Marching with MLK
By Suzan Berns
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| Heschel (second from r.) marching with King (center), Selma, AL 1965 |
At the end of the first day of his march for civil rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965, Rabbi David Teitelbaum wandered to the outskirts of the crowd that had gathered in a big tent to collect his thoughts and enjoy a solitary moment. He wasn’t the only one. Off in the corner he saw Dr. Martin Luther King, sitting quietly alone, meditating. It’s one of the many images of that experience that stays with Teitelbaum nearly 45 years later.
Teitelbaum, now rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth Jacob in Redwood City, was one of five Bay Area rabbis who answered King’s call for clergy to join the march for Negro voter registration. “It seemed like it would be a true turning point in history,” he said.
In January, Jewish congregations will join with churches and community groups to commemorate Dr. King’s birthday. And as they do each year, they will recall the contributions of this great leader who brought Jews and blacks together to work for a single cause.
When he arrived in Selma, Teitelbaum remembered, “One of the activists, a black man, said to me, ‘the very fact that you’ve come here means that your skin is as black as mine.’ He was right – I was cursed at, spat upon and jailed.”
Jews played a major role in the civil rights movement, both in leadership and the great numbers of people who participated. Many believed that blacks and Jews had similar experiences and that they shared the same agenda. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the leading Jewish theologians of the 20th century and an activist for justice, walked alongside King at the head of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. His words – I’m praying with my feet – have since become a theme for Jewish social action.
According to many experts on race relations, Heschel’s philosophy influenced King’s thinking on non-violence, race and human rights. He famously said to King that “the first conference on race took place between Pharaoh and Moses, and it’s been going on ever since.”
This concept was reflected in King’s words as he rallied the marchers before beginning their walk, recalled Teitelbaum. “Dr. King said, ‘We are like the children of Israel, going out from bondage to freedom.’ The fact that he used that image – an image of Jews escaping from slavery – was very, very meaningful to me. I felt very proud.”
In the last decades, particularly in the 1990s, there have been some bumps in the road of Black-Jewish relations. “Yet in recent years, conflicts have receded and cooperation is ascendant,” said Mik Moore of Jewish Funds for Justice in an article in MyJewishLearning.com.
The election of Barack Obama as president is perhaps the loudest statement of all that some of what King, Heschel, Teitelbaum and so many others marched for in the 1960s is finally coming to fruition.
“When I heard Obama’s acceptance speech, I literally wept. I was thinking of Selma and how far we have come,” said Teitelbaum. “No one at that time could even have imagined that a Negro (as they were called then) would one day become president of the United States. We will all be the beneficiaries of this remarkable development.”
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