I want every damn delegate quivering with excitement and anticipation about the future of civil rights and their future opportunities in this country.
In June 1963, President Kennedy summoned a group of leading members of the American Bar Association to the White House, among them Morris Abram. The president, Vice President Johnson, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy challenged the attorneys present to join, however belatedly, the fight for equal justice in the South.
Abram, now a full-fledged New York attorney, stepped forward to take up the first case of the newly established Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The scene was Americus, Georgia, the county seat of Sumter County, less than ninety miles from where he spent his childhood. Abram’s return to southwest Georgia marked an important symbolic turning point in his transition from civil rights attorney in Atlanta to partner in one of New York’s most prestigious firms.
During the spring of 1963 a team of students from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) conducted a voter registration drive in Americus and used pickets and sit-ins in an attempt to integrate the local movie theater. The authorities reacted by sending nearly one hundred local teenagers to jail.1 Several weeks later, following a mass meeting at a church, two hundred young people marched through the streets of Americus. The police, after ordering the group to disburse, fired warning shots and closed in on those protesters bracing themselves for arrest. As the police began to wield their clubs, protesters reacted by throwing bricks through windows. A state trooper broke a black demonstrator’s leg, and another black man was fatally shot in the back as he walked through a white neighborhood.2
SNCC fieldworkers Ralph Allen, Don Harris, and John Perdew, who had launched the voter registration and community organizing drives as part of the Southwest Georgia Project, were arrested, joined one week later by Minnesota-born agricultural worker Zev Aeloney of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The four were charged with insurrection, which carried the death penalty under Georgia’s 1871 Anti-Treason Act. The county solicitor used this particular charge to keep the demonstrators jailed indefinitely, which was mandated in capital cases. Their arrest captured national headlines, and the “Americus Four” became a cause célèbre for civil rights advocates nationwide. Still, the U.S. attorney general decided against federal intervention, as his office found no merit in charges of police brutality and refused to challenge the charge of sedition.3
Abram’s junior associate in the case, Sydney Rosdeitcher, had joined the Paul, Weiss firm shortly before Abram after working, coincidentally, for Abram’s brother-in-law Harold Reis at the Justice Department. The strategy pursued by Abram’s team was to get the case against the civil rights workers moved into federal jurisdiction. Rosdeitcher recommended that they make use of a precedent from the 1939 case involving Jersey City’s notorious mayor Frank Hague and his use of a local ordinance to suppress a recruitment meeting planned by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The lower federal court in that case, upheld by the Supreme Court, had held that federal jurisdiction could be applied if it could be demonstrated that constitutional issues were not likely to be enforceable within that community, particularly when there was a history of disregard for the U.S. Constitution in the state courts.4
“And so,” said Rosdeitcher, “we effectively put the city of Americus on trial.” Abram and his young associate questioned everything from the juvenile court system where a judge put blacks into outside concentration camps, to the hospital system in which blacks could not receive emergency care without being sent sixty miles away to a hospital that would accept them. “And a black person,” he said, “could never enforce a contract in a county court or in a local court if they were enforcing it against a white person.”5
Rosdeitcher was struck by a curious dichotomy in the treatment of Abram’s legal team:
One thing I remember about the case was that everyone was gracious to us during the day, but at night when we were walking in the streets they would scream out things like, “Go back to New York!” which had a connotation of not just that we were from there but also about our religion. But the odd thing was that they bought Morris. He was terrific as a legal advocate in the way he tried the cases. But he also had this wonderful Southern approach that during one break one of these guys came up to him and said, “Why can’t you be on our side? We could really use you.” They couldn’t understand why he wasn’t joining their side in the fight against desegregation and admired him. But I don’t think they desired the result. We won.6
A three-judge panel led by Elbert Tuttle, one of the South’s most courageous jurists of the civil rights era whom Abram had recruited fourteen years earlier to join him in his amicus brief in support of overturning Georgia’s unconstitutional voter registration law, was convened to hear the case. The prosecutor who had brought the insurrection charge admitted that its purpose was to keep the civil rights workers locked up in order “to convince them that this type of activity is not the right way” to achieve their goals.7
On October 31, 1963, the panel voted 2–1 to release the civil rights workers, who had been imprisoned for three months, along with a black teenage girl who had been locked up in a prison in a nearby county by the local juvenile judge. Abram had insisted that her case be included in the trial. The panel also declared the state’s insurrection statute unconstitutional.8
