Good morning, POU! This week’s morning threads will focus on the history of African American and Jewish communities relations. Today’s post will highlight shopkeepers and landlord relationships.
Following the Civil War, Jewish shop-owners and landlords engaged in business with black customers and tenants, often filling a need where white business owners would not venture. This was true in most regions of the South, where Jews were often merchants in its small cities, and northern urban cities such as New York, where they settled in high numbers. Jewish shop-owners were more civil than other whites to black customers, treating them with more dignity. Blacks often had more immediate contact with Jews than with other whites.
In 1903, black historian W. E. B. Du Bois interpreted the role of Jews in the South as successors to the slave-barons:
The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty [County, Georgia]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of the dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction,—”improvement” companies, wine companies, mills, and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew fell heir.
Black novelist James Baldwin (1924–1987) grew up in Harlem in the years between the world wars. He wrote,
[I]n Harlem…. our … landlords were Jews, and we hated them. We hated them because they were terrible landlords and did not take care of the buildings. The grocery store owner was a Jew… The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home along with our meats… and the pawnbroker was a Jew—perhaps we hated him most of all.
Baldwin wrote other accounts of Jews that were more sympathetic.
The first white man I ever saw was the Jewish manager who arrived to collect the rent, and he collected the rent because he did not own the building. I never, in fact, saw any of the people who owned any of the buildings in which we scrubbed and suffered for so long until I was a grown man and famous. None of them were Jews. And I was not stupid: the grocer and the druggist were Jews, for example, and they were very, very nice to me, and to us… I knew a murderer when I saw one, and the people who were trying to kill me were not Jews.
Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested that some black anti-Semitism arose from the tensions of landlord-tenant relations:
When we were working in Chicago, we had numerous rent strikes on the West Side, and it was, unfortunately, true that, in most instances, the persons we had to conduct these strikes against were Jewish landlords… We were living in a slum apartment owned by a Jew and a number of others, and we had to have a rent strike. We were paying $94 for four run-down, shabby rooms, and …. we discovered that whites … were paying only $78 a month. We were paying 20 percent tax. The Negro ends up paying a color tax, and this has happened in instances where Negroes actually confronted Jews as the landlord or the storekeeper. The irrational statements that have been made are the result of these confrontations.