-During the civil rights years, the Black-Jewish alliance reached its peak.

I was born in 1950, so I grew up watching it happen.

In my house, we saw Jewish-Americans as some of our strongest allies in the fight for racial justice.

-I think the civil rights movement healed our souls after Nazi Germany.

-We are trying to remind the nation -- now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

-Rabbi Heschel was told he might not live, but he said, "I'm marching right next to my brother, Martin King."

-Jewish children came in droves to the South to register Black people to vote.

I'll never forget those students.

-I was recruiting people, and I was also telling them, "You may go down there, and you may die," and it turns out I was right.

-The search for these civil rights activists takes on a different kind of intensity because two of them are white.

-We want Black Power.

-Black Power!

-At that moment, some Black activists weren't feeling allyship.

What they were feeling was a degree of alienation.

-It laid bare some of the tensions underlying Black-Jewish relations because Blacks and Jews were not on the same page, economically.

-The Six-Day Middle East War is a swift, smashing, and total one.

-The Six-Day War was a watershed moment in terms of Black Americans' understanding of what was going on in Israel.

-No peace without justice!

-The New York City school system was shut down again today by the third strike this term of the teacher's union.

-In the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike, you see the rupture between Blacks and Jews that eventually will rip the entire coalition apart.

-It wasn't a perfect partnership, but for a time, it stood as proof that people could bridge deep divides, an emblem of hope and a lesson in the power of solidarity.

-There is a history that we need to regard and respect.

We would not have got certain things done without those alliances.

-Jews and African-Americans both see their interests as relying on the universal commitment to equality.

Only when everyone is safe are we safe.

We cannot go it alone.

[ Birds chirping ] -The first time I met a Jewish person was 1960.

I was 9 years old when my mother would join the board of United Organization, and one of the other board members was Mrs.

Mamalin.

Mrs.

Mamalin invited my mother over to her house for tea.

The fact that she had invited my mother to her house for a social event was a big deal.

I don't think my mother was ever invited before to a white person's house.

And the fact that she was Jewish was remarked upon by both my mother and my father.

And that resonated with me.

There was a liberal alliance between Jews and Black people in the civil rights movement, and I began to realize that, yes, Jews were white, but there were different kinds of white people and that maybe the reason that Mrs.

Mamalin invited Mrs.

Gates over for that symbolic gesture had to do with the fact that it was an expression of sympathy about shared oppression.

And that struck me deeply.

Thinking about my mother's tea with Mrs.

Mamalin makes me realize that the so-called "grand alliance" between Blacks and Jews wasn't solely forged by the leaders of our two communities.

It was also built by ordinary people just reaching out to each other in small gestures of friendship and solidarity.

In fact, one of the unsung heroes of the early civil rights movement was a Jewish housewife named Esther Brown.

When Esther realized that there was racial discrimination in her local school system, she vowed to fight it, lending her support to a battle that would go all the way to the Supreme Court.

-In the late '40's, Merriam was really a rural community on the outskirts of Kansas City.

I think we were the only Jewish family.

-Susan's parents, Esther and Paul Brown, were children of Jewish immigrants.

With the help of the GI Bill, they were able to buy a home in Merriam, where Paul worked at an auto shop and Esther as a homemaker.

-My mother wasn't a typical Jewish housewife, and it seemed like, compared to most of my friends' parents, mothers in particular, she was very engaged in the world.

From an early age, she was always interested in equality and justice and disturbed by anti-Semitism, racism.

-Esther's transformation to civil rights activist began one day in 1947 after a conversation she had with her maid, a Black woman named Helen Swann.

-Mrs.

Swann was a charming lady, had five children.

She lived in a little area known as South Park, and every now and then, I'd take her home.

And it was a very country-type community, dirt roads, kind of a poor section.

-Through Mrs.

Swan, my mother learned about the Walker School, which was a two-room schoolhouse that the Black kids went to.

And there were two teachers who taught eight grades.

And there were about 47 children in the school.

The conditions were really horrific.

-It was almost unbelievable.

