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The Hidden Half-Life of Albert Einstein: Anti-Racism

By Fred Jerome

In a game of free association, if I say "Einstein," what's your response?

Probably "genius." Maybe "brilliant." Possibly even "absent-minded professor."

But few, if any would say, "social activist" or "human rights advocate," and virtually nobody would say, "anti-racist."

Yet, while the whole world acknowledges Einstein's monumental contributions to science and technology, his contributions to society actually extended far beyond those realms. During the last 22 years of his life, from 1933 to 1955, Einstein lived in Princeton, N.J., and-while J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI conducted a top-secret campaign against him-he was actively and passionately involved in numerous struggles for social justice. At the time, Einstein's outspoken support for those attacked by fascism abroad and McCarthyism at home often made front-page news.1 But in the nearly half-century since his death, the once front-page news stories have become non-stories, as Einstein has been simultaneously sanctified-named Person of the Century by Time magazine in December 1999-and politically castrated by the American establishment.

But of all the little known aspects of Einstein's political dimension, the least known is his activism against what he called "America's worst disease"-racism.

A key part of racism in America is the suppression of news of antiracist activity and the "disappearance" (as in, to make disappear, such as the desaparecidos in Chile) of antiracist heroes from history. (See Aptheker's Anti-Racism in U.S. History, The First Two Hundred Years, Praeger, 1993.)

Einstein's case is particularly important-for the racists, important to suppress; for the rest of us, important to resurrect. First because he was, he is Einstein, on any list, one of the most renowned, admired and beloved figures of history, and therefore someone whose statements, actions and passions command a huge worldwide audience.

But Einstein's anti-racism was significant also because he refused to let red-baiting drive him away from his defense of-and friendship with-men like Du Bois and Robeson, nor from publicly endorsing campaigns to save Willie McGee, the Trenton Six and other anti-frame-up causes organized by the Civil Rights Congress, which defended the Communist Party. Yet in all the hundreds of biographies of Einstein, nowhere will you find the names of Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willie McGee or the Civil Rights Congress.

The almost unique significance of Einstein's role, is that he was not only anti-racist, not only pro-socialist (See his "Why Socialism?" in vol. I, no. 1 of Monthly Review, May 1949), but he was not the least bit frightened by Robeson's red glare.

My book, The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002) details the story of Einstein's anti-racism for the first time. Some excerpts follow2 (extensive references may be found in the book version).

During the last twenty years of his life, Einstein almost never spoke at universities. He considered the honorary-degree ceremonies to which he was frequently invited to be "ostentatious." Moreover, the abdominal aneurysm that would eventually take his life caused him increasing pain and made it difficult to travel. Given the constant stream of university invitations, he found it easiest to adopt a just-say-no rule. In May 1946, he broke that rule to speak at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Both the year and the choice of school are significant.

About 60 miles from Princeton, Lincoln University was chartered in 1854 as, in the words of its eighth president Horace Mann Bond, "the first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent." In 1946, When Dr. Bond invited Einstein to Lincoln, the student body consisted of 265 men. "It was still a small school," Mrs. Julie Bond, Dr. Bond's widow, recalls. "But of course, everyone came to hear Einstein. We didn't have a hall big enough, so we held the ceremony outdoors in the grove."

"On Friday, May 3rd, a very simple man came to Lincoln University," one student wrote a few days later in the school newspaper:

His emaciated face and simplicity made him appear as a biblical character. Quietly he stood with an expression of questioning wonder upon his face as.President Horace Mann Bond conferred a degree. Then this man with the long hair and deep eyes spoke into a microphone of the disease [racism] that humanity had. In the deep accents of his native Germany he said he could not be silent. And then he finished and the room was still. Later he lectured on the theory of relativity to the Lincoln students.

That night, Albert Einstein went back to Princeton.

Dr. Bond's son chuckles today when he looks at an old photo of Lincoln faculty members' children with the famous scientist: "Family lore has Einstein telling me 'Don't remember anything that is already written down.' And although I do not recall this exchange"-he was barely four years old at the time-"I have followed this advice ever since." (Whether Einstein's advice helped or not, Julian Bond grew up to become a civil rights activist, State Assemblyman, TV talk-show host and Chairman of the NAACP.)

