The Lander Legacy
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slashed him across the face leaving a deep scar from his ear to his lip. “Only one of the many attacks against Jews during the past week,” cried the caption below the photo on the front page of the Daily News. The media succeeded in arousing enough public outrage in New York City to prompt a public call to action. “Why are we fighting Nazis in Europe and letting them run free in New York?” characterized a growing popular sentiment. Prodded by both this public pressure and in response to the Harlem riots, City Hall initiated steps aimed at studying and reducing the epidemic of ethnic tension rampant throughout the five boroughs. On February 27, 1944, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia decreed the formation of a “Committee on Unity,” whose mission, as announced with great flourish, was “to promote understanding and mutual respect among all the racial groups in our city.” The committee was to be chaired by none other than former U.S. Solicitor General, Charles Evans Hughes, Jr., son of the former New York governor, U.S. Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Republican presidential candidate in 1916. LaGuardia also selected a cross section of prominent black, Jewish, Catholic and protestant leaders to sit on the committee. Among these was a recognized expert in the field of juvenile delinquency who had recently returned to New York after spending five years in the pulpit of a Baltimore synagogue. Bernard Lander’s service to the Committee on Unity, as he was completing his Columbia doctoral dissertation, would forcefully shape the 56 The Lander Legacy next major chapter of his life. It was during this chapter that Bernard’s path would cross with that of another brilliant student of sociology who was studying at New York University at the time; a beautiful and engaging young woman by the name of Sarah Shragowitz. 57 Chapter seven Unity Every assembly that is for the sake of Heaven will have an enduring impact. —Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 4:14 At the time Bernard Lander was appointed to the Mayor’s Committee on Unity in July 1944, he was no stranger to anti-Jewish discrimination. In those years before films such as Gentleman’s Agreement began to alter public attitudes about anti-Semitism, Jews were routinely barred from many aspects of American life. In areas such as housing, public accommodation, university admission, professional employment, and even hospital admission, Jews had become accustomed to quotas at best and complete exclusion at worst. When Lander was deliberating on the direction of his future career as he prepared to graduate from Yeshiva College, he received a grim warning from faculty member, Dr. Theodore Abel, who had first introduced him to the field of sociology. Abel, a non-Jew, was also a distinguished professor at Columbia University. As a young Jewish intellectual, Abel warned, Lander would not find a position in academia. But that advice had been dispensed at a time that, at this juncture, seemed like centuries ago. This was a new postwar world that was to be marked by one overarching rubric: unity. Unity, as in the United Nations. Unity, as in the United Negro College Fund. Unity, as in the Mayor’s Committee on Unity. It was this general sense of one-world optimism, during that sweet slice of history between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War—between Hiroshima blowing up and the Iron Curtain coming down—that animated and motivated Bernard Lander as he began his work on the Mayor’s Committee. A key part of committee chairman Hughes’s mandate was to assemble a diverse governing board that included knowledgeable leaders 58 The Lander Legacy from each of New York’s major ethnic communities. So it was no surprise that when seeking to fill the “Jewish” slot, Hughes turned to Maurice Hexter, the executive director of one of the city’s foremost secular Jewish organizations: The Federation of Jewish Charities of New York. Hexter agreed to make inquiries and to assist Hughes in identifying a candidate with the appropriate credentials. When Hexter turned to his counterpart in Baltimore, Rabbi Bernard Lander’s name was immediately suggested. Hexter, who held a Ph.D. from Harvard in social ethics, was impressed with Lander’s academic qualifications and during their first meeting, he was equally impressed with the young rabbi’s excellent communication skills. Although Lander had been in Baltimore for the past five years, Hexter could see that the rabbi knew and fully understood the social dynamics present in New York City. He learned that Lander had worked extensively in Baltimore with black, Irish, and Jewish community leaders—exactly the type of work he would be required to perform on the Mayor’s Committee. After conducting his due diligence, Hexter enthusiastically endorsed Lander to Hughes, and Hughes passed on the recommendation to Mayor LaGuardia with his blessing. The relationship between Rabbi Lander and Maurice Hexter that was initiated through this process endured for many years and would culminate with Hexter and Lander working together to establish a graduate school of social work at Yeshiva University. As envisioned by Hughes and LaGuardia, the Committee’s leadership was to include four positions with each seat representing one of the city’s major ethnic constituencies: Protestant, Catholic, black and Jewish. The selected Catholic representative was Shuyler Warren, an African-American who had founded the Catholic Interracial Council and served on the National Urban League. The black representative was Edith Alexander, who was the community relations director at the city’s Department of Public Welfare and had also served on the Urban League. The Protestant member was Dr. Dan W. Dodson, who was appointed to serve as the Committee’s executive director by Chairman Hughes. Dodson, an assistant professor of educational sociology