Whenever there was a heavy rain, water would accumulate in the basement that would be two and a half to three or four feet high.

Children in that school were always having the flu and the colds and the pneumonia.

And this is the way these kids had gone to school for years.

-Then Mrs.

Swann told Esther that the town had no plans to fix Walker and, in fact, they were raising money to build a new white school instead.

-I thought this was pretty crummy and said, "Mrs.

Swann, maybe I ought to go to your school board and talk to them.

Being white, they'd probably listen to me where they don't to you."

-I think most immigrant parents felt like education was the way to get ahead in America.

My mother just thought that the conditions were horrible, regardless of who went to the school.

So it wasn't necessarily just a racial issue to begin with.

-But when Esther Brown attended a school board meeting to voice support for improving the Walker School, she learned that it was very much a racial issue.

-I have never had such a shock in my life and, for the first time, even became a little frightened.

The five school board members looked like a bunch of lynchers from the South.

-A few days later, she got a call from a guy in town threatening her, saying she should mind her own business, which just made her more angry and determined.

-Esther joined forces with a Black couple named Alfonso and Mary Webb, who were leading the charge to improve Walker.

And together, they began rallying the community.

They assembled the first local chapter of the NAACP, and then they hatched a plan to sue the school district.

Delores Locke-Graves was a student at the Walker School.

When her mother, Lucille, got involved with the lawsuit, she decided that Delores should become one of the plaintiffs.

-My mother told me, "We're going to do something, Delores, that is not really heard of, and I know you can handle it because you're my child."

-When you think back to the Black community, did you feel endangered?

-We did have a segment a couple of times where they came through our neighborhood and burned some crosses.

-The Ku Klux Klan did?

-Yes.

But my mother -- she said, "We're gonna try to do something about that school over there."

-Hmm.

Did your mom and Mrs.

Brown become close?

-Mrs.

Brown would come and they would kick off their shoes and they would just have a wonderful afternoon.

-It would've been unusual for a white lady to come to a Black lady's house at that time.

-Yes, it was.

-Mm-hmm.

-Mrs.

Brown was the one who I would say gave her this brazen mentality.

"Get what you want, Lucille."

-Uh-huh, uh-huh.

-"Get it."

-As the lawsuit dragged on into the fall of 1948, Walker parents couldn't bear the thought of their children forced to sit, day after day, in that dismal space.

So Lucille and another family offered up their homes as makeshift classrooms and staged a boycott.

-They called them the "Walker Walkouts."

My mother reached out to two teachers who had previously worked at Walker, Corinthian Nutter and Hazel Weddington, and asked them if they would come and teach the children in the parents' homes.

Two of the families offered up their living rooms for many, many months.

-While their children did their lessons in their neighbors' living rooms, the South Park parents threw themselves into the legal fight.

Finally, in 1949, Webb v. School District No.

90 made it before the Kansas Supreme Court.

And against all odds, they won.

-The Kansas Supreme Court ordered the school integrated, and that fall, the children were admitted to the school.

-Do you remember when the verdict was announced?

-It -- Oh, it was just happy.

I remember my cousins -- We had a little band going through the park, celebrating that we were free.

-But for Esther Brown, the fight was far from over.

-Early on, she talked not only about the integration of the South Park school, but integrating the schools throughout Kansas and the nation.

She was very prescient and sort of had her eye on the prize from the get-go.

-Esther began working with the NAACP's legal defense fund, which had been fighting inequality in education since the 1930s -- often with the help of Jewish allies.

-The leadership, both of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund always included Blacks and Jews working together on the strategy to improve conditions for African-Americans.

-Famed civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall and his team ultimately took five related school-segregation cases before the United States Supreme Court.

Collectively, they were known as Brown v. Board of Education, named not for Esther Brown, but for a Black plaintiff, Oliver Brown.

-Brown v. Board of Ed in many ways becomes the template for Black-Jewish cooperation during that period -- African-Americans at the front and strategizing and then Jews providing legal support, scholarly support, and especially financial support.

