Monday, October 24, 2005

Why is this Breaking News!?! Albert Einstein was actively opposed to lynching, segregation, and racism

Of over 100 biographies on Einstein, this is the first to even mention Paul Robeson or lynching. Kudos to Book TV on C-SPAN. This weekend I was able to watch Journalist Fred Jerome and author Rodger Taylor, discuss their book Einstein on Race and Racism. Although known as a non-joiner, and a person of dis-frumpled solitude, he was, it turns out, member of no fewer than 14 anti-racist/segregationist organizations, with involvement with the NAACP, the Civil Rights Congress and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. He offered to travel to DC to testify on behalf of W.E.B. DuBois when our gov't arrested him for being an agent of a foreign power. (in case you aren't aware, without evidence of doodly squat, except that Mr. DuBois held leftist political ideas - story available at the link below to LogosJournal)


Those who want to argue that racism is no more need look no farther than the silence of 100 biographers on this area of his life. One might argue that in the 50's and 60's biographers of his scientific mind might not want to "complicate matters," but for that silence to continue? Why don't we know the full story of this man and just his scientific achievements and personal fuddy-duddyness?


From the website of the Book:
The book uses Einstein’s letters and personal exchanges with such figures as W.E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson as evidence for his commitment to racial equality and the anti-lynching campaign. “Einstein on Race and Racism” includes interviews with African-American members of the community in New Jersey where Albert Einstein lived.

From LogosJournal.com
On the eve of Einstein’s move to America he joined the international campaign to save “the Scottsboro Boys,” nine African American teen-agers from Alabama, falsely accused of rape – eight of them sentenced to death in 1931. For Einstein, the Scottsboro Defense was the first of several protests against racial injustice in the American legal system. For J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, it was the first “Communist Front”

[At Lincoln University] "His visit was “in a worthwhile cause,” he told the assembled students and faculty. “The separation of the races [segregation],” he declared, “is not a disease of colored people, but a disease of white people,” adding, “I do not intend to be quiet about it.”
read more from Logos Journal.

Read the Preface, then the article/overview above, then buy the book.

1 comment:

LaReinaCobre said...

fascinating; yet another reason to admire Einstein!

saddening, that this part of his life has been "omitted" from history for so long.