at NYU, was the son of a Texas sharecropper and understood racial prejudice from the viewpoint of someone who had successfully overcome it. Despite their widely disparate early lives, Dodson and Lander shared much in common. They were both doctoral sociologists (although Lander Unity 59 was, at this point, still completing his dissertation), and they had both focused their work on the causes and prevention of juvenile crime. Both were deeply religious and found, within their respective spiritual lives, the impetus to deal with the task at hand: fighting racial and religious discrimination and improving relations among the city’s ethnic communities. The two spiritual sociologists formed a strong team. Dodson, because he was not a Jew, was able to open certain doors that Lander was barred from entering. Lander, on the other hand, was adept at navigating the murky waters of New York City politics with its complex ethnic dynamics. Without Lander’s hand on the tiller, Dodson would have found himself frequently adrift as the Committee’s work got seriously underway. The two men conducted strategy sessions that met almost daily over the next four years. Although the remaining Committee members, Warren and Alexander, enjoyed different, less scholarly backgrounds, the four nevertheless worked effectively as a team to investigate and offer recommendations to defuse future crises in New York City’s troubled neighborhoods. The LaGuardia initiative proved to be a model for other cities to follow as a series of “human rights commissions”—many with an agenda borrowed from the Committee on Unity—soon became part of the emerging post-war urban landscape. The first item on that agenda was legislative reform, particularly in the area of employment. Bernard Lander had earlier been asked to work with a bipartisan state commission in drafting new legislation that would outlaw discrimination in the workplace. Now, as a member of the Committee on Unity’s executive board, he helped to choreograph a delegation of concerned citizens who were dispatched to lobby in behalf of the proposed legislation in Albany. The delegation was headed by the Committee’s chairman, Charles E. Hughes, Jr., who had succeeded in persuading Governor Thomas E. Dewey to publicly support the anti-discrimination bill. Lander’s efforts, via his role on the Committee on Unity, succeeded with the passage of the Ives-Quinn Bill in March 1945. The new law was essentially a codification of FDR’s executive order No. 8802 that legally protected a citizen’s civil rights in the workplace. The new law also established a watchdog agency, the five-member State Commission Against Discrimination in Employment, to enforce these rights. The impact of this landmark bill, the first of its kind in the nation, was far-reaching, and served as model legislation that was borrowed repeatedly by other state 60 The Lander Legacy legislatures intent on eradicating employment discrimination in their own states. By the time of the passage of the Federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, twenty-nine states had placed similar fair employment laws on their books. When the Mayor’s Committee on Unity sought to address widespread racial discrimination in the professional sports arena, it was every bit as quick to step up to the plate. In the spring of 1945 the New York black community was becoming increasingly vocal in its call to “End Jim Crow in Baseball!” An ad hoc committee was formed, and its series of neighborhood street meetings was garnering increasing amounts of publicity as the weather turned warmer. Sensing that a fuse to future violence may have been lit, Committee Director Dan Dodson rapidly organized a meeting with the owners of both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. The Dodgers’ owner and fellow Texan, Branch Rickey, was sympathetic to the Committee’s interest in integration and agreed to take immediate action. Rickey recalled an incident that had taken place a few weeks earlier at Boston’s Fenway Park. In an attempt to pacify the desegregationist sensibilities of a powerful city councilman, the Red Sox management pretended to open a tryout session to players from the Negro Baseball League. The tryout was a sham intended to demonstrate the negative consequences of putting black players on the field alongside white ones. The fans in the stands did not disappoint. One black player, Jackie Robinson, from the Kansas City Monarchs, was forced to endure a barrage of humiliating racial epithets and catcalls when he stepped up to the plate. What impressed Rickey, in addition to Robinson’s obvious skills as a batter and fielder, was the way Robinson coolly handled the animosity of the racially charged crowd. If Rickey was to introduce a black player into the Dodger organization, it would have to be someone who could take it without flinching. Rickey met with Robinson to discuss signing him to the Dodgers’ farm team, the Montreal Royals. In an oft-cited conversation between the two men, Rickey asked Robinson if he could face the racial hostility without taking the bait and reacting with anger. Robinson was taken aback. “Are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?” he asked. “No,” replied Rickey. “I need a Negro player with enough guts not to fight back.” Robinson agreed to “turn the other cheek,” and Rickey signed him to a $600-per-month contract. Unity 61 Two years later, on April 15, 1947, Robinson was called up to the “big show” and played his first game as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He had effectively broken the Major League color barrier exactly six months before Chuck Yeager would first break the sound barrier. At this point, Dodson, Lander, and the Mayor’s Committee advised Rickey and offered him guidance as he pioneered the Major League integration process. Despite the anticipated racist reaction by many in the stands, other teams followed suit and began integrating their teams. Soon the