Albert Einstein and Civil Rights

    “America’s worst disease is its treatment of the Negro.” Albert Einstein

When German physicist Albert Einstein arrived in the United States, Isabel Wilkerson wrote in “Caste,” he was saddened to discover “that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had fled.” Even before he’d left his homeland, Einstein had spoken out on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, railroaded on false rape charges in Alabama, and written in “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. DuBois, encouraging African Americans not to let racists drag down their self-worth.  Living in Princeton, New Jersey, most of whose public facilities were segregated and whose African Americans were forced to live in ghetto slums, he and wife Elsa invited famed contralto Marion Anderson to stay with them following a 1937 sell-out performance McCarter Theater because she was unable to stay at the local Nassau Inn. He wrote, “Being a Jew myself, I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination.”

After World War II Einstein was spurred to action when returning Black G.I. were subjected to torture and even death for refusing to act deferentially toward the dominant caste.  He agreed to chair the NAACP anti-lynching committee and delivered the commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest Black college in America. While there, Einstein discussed the theory of relativity with Physics students, played with faculty kids, including Julian Bond, son of the university president, and accepted an honorary degree.

During the Red Scare, Southern demagogues in Congress focused their wrath on civil rights activists. W.E. B. DuBois was one victim, actor and old friend Paul Robeson another.  Einstein offered to be a character witness for DuBois and invited Robeson to Princeton University. In 1952, in an article for “Pageant” magazine, Einstein addressed those questioning the motives of civil rights activists: “Your ancestors dragged the black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and the easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is a result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”