In the penultimate speaker event of the Summer Institute at the Hebrew Center on Thursday, lawyer, civil rights activist and CNN host and political commentator Van Jones spoke to a packed audience about the historic relationship between Black people and Jewish people, which he said helped form and may help restore a strong American democracy.
“The worst people in the world are benefiting from Black folks and Jewish folks suffering alone, suffering individually, suffering in our silos,” he said Thursday. “So the first thing we have to do, as difficult as this may sound, is to greet each other again.”
Mr. Jones began his speech by speaking about his father, Willie Jones, who was born in 1944 into segregation and poverty in Memphis, Tenn. After attending Lane College, he became a principal of an integrated middle school in West Tennessee — the first Black principal in the county.
“My father turned that school into an award-winning school,” said Mr. Jones. “But how did he get the opportunity to do that?”
Following Brown v. Board of Education, Nashville civil rights lawyer Z. Alexander Looby wanted to sue Mr. Jones’ home county as part of the school desegregation movement. With a full docket, he called two Jewish lawyers from “up north” to sue, “so that my father could become a principal,” said Mr. Jones.
“And them Jews whooped them boys,” said Mr. Jones, to laughter from the crowd.
This was a time when Black people and Jewish people were both subjugated groups in America, Mr. Jones said. Today, both groups face rising levels of discrimination, proliferating a sense of hopelessness and abandonment, he added.
“I wanted to fight back, but in order to fight back…you have to ask a question. If you got to save American democracy, you first ask the question: Where did it come from?” he said.
Contemporary American democracy, Mr. Jones proposed, did not come from the framers of 1776, the American revolution or even the Civil War. Instead, he said it was truly born in 1909 when a small group of Black leaders and a small group of Jewish leaders decided to do something amid the terrors of the Jim Crow South.
“They said, ‘This is intolerable. We can’t live like this….We are going to do something about it. We are going to make sure that this Constitution that’s written here applies to your children and my children. We are going to make this thing actually be a democratic republic,’” said Mr. Jones.
It was a “nutty idea,” he added, that two outside groups could turn a tyrannical government into a democratic republic. It was also the birth of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded by both Black and Jewish leaders.
The next year, another small group of Black people and Jewish people, without knowing about the NAACP, formed the National Urban League on the same principles, Mr. Jones added.
“Two Black Jewish Alliances, in 1909 and 1910, are formed, unaware of each other at first, and this begins the process of turning a tyrannical apartheid terror state into what you now call American democracy,” said Mr. Jones. “And every decade after that, you can find on the front lines of change disproportionately two groups: Blacks and Jews, Blacks and Jews.”
Black people and Jewish people marched alongside each other during the Civil Rights Movement, fueled by their complimentary drives for achieving equality and justice after the horrors of the Holocaust, slavery and Jim Crow, he said. That drive is encompassed in “tikkun olam,” which means “repairing the world” in Hebrew. It’s also encompassed in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, which demands justice for all people.
“This is a moral miracle,” said Mr. Jones. “This is an extraordinary moral achievement on the part of two people, simultaneously, that make American democracy possible. So, if you want to resurrect, redeem and restore American democracy, you might want to return to those original spiritual and cultural resources.”
But that has not been happening of late, he said.
“The Black community is going through hell right now. The Jewish community is going through hell right now, and we barely even speak,” he said.
He cited anti-Black racism from the current presidential administration, DOGE cuts targeting, in large part, the jobs of Black women, and discourse following the October 7 attacks on Israel.
To nurture an enduring Black-Jewish alliance, Mr. Jones co-founded the EXODUS Leadership Forum. The organization seeks to bring together leaders and community members of Black and Jewish Americans to rebuild and advance American democracy.
The organization facilitates dinners between Black and Jewish people, where they talk about their experiences as minority groups and share spiritual, cultural and creative resources, said Mr. Jones.
He reflected once more on his father’s story — how two Jewish lawyers helped him lead a school — and on the National Convening of the Black Jewish Alliance, a conference held this June for Black and Jewish leaders.
Civil right activist and icon Dr. Benjamin Chavis was at the conference, said Mr. Jones.
“He stood up and he said, ‘This right here is all we had...All we had was praying hands and marching feet, and we changed the whole country. Don’t let this go,’” recalled Mr. Jones.
“And so, please believe that if they could do it then, under those circumstances, we can do even more together now,” Mr. Jones said.
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