In accepting the invitation, Einstein clearly intended to send a message to a wider audience. But the media then-like the media since then-had different news priorities. While almost all of Einstein's public speeches and interviews were widely covered by the major media, in this case, most of the press treated the address by the world's most famous scientist at the world's oldest black university as a non-event.

"There is a somber point in the social outlook of Americans," Einstein reportedly told the Lincoln University audience:

Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of "Whites" toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the services of the good cause.

To understand the full significance of Einstein's visit to Lincoln-and of its minuscule coverage-we need to recall the racial situation in America in what might be called "the Bloody Spring of 1946."

Black GIs came home after World War II in no mood for racism. Despite their segregated, second-class status in the Army, they had put their lives on the line, faced bullets and bombs, and lost arms, legs and buddies, fighting for freedom and democracy. One notable example, the 761st Tank Battalion, known as the Black Panthers, was designated by General Patton to play a key role in the Battle of the Bulge. The all-black unit subsequently fought against German troops in Europe for 183 straight days, capturing or destroying 30 major towns, four airstrips, ammunition dumps and hundreds of armored vehicles and tanks. The Battalion received the Presidential Unit Citation-but not until 1978, after years of letters and requests to the Defense Department. The 761st, like other black units in World War II, adopted as its unofficial insignia "Double V"-for victory over the Nazis in Europe and over racism back home.

But at home the war was far from over; the enemy had only changed uniforms and now wore sheets or Sheriff's badges-or both. In the first 15 months after Hitler's defeat, a wave of lynching and other anti-black terror, mostly but not only in the Southern states, killed more than fifty African Americans, with recently returned veterans the targets of some of the most bestial lynch mobs. The resurgent anti-black terror-not seen since the Ku Klux Klan rampages following the return of black soldiers from the first world war, a quarter-century earlier3-included a number police shootings of unarmed civilians, in the North as well as the South. One of the most widely publicized cases occurred in the small town of Columbia, Tennessee:

On the morning of February 25, 1946, a white radio repairman, William Fleming, "slapped, struck or kicked" a black woman, Mrs. Gladys Stephenson, and, according to news reports, "was promptly knocked through a plate glass window by her son James Stephenson," a 19-year-old Navy veteran recently returned from the Pacific. Both Mrs. Stephenson and her son were arrested. About 6 p.m., a white lynch mob paraded around the jailhouse, and at least some of them then headed towards the black section of town, called Mink Slide. A number of black veterans organized an armed defense of their neighborhood. Two armed white men "under the influence of alcohol" (according to court testimony months later) and four city policemen who went into Mink Slide that night were wounded by gunfire from blacks who were convinced a lynching was about to occur. According to one report, "four or five" men in the white mob were killed, "but the local authorities would not admit to it."

African Americans firing on white policemen was enough for the governor to rush in 500 State Troopers with submachine guns who attacked Mink Slide, destroying virtually every black-owned business in the four-square-block area, seizing whatever weapons they could find, and arresting more than one hundred black men. Two of the detainees were shot and killed inside the jail by troopers during what police called "a spontaneous outburst." Of the others, 25 were indicted for "attempted murder." A young, NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, chief defense attorney for the 25, angrily declared:

The actions of the Tennessee State troopers in roping off the Negro section of Columbia, Tenn. and firing at will and indiscriminately was closer to German storm troopers than any recent police action in this country.

Shortly after Marshall's statement appeared in the N.Y. Times in March, Einstein joined the National Committee for Justice in Columbia, Tennessee, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt and including an array of celebrities such as Mary Mcleod Bethune, Col. Roy Carlson (Carlson's Marine Raiders), Marshall Field, Oscar Hamnmerstein II, Helen Hayes, Sidney Hillman, Langston Hughes, Harold Ickes, Herbert Lehman, Sinclair Lewis, Joe Louis, Hentry Luce, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Artie Shaw, and David O. Selznick. Perhaps because of its political breadth, it is one of the few Einstein political affiliations not included on the FBI's list of his "Communist front" groups.