Abram’s new status as an outsider was underscored by the fact that not a single member of the Georgia Bar accepted his invitation to join him in fighting an unconstitutional statute that threatened civil rights workers with the death penalty. Nor could he count on the support of the local state senator, a future president of the United States, who refrained from taking any public position. Referring to state senator Jimmy Carter’s absence from the civil rights movement, Abram asked an interviewer fifteen years later, “What kind of a man would stand aside—what kind of a man must he be? Obviously, a man who has got sense enough to know where his bread is buttered. But what kind of a man is he?”9 Abram recalled, “It felt good to return to Georgia on a civil rights case, backed now by the pillars of the national legal establishment and no longer dependent on a livelihood in Georgia.”10
Abram returned to his native state that same year, summoned personally by President Kennedy for another mission that involved the civil rights of black Americans. This time it was in Atlanta, the city in which he had practiced law for fourteen years, and the target was its reformist mayor, Ivan Allen Jr. Despite his city’s progress in desegregating public facilities during the early 1960s, Allen had been unsuccessful in convincing restaurant and hotel owners that it was time to open their doors to black customers. As these meetings continued with little result, in early 1963 President Kennedy proposed civil rights legislation that included a strong public accommodations provision. This action was met with hostility throughout the South and was opposed even by moderate Atlantans who considered it unfair to private enterprise.11
While Allen was trying to determine his own position on the provision, Morris Abram paid him a visit in his city hall office. Abram told the mayor that President Kennedy had asked him to solicit Allen not only for his support for the bill but also his agreement to testify in favor of it before the Senate Commerce Committee. Despite Allen’s belief that doing so would destroy his chance for a second term, he eventually agreed to testify following a personal call from the president.12
Although a firestorm of controversy back home followed his testimony, Allen was able to survive reelection by a comfortable margin two years later. When he campaigned in the black community, he took with him a leather-bound copy of his Senate testimony from which he would read. “To say that my reading from that testimony was regarded with great reverence at Negro rallies,” he wrote, “would be an understatement.” Reminiscing on his final day in office in January 1970 about his eight years as mayor, Allen looked at the rocking chairs arrayed around his desk, calling to mind “the day Morris Abram sat in one and told me President Kennedy wanted me to testify in Washington.”13
Abram’s civil rights work in Atlanta and New York brought him to the attention of the Johnson White House when it was looking for an appropriate figure to chair a much-anticipated White House Conference on Civil Rights. The conference had its genesis in a major address the president had given at Howard University at its 1965 June graduation in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and with Congress on the verge of passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the address, Johnson noted that as the barriers to freedom were being knocked down, the next phase of the struggle would be “to give twenty million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities—physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.” He continued, “To this end, equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally, the man.”14
Johnson announced his intention to convene a high-level group of scholars of both races, black leaders, and government officials whose object would be “to help the American Negro fulfill the rights which, after the long time of injustice, he is finally about to secure.”15 The reaction to the Howard University speech was highly positive among black civil rights leaders. It had been read to Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young in advance and all had responded enthusiastically.16
In the spirit of bringing together an integrated group of scholars, leaders, and officials, the White House organizers decided the conference “To Fulfill These Rights” would be led by one black and one white co-chairman. For the former, they chose William Coleman, the first black to serve as a clerk to a Supreme Court justice, coauthor of the plaintiff’s brief in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case, and partner in a distinguished Philadelphia firm. For his counterpart, Vice President Humphrey proposed three candidates, Father Theodore Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame; Bronson LaFollette, the attorney general of Wisconsin; and Morris Abram, whom he described as “a southerner with an excellent reputation as a leader in the broader field of human rights.”17
In a meeting of Johnson’s domestic advisors in late September, which included the attorney general, presidential assistant Lee White, who was given the major staff responsibility for the conference, reported that “there was a strong sentiment for Morris Abrams [sic], as a can-do fellow with the best credentials and a fast starter.”18 Abram was selected to serve with William Coleman as co-chair of the conference.
The most venerated veteran of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph, agreed to serve as honorary chair. The executive committee read like a “Who’s Who” of the national civil rights leadership, including Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Education and Defense Fund.