-Marshall, aided by brilliant colleagues, including Robert L. Carter, Constance Baker Motley, and Jack Greenberg, successfully argued that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

"Separate but equal" had never been equal.

-In 1954, after the Brown case was decided and there was a celebration in Topeka, my mother was one of the speakers.

She talked about what a sacrifice the Black families had made and how hard it was for people to take a stand.

And she said something like -- you know, like, "The lawyers have done a great job, but it's the little people like us who really made this happen."

-One of the things you often hear about Black-Jewish relations is that, "Well, it was just elite Blacks and elite Jews."

But here was literally a housewife in Kansas who felt moved by what she saw and got very involved with the Black community.

And I think that shows the way this alliance between Blacks and Jews resonated among ordinary Jews.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Like many watershed moments in the fight for civil rights, the Brown decision was greeted by heated backlash across the country.

-The Negro students encountered violence in their attempt to register at a previously all-white school.

-You had governors in Arkansas and elsewhere who would say, you know, basically, "We're just gonna stand in front of federal troops and prevent folks from entering schools."

-White supremacists across the South waged a violent campaign against integration.

-They bombed my parents' church.

They bombed Bell Street Church, Mount Olive Church.

They bombed my parents' home.

I was born trembling, literally for the first six months of my life.

-This violence didn't only target Black people.

It also targeted their Jewish allies and their places of worship.

-This claim takes hold in the South that Jews are running the civil rights movement.

Because, after all, we know Black people are inferior.

They couldn't possibly run it themselves.

And so, at the same time that you have increased racial violence, you also have anti-Semitism and increased violence against Jews and synagogues and Jewish individuals.

-It's here you see the end result of bigotry and intolerance.

-When the big Reform temple in Atlanta is bombed in 1958, it's the fourth in a string of at least five synagogue bombings since Brown v. Board of Ed.

And the temple bombing is an example of precisely the tension for Jewish communities around how and whether to engage in the civil rights movement.

This is a community that is very integrated for Jews into the Atlanta elite.

They are not necessarily wanting to paint a target on themselves.

-Most of the Southern Jewish community is really not active and, in fact, oppose Northern Jewish involvement in civil rights activities.

And some historians argue that they had no choice.

They owned businesses in the South.

They understood this anti-Semitism and felt endangered, and they couldn't risk it.

-But Rabbi Jacob Rothschild preaches in support of civil rights from his pulpit.

This is likely one of the factors that goes into the temple bombing.

Rabbis in the South are often far more likely to take social justice stands than the congregations.

-We are trying to remind the nation -- now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

-As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, rabbis came to be seen as crucial allies, especially for Martin Luther King, who found a kindred spirit in famed rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

-When my father and Dr.

King met, their souls met.

It was an alliance of their souls.

-King and Heschel met in 1963 at a conference in Chicago on religion and race.

They both were, I think, amazed by each other's speeches.

Rabbi Heschel talked with this idea of racism as an evil and even argued that it was easier for the chosen Israel to cross the Red Sea than for many "Negros" to enter into universities in this country.

And I think for King, that was like a really powerful moment because here you have this immigrant who's actually acknowledging racism, to his own peril in many respects, and then you have King really acknowledging the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as sort of the paradigm for understanding what freedom looks like.

Their relationship reflects a kind of hope and dream that we all have around solidarity, around friendship, and yet, by all accounts, it was real.

-Negros are more convinced than ever before that our destiny is tied up with the destiny of our Jewish brothers and vice versa and we must work together.

-In 1965, we received a telegram asking my father to come to Selma for a march.

And I remember my father kissing me goodbye.

I held on to that moment because I thought, "This might be the last kiss I'll ever receive from him."

[ Indistinct shouting ] -There was a bloody Sunday a few weeks prior in which John Lewis and others were assaulted by state police officers.

[ Gunshots ] -Rabbi Heschel was told he might not live, but he said, "I'm marching right next to my brother, Martin King."

-My father said, "I felt my legs were praying."

I think the civil rights movement healed the Jews in very profound ways after Nazi Germany.

