thechanelmuse: From The New York Times: Decades earlier, another Sears executive engaged in activism
thechanelmuse:From The New York Times:Decades earlier, another Sears executive engaged in activism of a different sort. Julius Rosenwald began promoting civil rights causes while he was still president of Sears, before he became its chairman in 1924, leading some to call him the “first social justice philanthropist.” He helped fund fellowships for black artists and academics, including W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. He worked with Booker T. Washington to open more than 5,300 schools for black children in the Jim Crow South. Some of them were burned down by the Ku Klux Klan.SourceThere’s also this article titled “A Peculiar Alliance: Julius Rosenwald,the YMCA, and African-Americans,1910-1933″ from American Jewish Archives that touches on this further. Here’s an excerpt:“The alliance between Rosenwald, the YMCA, and African-Americansseems rather peculiar at first glance. Why would a Jew supportthe establishment of Christian facilities for African-Americans? DavidLevering Lewis, who examined the collaboration between AfricanAmericansand Jews during the 1910s and 1920s~ has suggested thatsome of the wealthy Jews who aided African-Americans had ulteriormotives. According to Lewis, they reasoned that their assistance tothe African-American struggle for racial advancement would spareJews “some of the necessity of directly rebutting anti-Semitic stereotypes,”for white America would perforce conclude that if “blackscould make good citizens…all other groups [including Jews] couldmake better ones.” Yet Lewis’s highly interpretive study offers noevidence to support this contention. Julius Rosenwald certainly never said that his support of AfricanAmericancauses was stimulated by a desire to refute anti-Semiticstereotypes. On the contrary, Rosenwald claimed that he was motivatedby sympathy for the victims of discrimination. Having experiencedthe indignity of anti-Semitism, he felt compassion for thosewho suffered from racism. -- source link
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