To say that President Johnson had high hopes for the conference would be an understatement. As planning got underway, he met with Abram and the conference’s executive director Berl Bernhard. Bernhard asked the president what kind of conference he desired. He answered this way:
In the hill country in the spring, the sun comes up earlier, and the ground gets warmer, and you can see the steam rising and the sap dripping. And in his pen, you can see my prize bull. He’s the biggest, best-hung bull in the hill country. In the spring he gets a hankering for those cows, and he starts pawing the ground and getting restless. So, I open the pen and he goes down the hill, looking for a cow, with his pecker hanging hard and swinging. Those cows get so Goddamn excited, they get more and more moist to receive him, and their asses just start quivering and then they start quivering all over, every one of them is quivering, as that bull struts into their pasture. . . . Well, I want a quivering conference . . . I want every damn delegate quivering with excitement and anticipation about the future of civil rights and their future opportunities in this country.19
A quivering conference planning session was pretty much what the president got several months later, but it was far from what he expected or desired. Warning signs were already on the horizon. That summer the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded over allegations of police brutality. For six days beginning on August 11, looting and arson resulted in thirty-four deaths and over $40 million in property damage. Nearly four thousand members of the California National Guard had to be called out to quell the rioting.
The White House looked to the established civil rights organizations to help it deal with riots that would later spread to northern cities. But none of these organizations had much of a base in northern or western ghettos.20 And the established civil rights groups were now fighting a growing militancy within the ranks of the black community, including young leaders calling for black separatism. Complicating those divisions were two additional factors. One was the escalating costs of the war in Vietnam, which was beginning to limit expenditures for social purposes. The other was a growing controversy over the underlying obstacles to black advancement.
The controversy was stimulated by a report that had been drafted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, and sent to the president by his boss Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, in March 1965.21 The nine-page document, which soon became known simply as “the Moynihan report,” pointed out that the next phase of the black’s struggle for equality would need to take it beyond the realm of political and legal equality to the achievement of more equal results in the areas of education, housing, and employment.
At the center of the report was the assertion that the single greatest impediment to achieving these results was the breakdown of the black family. Far from “blaming the victim,” as many of Moynihan’s fiercest critics later charged, the author of the report attributed the breakdown to the consequence of four primary historical factors: slavery, reconstruction, urbanization, and mass unemployment. The report included many grim statistics, among them the reality that over a third of black children were living in families with one or both parents missing, over half were receiving welfare under the Aid to Dependent Children program, and “probably not much more than a third of Negro youth reach eighteen having lived all their lives with both parents.”22
The reaction to the report after its release that summer was mixed: liberals were pleased with its calls for eliminating economic inequality; conservatives approved of its implications of the need for self-help.23 But critics on the left, including civil rights activists, were vocally hostile, many arguing that the report was fueling a new racism by focusing on the victims rather than the system that fostered it.24
Typical was James Farmer, cofounder of the Congress of Racial Equality, who wrote in his syndicated column, “We are sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over. . . . Moynihan has provided a massive academic copout for the white conscience and clearly implied that Negroes in this nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we stop sleeping with our wife’s sister and buying Cadillacs instead of bread.”25
The New Left also took strong issue with the Moynihan Report. Marcus Raskin, cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies, questioned why adopting middle class values was the solution to the problem of the black family: “It is only the foolish who would think that the middle-class is the be-all and end-all of existence. It is hardly something that has to be emulated.” Raskin objected to the notion that blacks should “run that rat race of opportunism which [their] white American brethren had become so adept at running.”26
The Moynihan Report heavily influenced the president’s graduation address at Howard. Moynihan himself had collaborated closely on it with White House speechwriter Richard Goodwin, working right up to the time it was delivered.27 The original idea for the White House conference called for in the address was to make the report its centerpiece. Now, with the controversy over the report, White House officials were forced to change their strategy. They decided to make the conference planned for November a planning meeting of several hundred activists for a much larger conference to take place the following year, and to reduce the family issue to one seminar among many others.28
Abram later noted how radical black nationalists who saw themselves as the new leaders of the movement viewed the conference as an opportunity to attack the government and to heap scorn upon Randolph, Wilkins, and other members of the “old guard.” He was particularly troubled by the fact that it took his persistent intervention to get the author of the Moynihan report invited to the planning session in the face of resistance from many black leaders. Abram recalled Moynihan’s reaction after he finally got the approval of the White House to call him with the invitation: “Goddamn it, it’s about time! Hell, there wouldn’t be any conference had I not written that into the Howard University speech.”29
As Abram recalled two decades later, “Pat came, and was thoroughly trashed.” When asked his own reaction to the controversy, he replied,
