On March 9, 1965, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. chose two of the hundreds of men of faith present that day to deliver the prayer that began the march to Montgomery: the Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy Sr., his dear friend and closest associate during the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and Rabbi Israel Dresner, one of Dr. King’s most trusted allies in the Jewish community.
Those men were our fathers.
“You may rest assured our lives are richer because of your visit. May God hasten the day when we will live as brothers in this great land and will know no prejudice because of race, creed, color or previous conditions of servitude,” Abernathy wrote in 1965, praising Dresner who had just delivered a sermon from his church’s pulpit.
Abernathy died in 1990, and Dresner in 2022. In the years since their passing, we have often been asked what they would say on issues and events. We believe they would be appalled, as are we, by the explosion of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia we have seen in our time. We know they would march against the rolling back of civil rights and voting rights. Equally painful would be their dismay over the continued erosion of the Black-Jewish Alliance.
We have never needed their counsel more than in these past awful months, since Oct. 7. Our hearts are broken by the hatred, violence and loss of life in Israel and Gaza.
We believe the lessons of our fathers’ life and work — and, most importantly, the ways in which they bridged the divides between their communities — offer us a path toward navigating our own divisive era.
When Abernathy and Dresner met in August of 1962, it was through the bars of a segregated jail cell in Albany, Ga. During their years together in the movement, our dads became soul mates.
Jail was not new to either man, and between them, they would go on to be arrested dozens more times. Both received multiple death threats. Abernathy’s home and church were bombed. Dresner found a bullet hole through the rear window of his car in the driveway of his home.
Despite the pain of all they went through, our fathers fervently believed that it is always the right time to engage in dialogue in the pursuit of understanding and peace.
Our fathers saw much in common. King, Abernathy and their fellow Black activists found inspiration in the Exodus story. King once told Dresner how much he admired Jews for celebrating the narrative of their slave ancestors in Egypt. The rabbi reminded him that Jews had also been slaves less than 20 years prior in the concentration and death camps of Europe. Most of Dresner’s father’s family was killed in the Holocaust, and he and many Jewish activists saw the world’s silence in the face of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale. They refused to remain silent in the subjugation of their African American brothers and sisters.
For his part, King saw Israel as having risen from the ashes of the Holocaust. He was a supporter of the Jewish state and explicitly linked anti-Zionism to antisemitism.
Abernathy was a member of the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, or BASIC, formed in 1975 to educate the African American community about Israel and Zionism and organize trips to Israel. “In the fight against discrimination, Black Americans and American Jews have shared profound and enduring common interests that far transcend any differences between us,” the group wrote in an ad placed in The Times.
In the intervening years our communities drifted, and animus grew. In our lifetimes, we have often seen the Black-Jewish relationship negatively portrayed as one of patron and client, with Jews as the patrons and African Americans as the clients. This implies that this relationship was a one-way street. In fact, it always went both ways — in the fight to end segregation and dismantle racism in America, and when it came to support of Israel.
We have dedicated ourselves to overcoming the separation that has grown between Black people and Jews in America, tearing our two communities apart. It had already begun to fray by the time of King’s assassination in 1968 and, in the intervening years, we have witnessed a continued turning away from our shared history of slavery and oppression and our common biblical commitment to the prophetic traditions of justice and equality. We are carrying on our fathers’ legacy by telling the story of our shared history and using it as a bridge to a better future.
We recall the lines written jointly by 16 rabbis, including Dresner, arrested in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964: “We could not pass by the opportunity to achieve a moral goal by moral means — a rare modern privilege — which has been the glory of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights,” the rabbis wrote. “We must confess in all humility we did this in as much in fulfillment of our faith and in response to inner need as in service to our Negro brothers.”
It is in light of this legacy that, after the initial shock and grief of Oct. 7 and the retaliation on Gaza we turned to each other.
It seemed to us that, within hours after the attack, onlookers immediately turned in a newly dark direction: with an explosion of antisemitism, a celebration, at certain protests, of the Hamas attack, rather than a condemnation, a division between communities over a hierarchy of victimization in the region.
We want to bring our fathers’ much-needed messages and methods of love and unity to campuses experiencing turmoil. We want to bring together Zionist and pro-Palestinian protesters to find common ground.
We tried this spring. Unfortunately, the responses we received from the Black and Jewish professors and students we reached out to could best be summed up as, “There’s nobody to talk to on the other side” and, “Now is the wrong time.”
We disagree. And, this fall, we want to bring our messages to schools and communities across the country.
Our fathers taught us by example how to make meaningful change through meaningful dialogue, especially with those who disagree with us. We want people to understand that Jews, no matter where they live in the world, are not responsible for the violence in Israel and the atrocities being perpetrated upon the people of Gaza by the current Israeli government. We want people to understand that when someone is Muslim, it does not mean they support Hamas, or that they hate Jews and Christians. We want to teach all of this and more, if people are willing to stop shouting long enough to listen. We promise to listen, too.
The work of Abernathy and Dresner was rooted in love — for each other, for humanity, for justice, for freedom, for equality, for America and for our world. They wanted the country we love to live up to the principles upon which it was founded and which are enshrined in its founding documents. We want the same for America, for Israel and for Palestine. Like many of the protesters across this country, we too want an end to the war in Israel and Gaza. We too want a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. Getting there from here may feel insurmountable, but however we do it, as our dads taught us, it must be through nonviolent action, not violence and violent rhetoric.
Such ideas may feel impossible but, then, who could have imagined that Black and white people would be sitting side by side in buses and in restaurants before our fathers helped make it happen?
Donzaleigh Abernathy is an actress and author of “Partners To History: Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and the Civil Rights Movement.” Avi Dresner is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is executive producer of the documentary in progress, “The Rabbi & The Reverend.”
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