racial barriers began to come down in all of American professional sports. The integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers is regarded by many cultural historians as a watershed event and recognized as the inception point of the American Civil Rights Movement. While not as dramatic as instigating the desegregation of Major League Baseball, much of Rabbi Lander’s behind-the-scenes work on the Committee was no less significant. Along with the Committee’s Catholic director, Shuyler Warren, Lander met with church leaders and members of the Catholic press to stem the flow of anti-Semitic sermons and articles. As a result of these “moral suasion” efforts, newspapers such as The Brooklyn Tablet, which had been printing Father Coughlin’s vile racist diatribes for years, were persuaded to stop doing so. The Committee was alerted that in a certain Brooklyn neighborhood, Italian police officers were failing to apprehend, and at times even found to be protecting members of, Italian street gangs involved in racial attacks. Lander visited the police station and informed the chief that his precinct was being watched by the Committee, a simple warning that convinced the involved officers to begin properly carrying out their duties. Rabbi Lander recognized that the one area of the Committee’s mandate of greatest importance to the Jewish community was the field of education. He naturally took a leading role as the Committee devised ways to eradicate the religious quota system that had become ingrained in America’s educational infrastructure. Historically, the politically empowered establishment, alarmed by the rising numbers of immigrants reaching its shores, as well as the large numbers of blacks moving northward, instigated quotas during the 1920s that served to effectively restrict higher educational opportunities for Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Catholics, and to a lesser degree blacks, had built their own colleges. But aside from religious seminaries, such as Yeshiva, Jews looked entirely to 62 The Lander Legacy private colleges and state universities as providers of the degrees required to secure the best professional careers. Thus Jews felt the sting of discriminatory admission quotas more sharply than did other minorities who enjoyed alternative options. Rooting out and exposing these policies would not be an easy task, Lander soon learned. Many schools conducted their admissions programs in a clandestine fashion, well concealed from public scrutiny. This cloak of secrecy was primarily the outgrowth of a scandal that rocked Harvard in 1922 when it was revealed that its president, A. Lawrence Lowell, had laid down specific quota figures for the number of Jews to be admitted to the school’s incoming freshman class. Lowell was alarmed by the ever-increasing percentage of Jewish students he had observed at Harvard and other Ivy League schools over the prior decade. As large numbers of European Jewish immigrants, absorbed by the United States since the beginning of the century, became assimilated and successful, their highest priority was to secure a top quality education for their children. By 1922 the percentage of Jewish students at Columbia had peaked at 40 percent. Jewish enrollment levels at the other Ivy League schools, including Harvard, also stood at record levels. Lowell viewed this situation as “Harvard’s Jewish problem” and decided to openly take action against it by implementing the admissions quotas. The reaction was swift and strong. Working in alliance, groups such as the American Jewish Congress and the American Federation of Labor grabbed the headlines and succeeded in pressuring the governor of Massachusetts to investigate Harvard’s violation of state equal opportunity laws. Lowell and Harvard caved in, and the quotas were lifted, but the victory was a pyrrhic one. While officially professing open enrollment policies, Harvard, and the other schools who followed suit, simply went underground. Via various subterfuges, such as geographic quotas and preferential treatment for students exhibiting so-called “leadership potential” (typically the children of wealthy and politically connected families), America’s elite colleges and universities continued to successfully limit the admission of ethnic, religious, and racial minorities. In just one example, acceptance at the top tier medical schools for City College graduates, 80 percent of whom were Jewish, fell dramatically from 58 percent in 1925 to 15 percent in 1943. Unity 63 The educational landscape that Rabbi Lander surveyed in the late 1940s had been effectively shaped, primarily via deception, to staunch the free flow of qualified Jewish students into the halls of ivy. Lander’s job, as he saw it, was to remove the blockage of bigotry in order to once again permit merit, rather than religious orientation, to determine who would receive a college education and who would not. Rabbi Lander began his investigation by examining the admissions policies and practices of New York City institutions. He likewise looked at educational opportunities for local Jewish students who attempted to enroll at schools outside the city. When he met with admissions officers and deans at several of New York City’s private colleges, he would hear them admit “strictly off the record” that they were regularly implementing quota systems to restrict the number of Jews at their schools. Some of the responses used to defend this practice were startling. “We are building a national school here,” he was advised by one law school dean. “We limit the number of New Yorkers to make room for the kids from Indiana and Texas.” When Lander asked one medical school’s admissions officer why the school did not even consider applicants who had graduated from New York’s heavily Jewish City College, he was told that they lacked an Download 1.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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