-During World War II, my dad served in the European theater.

And my dad took us to Ravensbrueck, a concentration camp, so that we would understand and we would know what Jewish people had gone through.

♪♪ -Donzaleigh Abernathy and Avi Dresner are the children of civil rights activists Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Rabbi Israel Dresner.

-Your dad and Dr.

King were the generals.

My dad was like a lieutenant.

On my tie, I've got written "tikkun olam," which means "repairing the world."

And that is part and parcel specifically of Reformed Judaism.

My dad was a Reform rabbi.

And the Reform movement really emphasizes that social-justice message.

One of the big reasons that my dad and so many of the rabbis got involved was because of the Holocaust.

My dad said to Dr.

King, "Jews were slaves 17 years ago in the death camps and concentration camps of Europe.

So this is not ancient history for us.

This is something that happened 17 years ago."

And my dad said that made a -- it really made an impression on Dr.

King.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -In the early '60s, as King, Abernathy, and their fellow activists staged protests and sit-ins across the South, rabbis like Avi's father joined the fray.

In June of 1964, Rabbi Dresner received a telegram from Dr.

King, who was jailed in St.

Augustine, Florida.

He said, "We need rabbis to come help us in St.

Augustine, Florida, with a willingness to be arrested."

-Dr.

King was a genius when it came to PR and using the media.

He knew that if he got a mass group of white clergymen to get arrested -- and the rabbis back then were all white -- that's gonna make the news.

-The late spring of 1964 was a critical moment in the civil rights movement, and all eyes were on the protests in St.

Augustine.

-Negro homes in St.

Augustine were shot at.

A Negro leader was badly beaten at a Ku Klux Klan meeting.

A white man was fatally shot.

-Protesters had targeted the Monson Motor Lodge, which refused to serve Black people, and they had garnered the attention of the national news media.

Rabbi Dresner and 15 other rabbis heeded Dr.

King's call.

-The day's activities began with 70 integrationists, 16 of them white rabbis, gathering at the Monson Motor Hotel.

They stood outside the restaurant and started to pray.

The manager, whose patience has worn thin, came out to stop the praying.

-You're on private property, and you're -- -We'll deliver the prayer.

-You're on private property, and I'm ordering you to leave.

-"...beside the still waters."

-Come here, Rabbi.

-Ultimately, the rabbis were arrested and the incident made national headlines, which is exactly what Dr.

King had intended.

This kind of white involvement in the movement increased pressure on the federal government at a pivotal time.

Less than one month after the St.

Augustine protests, President Johnson signed into law the historic civil rights bill of 1964.

Yet even as Johnson was signing the bill, the movement didn't let up.

Hundreds of young people were flooding the South, determined to maintain the momentum.

-Young people working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC as we call it, are characterized by a restless energy.

They seek radical change in race relations in the United States.

-But while Dr.

King had welcomed white allies with open arms, some leaders in the younger generation weren't convinced that white involvement was a good idea.

-There were those who said that to bring these outsiders in would mean the death and destruction of our carefully built local organizations.

But the level of danger kept rising exponentially.

-There have been five church burnings in the past dozen days.

All the churches were Negro churches.

-It was clear that, if we didn't do something dramatic, the movement would falter.

Bob Moses felt that we had to do something to shake things up, and that would mean bringing in white youngsters as security.

-Bob Moses's idea was that, wherever the white people went, the press would follow.

Wherever the press followed, then the government might get interested.

-Dorothy Zellner was just one of the many young Jewish people drawn to the movement.

-I remember exactly where I was sitting when I opened up The Times in February of 1960, talking about a demonstration where these four young Black college guys sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

And when they were refused service, they wouldn't get up.

I remember sitting there like lightning had struck me.

"Wow."

I said, "I have to get down there."

In Judaism and in Jewish culture, you do not stand idly by, especially because what had happened to us in the Holocaust.

-Jews are very rightly proud of the fact that Jews are disproportionately represented among the white participants in civil rights movements like freedom riding.

-Many of these kids going down were the children of these immigrants who had come as socialists, come as communists, come as union members.