I guess that created a certain disenchantment in me. I tend to want to go about as far as logic will take me, and logically I thought the man was dead right, irrefutable. And the fact that he had opened a Pandora’s box, exposed a nest of worms, I thought was absolutely significant and important. . . . Now as long as you will not listen to Pat in what he’s saying about the figures and the dire consequences, I think you just repeat and repeat and repeat the tragedy. That was beginning to surface at the White House conference. But I’m going to say I was too naive to realize it was part of the issue.30
Although the Executive Committee for the conference were all integrationists, “out in the wings, “Abram later pointed out, “unnoted by us, this Black Power movement was beginning, and the Black Power movement is a separationist movement.” Abram believed there are two schools of thought in this country on civil rights, one integrationist, the other, separationist. He left no doubt with which side he identified. “These young kids now were assailing the old titans of the movement who had created the revolution.”31
In his opening remarks to the planning session, Abram offered a realistic assessment of what the participants faced in addressing the problems of black America:
We meet at a time when long overdue legislative advances have opened not only the gates of opportunity but also the floodgates of expectancy. And we seek the means of matching opportunity with achievement before hope turns to despair. Already the signals from Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chicago and Watts tell us that the time is short. Our task is enormous. Though we deal with the problems of fellow citizens whose ancestors came to these shores before 1808 and who thus should be amongst our first families, they came without family and until now, in the main, never even enjoyed the equalizing opportunity of attending a truly American school system. . . . We are not here to discuss merely the symptoms of America’s gravest national problem, but also the causes and cures. We will deal not only with the pathologies of some families, but with some of the pathologies of the total society.32
Much of the rhetoric of the planning meeting was filled with anger directed at the government and its efforts to date. The planners, according to White House domestic policy advisor Harry McPherson, “vied with one another in demanding more and more extreme reparations.”33 The White House became alarmed that the actual conference to be held the following summer would be overrun by the militants, which would have the effect of setting back the movement from those achievements that had already been made. By the time the conference “To Fulfill These Rights” was held in June 1966, Abram and Coleman had been replaced as conference chairs by Ben Heineman, a Chicago-based businessman. Abram believed that their relegation to the Executive Committee had resulted from the frustration of the president in not receiving the praise he had expected for his civil rights achievements. A team of corporate and labor leaders were brought in to serve on the committee.34
During the conference, SNCC supporters and New York activists carried signs outside Washington’s Sheraton-Park Hotel that read, “Save us from our Negro Leaders, Uncle Toms!”35 John Lewis, who as SNCC chairman led the celebrated march in Selma, Alabama the previous year in what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” was one of the conference’s most prominent casualties. As he recalled,
there were individuals, activists in SNCC and other civil rights groups that were opposed to my being part of this conference. They said Lyndon Johnson is trying to coopt the movement. And it was not a good time for me. Stokely Carmichael and a small group had what I call a coup. They said I was not “black enough” and they needed to tell Lyndon Johnson where to go. And there was a picture of President Johnson when he presented me with one of the pens that he had used to sign the Voter Rights Act on August 6, 1965. I was too close to Lyndon Johnson; too close to Dr. King. And I loved Dr. King, and I admired President Johnson. I had a problem with the war, but I admired him. And I thought the speech he gave on March 15, 1965 when he said “We Shall Overcome” was one of the great speeches. And I quote from time to time what he said.36
When John Lewis was expelled from his position as the chairman of SNCC and replaced by the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael, he moved to New York to work for the Field Foundation’s director, Leslie Dunbar, and its chairman, Morris Abram.
Abram recalled the White House conference as “my first experience with raw black militance, my wound from black colleagues in the struggle for racial equality in which I had been engaged for twenty years.” The task, he later described, would turn out to be an unhappy experience, “one that would permanently influence my attitudes toward radicalism and unbridled social expectations.” Even so, “I was still unwilling to do the black man the honor of examining his conduct as critically as that of whites.”37
The replacement of John Lewis with Stokely Carmichael to head the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was symptomatic of a growing split within the ranks of the larger civil rights movement. Establishment figures such as Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and King himself were being challenged by younger, more militant blacks impatient with fighting for gains by working through a political system where the pace of change was not to their liking.
One important turning point in the alienation of black radicals from the civil rights movement had occurred during the Democratic National Convention of 1964, where an integrated delegation of “Freedom Democrats” from Mississippi sought to be seated in place of the all-white party regulars. While Martin Luther King Jr. and white liberal allies of the freedom delegation including Allard Lowenstein and Joseph Rauh reluctantly supported a compromise, many SNCC activists believed they had been sold out.38
One later wrote that the struggle was now one “not for civil rights but rather for liberation.” The term “white liberal,” formerly one of praise, was now an epithet used by those blacks challenging the established civil rights leadership, and those using it were now reaching out to the New Left, rather than to longtime liberal allies.39 Like Morris Abram, a high percentage of those allies were Jewish. Jews and organizations working on their behalf had played a major role in lobbying for the Civil Rights Acts, in organizing and participating in freedom marches in Southern states, and in providing funding for the activities of groups such as the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. But now tensions were running high between the new generation of black activists and their onetime allies in the Jewish community.
