Report in the front room
- so that when there are Klansmen customers that are clients
- popped in, everything would be well-- in other words, the need
- to preserve.
- So they did all kinds of things in that way.
- And I suspect that the religious thing was done that way too.
- In South Georgia, I learned that there were traveling rabbis
- for folks who had-- were probably too small
- to sustain a synagogue and the things that go along with it,
- just as there were among Blacks the Baptists who were poor,
- but drive the circuit.
- I had another one who had one church in this county,
- and another in other county, and they all saw him once a month
- for 50 bucks.
- On the part of the question about folks being white,
- I don't think that was an issue in those days.
- The average Black person would see somebody
- if it was not a what we call a birth certificate Black, that
- is if their birth certificate said Black,
- if they were clearly a white person,
- you saw that-- you saw the pigmentation package first.
- You had to because to be wrong in behavior
- could get you physically damaged.
- I could tell you some horror stories.
- He was concerned about the blandness
- of our discussion, somebody back there,
- saying that we haven't heard any shady side parts of it.
- We can all do our all-purpose knife business, pistol knives,
- and so on, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner business.
- But we saw them as white first.
- And if you've got a good rapport and and they turned you
- on about the life of the mind beyond reverie, so to speak,
- then you saw them as persons.
- Because you were then into this thing with them.
- And that happened a lot, I think, at Morehouse--
- and at the other places too.
- But certainly, this is where I was.
- We used to argue socialism.
- We have used the big debates on socialized medicine
- and what it would be to the medical profession
- and to the nation's health.
- And who's behind this stuff anyway.
- and so on?
- So if the life of the mind was fired by somebody,
- you forgot the pigmentation, except when
- it was necessary to negotiate to get the Black person
- by somebody else.
- I'm going to go in so-and-so's place
- because we're going to discuss Hegel tonight and so on.
- I don't want to get evangelical about it,
- but tried to address the three questions about paternalism,
- sure.
- We say paternalism-- nobody wants it
- who's healthy, in my judgment.
- Religion was a slip and slide.
- You got it where you wanted it.
- And if you were Jewish without ritual, so to speak,
- then it's like being invisible.
- I mean, it's in factory, so to speak,
- to do the Catholic thing.
- And if you're white, you're white.
- And if you ain't, you ain't.
- Sir?
- [INAUDIBLE]
- First of all, on Black campuses, students
- were also secondary [INAUDIBLE] what
- we call the white colleges.
- [INAUDIBLE] German immigrants coming to this country, who
- themselves were outcast, who were in a strange land,
- migrating is natural, it seems to me,
- to an area where they have some kind of impact.
- They were not accepted by wider white universities because
- of the fear for publicization.
- And that's the place you want to go
- were these Black [INAUDIBLE].
- Under Black colleges, the programs,
- money that was paid out for instructors wasn't so small.
- No self-respecting Black or white professor
- was coming to a Black college because he
- could go other places.
- But it was a natural thing for Jewish immigrants
- to go to Black colleges.
- May I respond to that?
- Sure.
- I think that's 50% true.
- The other 50% ought to be looked at.
- At Chicago, I was taught by Hans Jacob Morgenthau.
- OK, but hold just one minute.
- I'm not saying anything--
- Now, when we say natural, I'm just concerned about what
- you mean by natural.
- Right.
- The point is that I am saying natural from a common sense
- point of natural.
- OK, natural doesn't matter.
- OK.
- Now, I'm not saying I'm saying this to be sarcastic
- or you know, I'm saying that when
- you look at the elements involved in Black colleges
- at that time and the elements involved in Jewish immigration
- at that time, it's a natural melding of the two forces.
- But then you said, more than in white institutions.
- And I think if one did a statistical analysis,
- you'd have a very lopsided percentage in Black schools.
- Because we're talking less than 100 folks.
- 50.
- And not that that exhausts the list that went to such places.
- Just about.
- I was taught by Morgenthau, who was--
- Well, but that's Chicago.
- I know, but I'm speaking of white schools that had them.
- Oh, well, yes.
- And I used to work at the mail room.
- And I used to almost [INAUDIBLE] Jewish calling their mail--
- I mean, the mail list--
- Leo Strauss.
- Yeah, right.
- He's a rabbi we talked about earlier, saw [INAUDIBLE]
- walking to Midway all the time.
- And they were paid.
- Well, that was Chicago.
- It's a rich school.
- The Rockefellers funded that.
- I have a-- Dr. Lehman has something to add.
- Well, just a brief remark.
- It's very interesting to look at the careers.
- Some, in fact, do go to the historically Black colleges
- and do stay on for many years.
- That's what I want.
- But others choose the first opportunity to get away again--
- That's right.
- --because it's the white places where they make-- where they
- want to continue their career.
- That's right.
- So thrown into naturally-- well, yes and no.
- David, were you making a signal to me?
- What was the signal?
- One more question?
- All right, sir.
- A statement?
- I don't know, I'll listen.
- Sure.
- I'm a bit nervous.
- And I stutter out a little bit when I do get nervous.
- My name is Memphis Norman.
- And a few days ago, a good friend
- of mine, Joan Mulholland, called me
- and told me that there was going to be this panel here
- this evening.
- And I immediately felt that I should be here.
- We are from Tougaloo College in Mississippi--
- Tougaloo College.