Some of them are absolutely motivated by their religion.

But I would say a large majority of those white Jews were doing so out of a political conviction that also came from their Jewishness, but not a religious Jewishness.

-They were taught how to react when confronted with hostile segregationists.

Staff workers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, along with the National Council of Churches, conducted the training.

-The SNCC people were the greatest people I ever met.

They were beyond smart, courageous, but what people don't realize is funny.

Chuck McDew, who was the chairman of SNCC, was actually Jewish, Jewish by choice.

And Chuck was also one of the funniest people who ever lived.

All of them managed out of these really terrible, terrible experiences to extract this wild sense of humor.

This was one of the few times where an interracial group of people really had the racial animus and the racial stereotypes lifted away from them because we had to work so closely together.

We had to depend on each other so much.

-During Freedom Summer of 1964, civil rights activists descended upon the state of Mississippi, where Black voter registration was the lowest in the country.

-Freedom Summer really is a huge high point of a very visible Black-Jewish alliance during the civil rights movement.

-Jewish children came in droves to the South to register Black people to vote so that we would get our right to vote.

I'll never forget those students.

My dad's church was like a headquarter, and they were going, you know, door to door, getting Black people to register and then meeting in churches to get everybody to understand what you needed to do in order to vote.

-About 55 Negros walked into the LeFleur County Courthouse to line up for registration.

In the complicated process, about four were registered.

-I was recruiting people.

And I was also telling them, "You may go down there, and you may die."

I was terrified the whole time.

And it turns out I was right.

-Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

These three young men, two Jewish and one Black, would come to symbolize Black-Jewish cooperation at its most noble, not because of their success, but because of their tragic sacrifice.

♪♪ -Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman 4go down South together to register voters, and where they're going has already had a lot of problems It's genuinely dangerous.

They're trying to drive to a church to investigate an arson.

Their car is stopped by a sheriff.

-Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price says he stopped the car.

Price says it was going 65 in a 30-mile-an-hour zone.

-The reputation of local officials like Sheriff Price was known to be lethal.

Some white people were meaner than others, and he was one of those.

-The three were taken to jail and released a few hours later, but by that time, at least eight Klansman had assembled near the jailhouse.

Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were never heard from again.

-This is unbelievably sick and sad and grotesque, but the search for these civil rights activists takes on a different kind of intensity because two of them are white.

-The FBI gets involved.

President Johnson orders sailors from a nearby base to join the search.

A lot of the Blacks in the civil rights movement are wondering, "Why now?"

Black civil rights workers have been murdered and buried, and no one has taken any notice.

-While they were searching for them, they find the bodies of other Black Mississippians, including headless torsos, in rivers that they drag in Mississippi.

-Eventually, they find the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in an earthen dam in Mississippi on August 4, 1964.

-The white people couldn't come to grips with it.

I was one of them.

"Oh, this can't be true this can't be true."

And the Black people that I was working with said, "It's true.

Get used to it.

They died."

The widow of Mickey Schwerner had the press all over her, and they wanted her to cry.

-I personally suspect that if Mr.

Chaney, who is a native Mississippian Negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others that have come before, would've gone completely unnoticed.

-Rather than crying, what she said was symbolic of what white people could do in situations like that.

-Mrs.

Chaney, the wife of one of the missing white men has said that the only reason this case has attracted national attention is because there are two white northerners involved.

-That's right.

-How do you feel about that?

-Well, that's what I feel, too, because if he was by himself, I doubt that we would have ever known.

-When you have the murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, you have Black activists saying, "What will it take for a Black life to matter, where when we raise issues, the virtue of the fact that we're American citizens and human beings is sufficient to move people to action, that there doesn't have to be a white person by our side to be able to do it?"

-At Chaney's funeral, Dave Dennis, who's a civil rights organizer, gets up and gives this blistering sermon.

-I know that they're gonna say not guilty 'cause no one saw them pull the trigger.

I'm tired of that!

-And he says to the crowd, "If you don't do something, if you don't fight back, then...your souls to hell."

