Post No. 38. Albert Einstein and the Civil Rights in America
In 1946, Albert Einstein, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania the first school in America to grand college degrees to black Americans. He received an honorary degree and gave a lecture on relativity to the Lincoln students.
This visit was ignored by the mainstream press. According to the authors Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, authors of “Einstein on Race and Racism” these omissions need to be recognized and corrected.

Einstein was Jewish and was victim of racism, threats and harassment while working at the University of Berlin during the Nazi Germany. He found similarities between American segregation and the treatment of Jews in Germany.

In January 1946, Einstein offered public encouragement to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its founder. W.E.B.  Du Bois. In 1951, when the federal government indicted the 83-year-old Du Bois as a “foreign agent”, Einstein offered to appear as a character witness during the trial. The potential publicity convinced the judge to drop the case.
In January 1946, Einstein published an essay, “The Negro Question”, in Pageant magazine in which he called racism America’s “worst disease.”

Some of his famous quotes about this topic are:

“Racism is a disease of white people and I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

“There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. 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 Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the “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…

Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.” (The Negro Question, January 1946)

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