With Marshall leading a four-man interracial defense team, 24 of the 25 defendants were acquitted. (The 25th defendant, Lloyd Kennedy, was released after serving ten months of a five-year sentence.) The legal victories came despite two acrimonious trials in segregated Tennessee courtrooms before hostile judges and all-white juries. After the second trial, Marshall himself narrowly escaped from a lynch mob (including local police) that nearly succeeded in murdering the future Supreme Court Justice.

Foretelling its investigations into civil rights abuses during the 1960s, the FBI sent an all-white team of agents to Columbia to interview witnesses, ostensibly about possible violations of civil rights. But African Americans they questioned reported the agents seemed mainly interested in finding out which black people had fired guns. A "top-secret" FBI memo, dated March 2, 1946, ignores the police attack on the black community in Columbia and, without indicating a cause, as if it were describing spontaneous combustion, refers to the events simply as "race riots." Within less than two weeks, the Bureau produced a 197-page, single-spaced report, citing only white witnesses and totally exonerating the local and state police. The black population was described as threatening, local officials as restrained, and the state police as operating completely within the line of duty.

If Einstein and the other members of the Committee thought their prestige would restrain the lynching, disappointment didn't keep them waiting long. The total failure of the President, Attorney General or government officials at any level to take action against the state and city authorities behind the Mink Slide attack would beget only more terror. The lynchers could not have asked for a greener light than the FBI's report. White mobs throughout the south, often aided by police, went on a lynching rampage, targeting primarily World War II veterans.

In the heat of July and August, 1946, the wave of unpunished lynching seemed to swell. In successive weeks, African American veterans J.C. Farmer in Bailey, North Carolina, and Macio Snipes, described as "the only Negro to vote" in his district of Taylor County, Georgia, were shot down by bands of white men. As his mother stood a hundred yards away, Farmer was killed by bullets from a posse of twenty to twenty-five "deputies" in eight cars. An hour earlier, while waiting for a bus he had gotten into a scuffle with a policeman. Snipes was gunned down on the porch of his home by ten white men.

The media missed or ignored a number of such murders,4 but on July 27, a front-page story in the N.Y. Times, which Einstein read every morning, reported one of the more gruesome cases, and lynching in America suddenly became national and international-and unavoidable-news:

GEORGIA MOB OF 20 MEN MASSACRES 2 NEGROES, WIVES; ONE WAS EX-GI

MONROE, Ga., July 26 -Two young Negroes, one a veteran just returned from the war, and their wives were lined up last night near a secluded road and shot dead by an unmasked band of twenty white men.

A Grand Jury heard testimony from 106 witnesses in this case, and then returned no indictments. Another lynching report, two weeks later, described the complicity of local authorities in Louisiana:

John C. Jones, 28, discharged veteran of European services, was found dead two miles from Minden in Dorcheat Bayou. His body had been horribly beaten with "some flat object-such as a wide leather belt or a thick plank," his face and body burned with a blow torch so that his eyes were "popped" out of his head and his light complexion seared dark. His wrists were mutilated with a cleaver and he had been partially castrated.

It is impossible to imagine that Einstein had not been shaken by these news reports when, in early September, a telegram arrived from Paul Robeson, proposing to set up a group called the American Crusade to End Lynching (ACEL) and to hold a mass rally in Washington on September 23-the anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The protest, to be led by black veterans, would demand punishment for lynchers and prompt passage of a federal anti-lynching law. W.E.B. Du Bois and several other prominent citizens, white and black, were already on board as ACEL sponsors. Now Robeson was asking Einstein to be co-chairman.

Race had not been a central consideration when Einstein moved to Princeton 13 years earlier. He was seeking a quiet work-space, a violin-playing, pipe-smoking space, and a refuge from media attention. "Into this small university town," Einstein wrote during his early days in Princeton, "the chaotic voices of human strife barely penetrate. I am almost ashamed to be living in such peace while all the rest struggle and suffer." It turned out to be more wish than observation, but Princeton seemed-at first-"a banishment to paradise."

