I just read a Stanford University website that posted in full Joachim Prinz’s 1958 letter to Martin Luther King. Here is an excerpt:
On September 26th, I addressed a letter to the President of the United States urging him to summon the country’s leaders in the field of religion, education, social welfare, labor and business to a meeting at the White House to spell out for every American the democratic principles that underlie our existence as a nation. From such a meeting, I suggested, could come a Presidential proclamation of equality in which the full authority and prestige of the office of the President would be placed in support of the moral principle of integration and the basic concept of obedience to court decisions.
The Stanford website notes: “Joachim Prinz (1902-1988), born in Burkhardtsdorf, Saxony, attended the University of Berlin, received a Ph.D. from the University of Giessen, and was ordained a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau (1925). While serving as a rabbi in Berlin, Prinz preached against the Nazis and was repeatedly arrested by the Gestapo; he was expelled from Germany in 1937. In 1939 Prinz became rabbi of Temple B’Nai Abraham in Newark, New Jersey, where he served until his retirement in 1977. Prinz was president of the American Jewish Congress (1958-1966) and two-term chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He served as a founding chairman of the 1963 March on Washington and spoke at the event.”
Dr. Prinz devoted much of his life in the United States to the Civil Rights movement. He saw the plight of African American and other minority groups in the context of his own experience under Hitler.
From his early days in Newark, a city with a very large minority community, he spoke from his pulpit about the disgrace of discrimination. He joined the picket lines across America protesting racial prejudice from unequal employment to segregated schools, housing and all other areas of life.
While serving as President of the American Jewish Congress, he represented the Jewish community as an organizer of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington. He came to the podium immediately following a stirring spiritual sung by the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and just before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. Prinz’s address is remembered for its contention that, based on his experience as a rabbi in Nazi Germany after the rise of Hitler, in the face of discrimination, “the most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
But this is a deceptive summary of the man and his ideological contortions in service of what he thought was best for the Jews, be that one moment supporting the Nazis and another moment supporting racial integration.