And it's really the first sign you can see of the emerging Black Power movement, of this anger that is boiling up, that, despite Martin Luther King's success in kind of holding things calm and having nonviolent protests, people are reaching their limit.

♪♪ -Don't be afraid.

Don't be ashamed.

What do you want?

-Black Power!

-What do you want?

-Black Power!

-What do you want?!

-Stokely Carmichael, a 25-year-old revolutionary born in the West Indies, educated at the best high school in New York, a college graduate with a degree in philosophy.

-Stokely Carmichael popularized the electric phrase "Black Power" in 1966.

Soon it became a movement, pushing for a more radical political agenda than Dr.

King's.

-The Black Power movement is really a movement for radical social, political, economic, cultural self-determination.

-It was also a turn away from white people -- even white allies.

-We have to move into a position where we can define terms for what we want them to be, not what racist white society wants it to be.

-At that moment in the 1960s, particularly in SNCC, some Black activists weren't feeling allyship.

What they were feeling was a degree of alienation, a degree of exploitation.

-Jews, as white people, were doing better than African-Americans, and that brought a certain amount of paternalism -- "We know better than you what you should do" -- which, of course, was resented by Black leaders.

-Unfortunately, Black Power was immediately defined by the media as being anti-white.

But it started as a way to redefine how Black people felt about themselves.

And when some Black people said that we must control our own communities, it didn't mean putting white people out.

It just meant that we were in charge.

-The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee engaged in heated debates about expelling all white people from the organization.

-If you speak to Jewish activists at that moment, they had, strangely, no idea this was coming.

They had established deep relationships with African-American civil rights leaders, and they were blindsided.

-In December of 1966, it's decided that the last remaining white organizers should organize in white communities.

-This was the worst thing that ever happened to me because I had intended to -- this was the rest of my life.

I mean, I had made my commitment.

Just like some people are gonna be doctors, this is what I was gonna do.

-Part of the message from SNCC is, "If we're ultimately gonna build the foundation for a national movement that completes the work, it can't just be about you coming South to help us.

It's got to be about you helping yourselves by dealing with the racism that exists in the communities you come from.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -The Black Power movement was about much more than radical politics.

It was also a cultural revolution, a newfound embrace of the concept that "Black is beautiful."

It also led to the creation of Black Studies in colleges and universities.

And by the late 1960s, something similar was happening among Jewish Americans.

-At the same time that this alliance appeared to be fracturing -- and it was -- there was an emulation, a copying, taking a page from the Black Power handbook by American Jewish leaders who saw in the Black Power movement a model for reinforcing Jewish identity in America.

Jewish college students begin calls for Jewish Studies programs.

They'll wear a head covering, a yarmulke or kippah.

They will engage in public protests, and they will don religious garb.

They'll adopt their Jewish name, their Hebrew name, as their regular everyday name.

[ Indistinct shouting ] ♪♪ -This embrace of Jewish identity took on new meaning and new urgency with the emerging threat of war in the Middle East in 1967.

-Tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors were rising through the mid 1960s.

There was a lot of support in the Arab world for a war that would liberate Palestine.

The Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, formed an alliance with Jordan and with Syria, and Israel was on the verge of being attacked and possibly destroyed.

-American Jews were terrified.

I was terrified.

Everybody felt that Israel was under threat and that, in fact, when Nasser said, "I'm gonna throw Israel into the Mediterranean," that he could do it because he had Soviet backing, after all.

At the time, Israel didn't have the kind of intense US support that it has today.

-American Jews, like Jews the world over, including Israel, really feared a second Holocaust.

It had been only 20 years since the end of the Second World War.

That's a blink of an eye.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -For American Jews, the conflict in the Middle East inspired a heightened sense of connection to the state of Israel.

-There was a reaction among American Jews, and especially among young American Jews, that surprised even the Jewish leadership of the country.

In New York City, there was a luncheon that raised millions of dollars in one hour.

7,500 Jewish college students flew to Israel so that they could work and create an opportunity then for the Israelis to go and fight.