Not that he'd been oblivious to racism in America-in 1931, shortly before moving to America, as we've seen, he had joined the campaign to save "the Scottsboro Boys,"5 and the NAACP had published his article in Crisis, expressing admiration for the "determined effort of American Negroes." Nonetheless, on arriving in Princeton, his most striking impression had to be the contrast with Berlin-the absence of SS agents and the young boys with swastika armbands roaming the streets. Princeton must have promised an enclave, a safe haven. Even the name of the street they'd lived on when they first moved to Princeton-Library Place-symbolized sanctuary.

But anyone living in Princeton in the 1930s and '40s couldn't miss the racism. The idyllic little sanctuary turned out to be not so idyllic. On the campus, as at all the Ivy League schools, the University's quota system allowed only a few Jewish students. Of only two Jewish faculty members, one-Einstein's good friend Otto Nathan-was fired after teaching economics for just one year, an act Einstein considered blatantly anti-Semitic. And if you were black, whether student or faculty, the university was totally off-limits. Perhaps because it was the southernmost of the Ivy League colleges, Princeton attracted a high percentage of students from Southern states. As late as September, 1942, while US and Allied troops were battling fascism overseas, the Princeton Herald "explained" that admitting black students to the university, while morally justified, would simply be too offensive to the large number of Princeton's southern students.6

The town itself was as racially divided as its movie theater, where whites and blacks sat in separate sections until well after World War II had defeated Hitlerism. The black population, about twenty percent of the town, moved about unobtrusively, mostly outside the white world-a segregated civilization beginning just behind Princeton's main street and continuing on down to the unpaved "avenues" next to the trolley tracks and past the garbage dump. Until 1947, all Princeton's African American primary-school children attended the Witherspoon School, as color-coded as any school in Alabama, and on Sunday mornings, segregated prayers arose from the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. Rumors of "incidents" between blacks and the all-white police force were frequent. Einstein told friends he often heard white townspeople "talking against Negroes." Robeson, who was born in Princeton, called it a "Georgia plantation town."

 Nor did Princetonians restrict their bigotry to people of color. During his first months there (before the local citizenry decided they would benefit from having a famous Jew in their town) Einstein felt a definite "coldness" towards him-a Jew in what one writer called "that enclave of WASP-dom."

Another example of Princeton prejudice came on April 16, 1937, when the great diva Marian Anderson gave a concert to a standing-room only audience at Princeton's McCarter Theatre. "Complete artistic mastery of a magnificent voice...from the first Handel aria to the last Negro spiritual," reported the daily Princetonian, adding, "It is hard to discuss such a performance without the excessive use of superlatives." Nonetheless, Princeton's Nassau Inn refused the African American contralto a room. Einstein immediately invited her to stay with him and Margot in the house on Mercer Street. She accepted, and their ensuing friendship lasted for the rest of his life. She stayed with them whenever she came to Princeton. The last time was in January 1955, two months before Einstein died. When she left, he came downstairs, with difficulty, to say good-bye. The world-renowned diva later wrote that she felt "honored," and that she knew "this was really good-bye."

After becoming a citizen, Einstein was even more outspoken on racial issues; he told friends he now felt less like a guest in America's house. Dedicating the Wall of Fame at the 1940 World's Fair, Einstein said, America "still has a heavy debt to discharge for all the troubles and disabilities it has laid on the Negro's shoulder..." During the war years, despite the global issues in the air-or perhaps because of them-he helped sponsor the NAACP's new Defense Fund and supported the campaign to block the extradition of Sam Buckhannon, a refugee from a Georgia chain gang.

But it's doubtful anyone expected the extent of the post-war racist terror that erupted in America, echoing the horror the world had just defeated. During the first year following the defeat of fascism in Germany and Japan, racist violence in the US had killed 56 blacks-mostly returning veterans. That is only the number of lynched African Americans that was reported to, and reported by, the local police. (In 1941, the last year before the US entered World War II, the number of lynchings reported was four.)

Busy as he was with the new Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Einstein could not shrug his shoulders at Robeson's invitation -or at lynching. If his increasing abdominal pains prevented his travel to Washington for the September 23 protest, he would send a letter to President Truman to be delivered by the protest leaders, urging an immediate anti-lynching law. Either way, his answer to Robeson was yes.

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