- You mentioned Dillard, Xavier, Atlanta, Morehouse, Talladega,
- Howard, Hampton, and so forth, and left out my college.
- So I felt compelled to come up here.
- Did you have Borinski?
- Yes.
- And I'm here to--
- I feel very emotional about this.
- And I'm here to thank my good friend and mentor, Dr. Ernst
- Borinski for what he did for me and for my college.
- Dr. Borinski came from Kraków, Poland.
- He came in the early '30s.
- And he came to my college and he stayed there his entire career.
- I was going to tell them about him.
- I hope that he is in your--
- among your 50 people.
- He's among the most important.
- Good.
- I'm glad to hear that.
- Dr. Borinski made a great contribution to our college.
- I too learned about people like Talcott Parsons, and Max Weber,
- and Camus, and Emile Durkheim, et cetera from my mentor.
- I started off at Tougaloo College in pre-med,
- and I took one course in sociology.
- And Dr. Borinski was expounding on sociological theory,
- and Emile Durkheim, et cetera.
- And he caught my ear.
- He caught Jones too.
- Dr. Borinski got me or persuaded me
- to go into public administration at the University
- of Pittsburgh.
- He did some work at the--
- up there too.
- And I went to the University of Pittsburgh,
- got my master's in public administration.
- Today, I'm employed by the Office
- of Management and Budget.
- And they say I do a good job.
- I work on part of NASA.
- And I have the Smithsonian, and the National Gallery of Art,
- and a few other agencies.
- Just recently, I completed my PhD in public administration
- from USC in Los Angeles.
- So I-- Dr. Borinski got me on this track.
- And I felt compelled to come and thank him
- in this particular gathering.
- Thank you.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Dr. Borinski was an extraordinary man
- and a very important figure at Tougaloo.
- And he was there from 19--
- well, he went into the American Army.
- And because he had been a lawyer in Germany,
- he could not practice his profession.
- And so he went to graduate school,
- first at Chicago, and then at Pittsburgh,
- and got a PhD in sociology, went straight to Tougaloo,
- and died there at age 83.
- And he is buried in the little cemetery
- on the campus at Tougaloo and had an enormous impact, also,
- on the Civil Rights Movement.
- He did one thing I'll tell you because time is running short.
- He had what he called his lab, which was
- in the basement, in which he--
- students got him furniture.
- And the story of how they got it is a little shady.
- And there, he had his books and a little place to cook.
- And he started seminars.
- And that was a time of, really, total segregation.
- And Millsaps college was the white college near there.
- And he started the seminars as follows.
- The chairs around the table were first
- occupied by the Black students from Tougaloo.
- And he said, leave one chair empty
- so when they come in from Millsaps, they have to mingle.
- And that is what he did.
- Was called integration, right?
- And he was quite a character.
- I never met him, unfortunately.
- But the Mississippi Historical Archives
- have four reels of oral history.
- And I listened to some of those.
- And the man asked him what had happened to him
- and his family in Germany.
- And all the people I interviewed who
- knew him said he would not talk about this.
- On this tape, he said, I have had
- to excise this from my mind.
- And I cannot talk about it because if I had not done that,
- I would not be sane.
- And that's all we know about that.
- But I will tell you one story that I found very wonderful.
- There's a Black-- very famous Black
- painter who lives in Houston.
- Name is John Biggers.
- And he went to Hampton to become a plumber.
- But he noticed that there was an art
- class at night, which he took.
- And his teacher was a man from Vienna
- called Lowenfeld, Viktor Lowenfeld.
- And Viktor Lowenfeld got to Hampton
- and found that it had an industrial arts department.
- He said, what is this?
- Why can't they have a real art department?
- Proceeded to found that.
- And John Biggers didn't have any money.
- And the art class was at night.
- And he would miss the dinner at the college,
- which had-- was paid for so.
- Dr. Lowenfeld often said, well, come on home,
- and we'll have a sandwich at my house.
- And en route, he would always stop at the post office
- to get his mail, professor did.
- And one day, he came out of the post office--
- I have this also on my audio tape with Professor Biggers.
- And he said, he looked white as a sheet.
- And he got into the car.
- And he drove to the water's edge and just sat.
- And I didn't say anything--
- I'm quoting the videos--
- and he said, this is a letter from the State Department
- to inform me which members and how many members of my family
- were exterminated in the camps.
- And Dr. Biggers said, he was just horrified, and said,
- at that moment, I knew, there could never
- be a division between us on the basis of race, or religion,
- or anything else.
- And that's a very beautiful story
- about this historical episode.
- I'll close with that unless someone
- has something they want to say.
- With regard to the final fruits of our efforts,
- we did have an opportunity to explore
- the context in which this research is being done
- and to share some ideas about two sets of people who have
- had their respective Holocaust.
- It's about Holocaust comparisons.
- But the Holocaust where lives were lost
- and the Holocaust where continents
- were denuded of people and enslaved,
- those are the two big ones in Western culture.
- And one of the things we do in Afro-American studies
- is to keep in mind that the two experiences are connected
- at the core of Western culture.
- One of these days, you'll read my book on that.
Overview
- Date
-
interview:
1989 April 11
Physical Details
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- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
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- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
- Personal Name
- Edgcomb, Gabrielle Simon.
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- Gabrielle S. Edgcomb donated her videotaped presentation to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in November 1989.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:13:28
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn520360
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