-I remember volunteering here and there to try to raise funds, and there was a sense that we were on the eve of destruction.

-After weeks of rising tensions, on June 5, 1967, war broke out between Israel and a coalition of Arab states.

-Within just a few hours, Israel destroyed almost the entirety of the Egyptian Air Force.

They conquered the Sinai Peninsula in Eastern Jerusalem.

They conquered Jordanian territory west of the Jordan River, known as the West Bank, and they also conquered the Golan Heights, which was an area in Syria.

So, Israel came out of that war having tripled its territory and in a state of military dominance.

-We have the beginning of what comes to be known as the occupation, which is to say the imposition of military and, in some places, civilian rule over a Palestinian population without any grant of rights of citizenship or equality.

-Although it was happening thousands of miles away, the outcome of the Six-Day War, as it was called, would have a profound impact on Black-Jewish relations in America.

-No peace without justice!

-No peace without justice!

-When Israel was established in 1948, many Black activists -- Du Bois, others -- were very excited and supported that a group of oppressed people now had a homeland.

[ Indistinct shouting ] But I think the Six-Day War was a watershed moment in terms of Black Americans' understanding of what was going on in Israel.

-There was a generational split.

So, the grown-ups in the civil rights movement -- somebody like Roy Wilkins of the NAACP -- were so grateful for the important support they had gotten from Jewish Americans, and so they didn't hesitate to support Israel.

For the younger people, like Stokely Carmichael and the people in SNCC, they took the side of the Palestinians as Third World people.

-The line was clearly drawn that Palestinians were viewed as oppressed people who didn't have the level of power that the State of Israel had, and Israel came to be defined as a colonizer in a way.

-As we come into the Black Power era and many organizations are kind of defining themselves as part of the Third World activists, you get a kind of new sense of a solidarity and kinship with Palestinian people and a new awareness that many of the conditions that Palestinians were confronting resembled that of the conditions that Black Americans were simultaneously confronting in the United States.

-Everybody is very proud of brave little Israel, a state against which I nothing.

I don't want to be misinterpreted.

I'm not an anti-Semite.

But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns -- or the Poles or the Irish -- or any white man in the world says, "Give me liberty, or give me death," the entire white world applauds.

When a Black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.

-The war didn't create strains between the Black and Jewish communities, but it did sharpen them, especially after SNCC published an article in their newsletter that was not only critical of Israel, but also included an anti-Semitic cartoon.

-It's an image that shows a hand with a Star of David embossed on its sleeve, and one noose is around the neck of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the other noose is around the neck of Muhammad Ali.

This is very clearly an image of Jews manipulating and harming Arabs and Blacks alike.

-There's gonna be accusations that SNCC is practicing anti-Semitism.

SNCC is gonna lose a lot of Jewish supporters.

-Stokely Carmichael became a lightning rod for this shift in Black-Jewish relations when he embarked on an international tour later that year.

-By 1967, Stokely becomes a huge critic of Zionism, and this is gonna get him in massive controversies.

But even as Stokely's gonna be accused of being an anti-Semite, he's gonna always insist that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

-But tensions between Black and Jewish people were mounting for other reasons that had nothing to do with global politics.

It was about economics at home.

By the late '60s, the class divide between the two communities was becoming more and more stark.

Racist housing policies confined many African-American families to deteriorating inner cities, while most Jewish people had long since decamped to the suburbs.

At the same time, Jews were well-represented among those who owned rental properties and businesses in Black neighborhoods.

-So you get this complicated and adversarial relationship in which you have absentee landlords and business owners who are not part of the community.

And there's price gouging and there are all sorts of things that structurally happen.

And that creates tension.

-In 1967, James Baldwin wrote... His article, published in the New York Times Magazine, was provocatively titled "Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White."

-So, James Baldwin is not denying the reality of Jewish suffering.

What he's saying is, whatever the situation of Jewish suffering, up to and including the Holocaust, it is not shaping the Jewish reality in the United States of 1967.

What Baldwin is saying is, "Look, you're part of the system that exploits us.

