Julius Rosenwald by Hasia R. Diner

Author:Hasia R. Diner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

A Jew Steps In

IN 1924, the American Israelite challenged Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic and xenophobic outpourings with a small piece. “Here’s an item for Ford’s Folly,” it mocked: “a group of Nordics in the South—white 100 percent, American money-lenders—were about to stop Herman E. Perry, Negro financier of Atlanta . . . when a JEW by the name of Julius Rosenwald stepped in.” Rosenwald offered to rescue Perry’s business, the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, from certain death. The American Israelite’s designations “Nordics” and “100 percent” Americans took aim at a common 1920s anti-immigrant trope, and when it then identified them as “money-lenders,” it subverted the centuries-old condemnation of Jews as usurers. After all, a “JEW” had demonstrated to the white Georgia Christians the meaning of generosity.1

The piece highlighted the prominence of Julius Rosenwald, the one who “stepped in” to assist Perry’s business, in initiatives aimed at ameliorating the dire economic conditions endured by black Americans. Rosenwald knew Perry and admired him. He also felt that if the bank failed, black people in Atlanta and elsewhere would suffer. Much of Rosenwald’s philanthropic and civic activism revealed a disposition to step in and act for and with America’s black population, who were largely living in extreme poverty, lacking access to basic services offered by private institutions and denied the basic rights guaranteed by governments, local, state, and federal, to American citizens.

Julius Rosenwald’s name had been linked to black causes since the early twentieth century, and many Americans knew of his dedication to lessening inequalities between blacks and whites and addressing the nation’s deliberate failures. In his work for “the Negro,” his Jewish self-image and worldview played a large role.

Shortly after Rosenwald’s death in 1932, the philosopher Alain Locke, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance and author of the pathbreaking anthology The New Negro (1925), eulogized the philanthropist’s life and work. In a few pages, Locke summarized charitable giving in general, American democracy, the status of African Americans, Jewishness, and the bonds connecting Jews and blacks, as he contemplated the “benefactions of Julius Rosenwald . . . a man who discovered a new social and spiritual dimension for the philanthropist’s dollar.” Rosenwald, with his distinctive brand of charitable giving and his focus on “the Negro,” had become, according to Locke, a “patron of democracy.”2

Why did Locke, the chair of the Philosophy Department at Howard University, a beneficiary of Rosenwald’s philanthropic work, equate JR’s philanthropy with working for democracy? Locke noted that much of American philanthropy contained within it “un-American elements,” given the “bureaucratic trend of the self-perpetuating foundation and the enfeebling effect of private giving to social objectives that should be recognized clearly as public or state responsibilities.” This predominant form of American philanthropy did not alter social realities, but perpetuated them while alleviating some immediate problems temporarily.

But JR’s insistence that beneficiaries of philanthropy, such as the millions of southern blacks who lived in communities which housed “Rosenwald schools” or African American men around the country who spent leisure time at the YMCAs

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