Riots in the ghettos of major U.S. cities, which began in Harlem in 1964 and spread across the country, frequently targeted small businesses, many of them owned and operated by Jews. According to longtime civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, attacks on Jewish merchants were part of a psychology that blamed not the enemies of black advancement but rather those who had worked over the years for civil rights.40 In the late 1960s, Rustin, who had organized the 1963 March on Washington, found himself fighting a losing battle in his argument that the black community could achieve basic educational and economic goals only by working with the liberal white majority.41
Blacks who favored separatism and who sought to turn the civil rights movement into a racial revolution found their hero in Nation of Islam follower Malcolm X. A charismatic figure who gave voice to the frustrations of many blacks in northern ghettos, Malcolm portrayed Jews as exploiters of blacks. In his autobiography, released after his assassination in February 1965, he depicted Jews as hypocrites who claimed friendship with blacks to further their own purposes.42 Within just a few years, the book sold millions of copies and was adopted by hundreds of colleges nationwide.
Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 furthered the friction between Jews and black activists. Malcolm, who had converted to Islam while serving a prison sentence early in his life, had adopted the line that the Jews had established the state of Israel by stealing Muslim-owned land. When the war broke out, SNCC’s newsletter commented that Zionist imperialists had been responsible for the unrest in Palestine since the late nineteenth century. The article included antisemitic drawings and cartoons.43
Over the Labor Day weekend of 1967 a group of political activists on the left convened in Chicago to build a new biracial coalition that would challenge President Johnson in 1968. A militant black group led by SNCC activist James Forman presented thirteen resolutions, one of them condemning the “imperialist-Zionist war” in the Middle East. When the press reported that Martin Luther King Jr. had given the keynote address, Morris Abram reached out to his friend to inquire why he and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had participated in a conference with antisemitic overtones.
On September 20, 1967, King sent Abram a four-page reply. The letter began with a complete denial of SCLC support for an anti-Israel resolution at the Chicago conference. In fact, said King, it was members of his organization who were the most vigorous opponents of the “simplistic” resolution on the Middle East and who pressed for the elimination of its reference to Zionism. Writing that he had attended the conference only to give a speech and leave immediately afterward, had he been present for the debate, “I would have made it crystal clear that I could not have supported any resolution calling for black separatism or calling for a condemnation of Israel and an unqualified endorsement of the Arab powers.”44
King asserted that at the heart of the problems in the Middle East are “oil interests,” and the solution would have to be based upon “statesmanship by Israel and progressive Arab forces who in concert with the great powers recognize that fair and peaceful solutions are the concern of all humanity.” According to King, “Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is uncontestable.”45
Regarding antisemitism, which King insisted the SCLC had denounced “expressly, frequently, and vigorously,” he wrote that it is not only immoral but is used to separate blacks and Jews, partners in the struggle for justice. Quoting from his recent book, Where Do We Go from Here? King noted that what little antisemitism existed in the black community was entirely a product of northern ghettos. While the urban black is associated with Jews as partners in the struggle for civil rights, he also meets them daily “as some of his most direct exploiters in the ghetto.” Although those in the latter group operate as marginal businessmen, not according to Jewish ethics, the distinction is lost on some blacks who are mistreated by them. “It would be a tragic and moral mistake,” he wrote, “to identify the mass of Negroes with the very small number who succumb to cheap and dishonest slogans.” King assured his friend that he would continue to oppose antisemitism “because it is immoral and self-destructive.”46
During this period of growing tension between the two communities, the American Jewish Committee sought to convince Jews living in the inner city that it was in their interest that integration succeed. AJC historian Marianne Sanua notes that Abram was openly critical of Jews who tried to escape integration by moving away to the suburbs, where he himself lived, or by not sending their children to public schools.47 At AJC’s annual meeting in 1965, after hearing reports of rioting in Philadelphia that targeted hundreds of Jewish establishments, Abram said, “You can’t expect these people to reach a responsible maturity until they have developed self-respect and a feeling of self-worth. And in the growing up process there are going to be these tensions, these confrontations and these times of trouble.”48
At a meeting the following year of AJC’s executive board, Abram was critical of those who were not prepared to support the radical reforms needed to make white and black America one nation. As he exhorted his colleagues, “We in AJC must not, shall not, and do not intend to withdraw from this struggle. Rather, we shall intensify all our efforts to create fair and full housing, full employment, and integrated quality schools.”49
By the fall of 1967 it had been a mere five years since Morris Abram had cast aside his doubts and moved with his family from Atlanta to New York. If it was visibility he sought, he could not have been more in the public eye than he was, given his partnership at one of the country’s leading law firms and his national positions at the American Jewish Committee and the United Nations.