It doesn't matter how much you were exploited somewhere else."

-Even after the civil rights movement, Black people were still living as second- and third-class and fourth-class citizens.

There was so much attention on integration, and yet there was also a stark realization about the failures of integration, as well.

-All across the country, you had Black people saying, "We need to elect our own elected officials.

We need to own our own businesses.

We need schools where children are actually going to be educated."

-In a striking twist of irony, the very issue that had once united Blacks and Jews in the 1950s -- equality in education -- would, just a decade later, became a source of tension that helped further unravel the alliance.

Those tensions erupted in 1967 in a Brooklyn school district called Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

-New York City public schools beginning in the '60s had come into an almost Black and Puerto Rican majority.

Most of the teachers in the New York City public schools were white, and most of those teachers were Jewish.

-And then you had Central Brooklyn schools that were overcrowded, where there is inferior instruction.

For so many years, they have not been doing a job that was productive to our children.

Our children -- you have children going in to the 9th and 10th grade with reading levels of a 3rd-grade child.

-As part of an effort to address these concerns, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district became part of an experiment in community control.

A board of Black community members was appointed, led by an educator named Rhody McCoy.

-Rhody McCoy decides to fire 19 teachers and have them transferred to another district.

They were all white.

Most of them were Jewish.

-And this precipitated an angry response from the teachers union, known as the UFT.

-The Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment, if it is an experiment, must now be deemed to be a failure.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Albert Shanker, who was the head of the UFT at that time, demanded that those 19 teachers get reinstated.

The UFT went on strike citywide.

Those strikes ended up really turning New York City upside down.

It stopped children from going to school for almost seven weeks.

-We will write our own curriculum.

-By virtue of what authority?

-Number -- -Just a minute now.

-By virtue of what authority?!

We want and we know and we realize that we need Black control!

-What's happening is Jews see the fight in Ocean Hill-Brownsville as a labor union struggle, right?

"We're defending our members, and you can't just reassign them."

And that's what the battle is about.

The Blacks in the community and Rhody McCoy see it as a battle for their children.

-I remember it very well 'cause I -- it was the year I graduated junior high school, going to high school.

For two months, we're waiting to go to school.

And I remember the tension because it became a whole battle about Blacks and Jews.

During the course of the strike, a leaflet appeared that was anti-Semitic up and down.

We don't know where it first came from, but thousands of copies were made by the UFT and they were passed around and this was offered as evidence that Ocean Hill-Brownsville was, in fact, an anti-Semitic experiment at its root.

-The story becomes not who should control schools, but the idea that so many Blacks hate Jews.

This is not about teacher performance.

It's about anti-Semitism.

-There have been anti-Semitic remarks made.

I have heard them, but we don't approve of them.

-And even in retrospect, when you talk to Albert Shanker, he will admit that Ocean Hill-Brownsville had nothing, really, to do with anti-Semitism, but that theme was introduced and exploited.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -White against Black.

Black militant against Jew.

It's a bitter lesson to learn.

-I understood that sometimes the loudest voices were not the ones that represented most of the people in both communities.

-Ultimately, the New York City Board of Education suspended the community board and allowed the teachers to return to their jobs.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville teacher's strike became yet another flashpoint in the unraveling of the Black-Jewish coalition, a metaphor for a broken alliance.

-It's been a pattern that we see, where, you know, well-intentioned liberals may support and even participate in securing civil rights for Black people and other oppressed people.

But when it comes to actually giving Black people control over institutions in their communities, that's where it goes too far.

-By the 1970s, the once-celebrated bond between Black and Jewish Americans had begun to fray.

A connection built on a shared histories of slavery and persecution and a common belief in justice was now strained by politics and class.

And in the decades that followed, escalating tensions, both at home and abroad, would force both communities to ask hard questions.

Can we afford to turn on each other, or can we still turn to each other?

Can we find common ground again?

[music plays through credits] NARRATOR: For more information about Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, visit pbs.org/BlackAndJewishAmerica.

The DVD version of this program is available online and in stores, also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

[music continues through credits]