There’s a lot of attention—and money—being lavished upon America’s historically Black colleges and universities right now. Affectionately known as H.B.C.U.’s, they’ve educated America’s Black elite for nearly 200 years. Alumni include Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who graduated from Howard University in 1986 with degrees in economics and political science; former surgeon general Dr. Joycelyn Elders (Philander Smith, ’52); Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison (Howard, ’53); and my own grandparents.
Just this month, for instance, Michael Bloomberg donated $600 million to a quartet of H.B.C.U. medical schools, including Howard, a gift that followed the former New York City mayor’s previous pledge of $100 million in 2020. Nine-figure donations have also been recently bequeathed to Spelman College, in Atlanta, and the United Negro College Fund, reflecting the renewed focus on H.B.C.U.’s since George Floyd’s murder, four years ago.
At a time of growing discord between Black Americans and Jewish Americans, an often overlooked chapter of H.B.C.U. history offers a model for renewed cooperation between these once strongly allied minorities. “This is a complicated topic that doesn’t fit neatly into the narratives of today,” says Charles Chavis, director of the John Mitchell, Jr., Program for History, Justice, and Race, at George Mason University, where he specializes in Black-Jewish relations.
During the period between, and just after, the two World Wars, H.B.C.U.’s served as safe havens for European-Jewish professors fleeing from Europe following the rise of Nazism. Like many who escaped the Third Reich, these academics came to America to avoid likely extermination—only to then be shut out of the nation’s “elite” universities owing to institutionalized anti-Semitism.
“Some—particularly well-known scholars, with international reputations, like Albert Einstein—found positions by themselves,” says Bonnie Gurewitsch, an archivist and curator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Lower Manhattan. “But most needed help.”
Enter the H.B.C.U.’s, which had no such restrictions on the number of Jewish professors, and whose presidents “put out a call to take these professors in,” explains Chavis. “These schools had always served as refuges. If Harvard would not take them, H.B.C.U.’s wanted these best-of-the-best scholars for themselves.”
“Racial segregation reminded me a lot of Nazi Germany, except that I wasn’t a victim, the Black population was,” said Georg Iggers, a German-Jewish refugee who taught history at Philander Smith University, in Little Rock, Arkansas. German-born philosopher Ernst Manasse put it more bluntly: “If I had not found a refuge at the time [at North Carolina Central University], I would have been arrested, deported to a Nazi concentration camp, tortured, and eventually killed.”
Although exact numbers are hard to confirm, Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, estimates that about 50 German-Jewish-refugee scholars found teaching positions at H.B.C.U.’s. “Ivy League universities had a chance to rescue many of their European Jewish colleagues,” Medoff says, “but in another tragic instance of antisemitism in American life, for the most part they refused.”
Jewish philanthropists played important roles in educating Black Americans throughout the first half of the 20th century. In 1912, Sears, Roebuck and Co. founder Julius Rosenwald, for instance, committed the equivalent of over $1 billion to develop more than 5,000 Southern schools—often known as “Rosenwald Schools”—to educate Black students. Over the next two decades, some 600,000 Black students were educated in Rosenwald Schools across 15 states, including Maya Angelou, civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, and the playwright George Wolfe. The Julius Rosenwald Fund also supported H.B.C.U.’s such as Howard University and Morehouse College, in Atlanta.
“These schools had always served as refuges. If Harvard would not take them, H.B.C.U.’s wanted these best-of-the-best scholars for themselves.”
Still, the sudden presence of Jewish refugees in mostly small, mostly Black Southern communities was not without challenges. “Many of these professors had never met a Black person before,” says Rabbi Meir Muller, a professor at the University of South Carolina who focuses on Black-Jewish history. “And particularly in the most rural areas, these students had mostly never encountered Jews.” But with Nazis on the march in Europe, and Jim Crow in force down South, both sides recognized their shared vulnerability.
H.B.C.U. students of that era later described the Jewish presence as intimate and often life-changing. Harlem Renaissance artist John Biggers credited Austrian-born professor Viktor Lowenfeld for helping to define his politically charged aesthetic as a student at Hampton University.
Donald Cunnigen, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Rhode Island College of Arts and Sciences, studied at Tougaloo College, an H.B.C.U. in Jackson, Mississippi, which hired German-Jewish sociologist Ernst Borinski in 1947. “He was known around campus as ‘Bobo’ and had a tremendous impact on my life … always supporting me, insisting I was as good as any other student,” recalls Cunnigen, who served as Borinski’s research assistant and later completed his doctoral work at Harvard. “This helped propel me to become Mississippi’s third-ever Black Ph.D.”
Borinski was a stickler for old-world traditions, such as having students stand when he entered or left the classroom. But he became a leading civil-rights activist. “Borinski forcibly de-segregated his public lectures by instructing his Black students to arrive early and sit in every other seat, which compelled white attendees to sit next to them,” according to Medoff. He organized inter-racial study groups and sent books and lesson plans to his Black students arrested during sit-ins and protests so they wouldn’t fall behind their white peers.
“The altruism was on both sides here; this was very much a two-way street,” Rabbi Muller says. “The school may have been getting top-notch scholars, but these professors needed jobs!”
Without secure employment, emigration from Europe was almost impossible, owing to onerous government regulations in the 1930s, such as the “public charge,” which demanded that Jewish refugees—whose assets were forcibly kept in Germany—demonstrate the ability to support themselves upon arrival in the U.S.
While Borinski remained at Tougaloo for the rest of his life and career, many of his Jewish-professor counterparts eventually headed north to non-H.B.C.U. institutions, part of what Chavis describes as their assimilation into then Protestant-dominated America.
Although pro-Palestinian protests have been almost nonexistent at H.B.C.U.’s over the past year, polls consistently show that majorities of both young people and Black Americans view Israel unfavorably. Now with colleges back in session and renewed protests all but inevitable, already frayed community relations are likely to disintegrate even further.
But some believe the legacy of Jewish academics at H.B.C.U.’s can help rebuild relations between Blacks and Jews. This fall, Muller, along with Voorhees University professor Devin Randolph, is leading a course at a pair of Southern H.B.C.U.’s aimed at confronting anti-Semitism and highlighting historic Jewish-Black alliances. In addition to covering civil-rights-era support for Zionism, the course focuses squarely on the role of Jewish professors at Black colleges.
“We want to highlight the complexity of this shared past while building bridges toward the future,” Rabbi Muller says. “And remind students that issues like racism and anti-Semitism are not as simple as an Instagram post might make them seem.”
David Christopher Kaufman is an editor and columnist at the New York Post, a regular opinion writer for The Telegraph, and an adjunct fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute
