Originally published in The Chattanooga Times Free Press
Many quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. were posted on line this week. A fellow Chattanooga colleague got my attention with, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Then I got an email from a synagogue buddy asking me why Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) was being silenced and suggested that I write about this for my TFP column. Interesting coincidence! But I was busy mailing a DEI book that I’d written. Holding the book in one hand, I picked up an unmarked envelope mailer only to find that there was something already in it. And that’s when coincidence became weirdness.
The envelope contained two old letters that I thought I’d sent to the American Jewish Archives where my dad had been the Chief Financial Officer. One letter was from my great grandfather Simon Swig who was a Boston banker a century ago and the first financial officer to hire women and Blacks. His colleagues tried to bankrupt him as the theory that immigrant “poisoning” became popular and laws limiting immigration, including of Jews, were enacted. I was reminded that DEI has been in the family’s DNA for a century.
The second letter was written to me almost 40 years ago by Jan Niemöller, the son of the Rev. Martin Niemöller. You may have heard of his father’s famous poem: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist… Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.” In case I missed the message, fate had another friend send me an article he’d just written called, The Power of Words: the “said” and the “unsaid”. It concluded with Niemöller’s poem.
My mind travelled back decades to the 1990 National Workshop on Christian Jewish Relations that I coordinated and had invited Jan to be a speaker. He’d sent me this letter about joining me rather than attending the annual synod meeting of Germany’s Council of the Evangelical Church where he was continuing his father’s work. Reading again how he happily “faced the opportunity to meet me”, I was suddenly back with Jan and his wife, talking over lunch about the long journey Germans had taken to distance themselves from Hitler’s claim that killing 6 million Jews was the will of the Almighty Creator in preventing the poisoning of the Aryan race.
What would the Niemöllers say today when Trump uses similar “poisoning” language? And what about the billionaire who claims that MLK would despise DEI because it opposes his “I Have a Dream” speech which emphasized character, not skin color. This billionaire is a hedge fund manager who’s trying to disenfranchise DEI as racist, and by the way, was an integral part of ousting Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president. Then there’s Elon Musk hoping that DEI would die when airline pilots who attended historically Black colleges and had lower IQs crashed and burned hundreds of people.
These words, intents and actions are not unrelated. Nor is the soaring increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents prompted by them. We are living in an era where hate is being disguised as God’s will. Where will this lead? Read Niemöller’s poem, look at the history of the rise of Naziism and you’ll get a pretty good idea. Time to rise up and speak out! As MLK said, ”In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
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This is an important lesson and one that Americans should really pay attention to. During my time in the Civil Rights Movement in Detroit, as a child, we were shown this video poem to remind people the dangers of keeping quiet while injustices and tragedies are occurring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRDq7aneXnk
This lesson does not just apply to Black and White issues, but more specifically, applies to people everywhere in the world. We, as a self-governing nation are even more responsible for paying attention to what we allow, support, defend and initiate regarding the rights of others, including LIFE! JUSTICE! MERCY! ACCOUNTABILITY!
Thank you for your insight, Nancy. We do indeed have the responsibility as you outlined.
Thank you. 🙏🏽 We must not let antisemitism, Islamophobia or racism be wrapped in the cloak of religion or in the twisted interpretation of MLK’s words. Promoting the idea that a group of people are inherently ‘less than’ is hate speech.