WR151: American Conversations: Jews and Blacks / Blacks and Jews

Includes over 100,000 items of correspondence (more than three quarters of the papers), speeches, articles, newspaper columns, nonfiction books, research materials, book reviews, pamphlets and leaflets, petitions, novels, essays, forewords, student papers, manuscripts of pageants, plays, short stories and fables, poetry, photographs, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, videotapes, audiotapes, and miscellaneous materials.

Over the next two years, Leo Frank’s legal case became a national story with a highly publicized, controversial trial and lengthy appeal process that profoundly affected Jewish communities in Georgia and the South. The Leo Frank case and its aftermath revealed lingering regional hostilities from the Civil War and Reconstruction, intensified existing racial and cultural inequalities (particularly anti-Semitism), embodied socioeconomic problems (such as child labor), and exposed the brutality of lynching in the South.

It’s a story about immigration, New York City’s first Black mayor, the rise of Rudy Giuliani, and the Lubavitch Jewish and Caribbean-American communities sitting at the center of it all. To Meyerson, the Crown Heights Riot can help us unlock and understand so many of our modern dilemmas: from police violence and racism to the persistence of antisemitism.

Shoe Leather is an investigative podcast that goes behind the scenes of forgotten stories that shaped New York City. Go along with the team as they knock on doors and track down the people who were at the center of the news.

Originally from New York, Leo Frank was the manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta in 1913, when he was accused and convicted in the rape and murder of a worker, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. The case is widely regarded as having been a miscarriage of justice. t was the focus of conflicting cultural pressures, represented class and regional resentment of so-called educated Northern industrialists who were perceived to be wielding too much power in the South, threatening its system of justice, culture and morality. The trial occupied the front page of every American newspaper and captivated public attention around the world. Shortly after Frank’s conviction, new evidence emerged that cast doubt on Frank’s guilt. The Governor commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, sparking riots in Atlanta. A populist newspaper urged that Frank not be allowed to escape “justice.” On August 17, 1915, Frank was kidnapped from the state prison and lynched by a mob in Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia.

of 1965.

It examines the history of lynching, and the interplay of race, labor and the left, and popular culture as forces that would give rise to the Civil Rights Movement.While many people assume Strange Fruit was written by Billie Holiday herself, it actually began as a poem by a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music.

A veteran of increasingly outdated show business traditions, Davis strove to stay relevant, even as he found himself bracketed by the bigotry of white America and the distaste of black America.