Given this visibility, which included taking public positions on important policy issues, Abram began to hear from prominent figures in the Democratic Party that he should consider a run for its nomination to oppose incumbent Senator Jacob Javits, then looking forward to his election to a third term in November 1968. It had been fourteen years since his unsuccessful campaign for a congressional seat in Georgia, a state then still dominated by the undemocratic county unit system.
Javits’s record as a liberal Republican allied with popular governor Nelson Rockefeller made the prospect of defeating him in 1968 a formidable challenge. He had entered the Senate in 1956 after defeating popular New York City Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. by a half million votes and was reelected six years later in a landslide victory. A year before the election, leading figures in the state Democratic Party considered Abram their top candidate.50 In an interview for Women’s Wear Daily, Abram said that he had been a Democrat “since I could breathe,” adding that he intended to become more and more active in the party. He told his interviewer that growing up in a small town and hanging around the courthouse had given him the opportunity to see government “at an intimate level.” He related how he had lost his one bid for electoral office running against a segregationist and spending a mere $30,000 on his campaign because of the discriminatory unit voting system.51
In late October Abram served as toastmaster at the most successful Manhattan Democratic organization fundraising dinner in a decade, to which he brought his entire family. At the dinner, Senator Robert Kennedy quipped, “Some people are speaking of him for statewide office. I can’t personally see how you could send a carpetbagger to the Senate—someone who doesn’t even speak with a New York accent.”52
But Abram soon found himself trapped politically in the fierce divisions within the national Democratic Party over the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. A group of representatives of the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had recently come together to form the American Jewish Service Committee on Civilian Relief in Vietnam. As chair of the committee, Abram traveled to Vietnam in January 1968 to visit refugee camps and explore the feasibility of setting up a program there.53
Abram’s dilemma was reinforced by what he saw during his visit: an unwinnable war absent a much larger commitment in blood and treasure, one he knew would be wholly unacceptable to the American people. Along with Robert Kennedy, Abram believed that distancing himself from the White House position would be highly problematic, since he needed its support to raise enough funds to run a credible campaign. When key Johnson associates read a memorandum he drafted recommending a negotiated settlement that adequately protected our South Vietnamese allies, they deemed it to be unacceptable, effectively quashing his plans to run against Javits.54
As Abram approached the end of his four-year term as president of the American Jewish Committee, tensions between blacks and Jews once again began to erupt. This time the scene was New York City, and the occasion a teachers’ strike called in the spring of 1968 by the predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The strike kept one million students, a heavy percentage of them black and Hispanic, out of class for thirty-six days.
Working with the Ford Foundation, Mayor John Lindsay had sought ways to give parents more control over their children’s education by decentralizing the city’s vast school system. One of those designated for a pilot project was based in the Ocean-Hill Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The superintendent chosen, a follower of Malcolm X, began his tenure by dismissing a mostly Jewish group of supervisors and replacing them with 350 substitutes. This was followed by antisemitic flyers appearing in the mailboxes of schoolteachers that the UFT leader, Albert Shanker, exposed by distributing them more widely, further enflaming tensions. Following the strike, the school district’s board was suspended.55
The animosity between blacks and Jews, much of it attributable to the strike and the events surrounding it, lingered on well after its conclusion. Murray Friedman cites a major art exhibit at the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art that opened in January 1969 entitled “Harlem on my Mind.” The catalog declared that “behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has to jump stands the Jew who has already cleared it.”56
In a guest address to AJC’s Executive Committee following the New York teachers’ strike, Morris Abram asserted, “There will be many black-white confrontations and much friction between Negro and Jew—but we must pay the price of past wrongs. . . . We must recognize that not every conflict and confrontation signifies anti-Semitism.” And in his final annual address to the organization as he was stepping down as its president, Abram distinguished between two cries for separatism this way, “One is a racist cry which I reject totally; but the cry of identity and pride is something I accept and applaud.”57