© William Issel

Department of History, San Francisco State University

An abridged version of this essay, without endnotes, is chapter ten in California Jews, edited by Ava Kahn and Marc Dollinger, a volume in the Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life, Jonathan D. Sarna, General Editor (2003).

On August 12, 1957, Mayor George Christopher presided over the swearing in ceremony for the seven members of San Francisco’s new Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO). Approved by the Board of Supervisors after more than a decade of lobbying by civil rights activists, the CEEO became the first such agency in a major California city. Three years later, the Commission ceased operations when the State preempted its duties, after the California Fair Employment Practice Act of 1959 went into effect.¹ The twenty-year period prior to the passage of the state FEPC act witnessed a world torn asunder by war and cold war, a world in which the practice and preservation of civil rights and civil liberties stood as a central issue in world affairs and domestic politics. In San Francisco, site of the dramatic signing of the Charter of the United Nations at the War Memorial Opera House on June 26, 1945, the campaign for civil rights took center stage in municipal politics and policy-making. Jewish and Catholic participation during these years deserves attention as a successful experiment in liberal civil rights coalition building in the urban West during the World War II and early Cold War period.²

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jews and Catholics in San Francisco shared the nationwide outrage at the murderous consequences of Hitler’s European and North African wartime regime and the postwar repression practiced by Stalin in Poland, Hungary, and other Soviet satellite countries. As historian Stuart Svonkin has pointed in his recent book Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight For Civil Liberties, Jews had a particular interest in civil rights and civil liberties coalition building during and after World War II.³ In San Francisco, such a coalition, operating on the assumption that no one can be safe unless everyone is free, emerged in the late 1930s. Jews played the leading roles in the effort, but the coalition also included Catholic liberals, as well as those who were neither Jewish nor Catholic. The white liberals coalesced with racial and ethnic defense organizations in the early forties and created an interracial council that revitalized the civil rights movement in the bay area. The Bay Area Council Against Discrimination began its work in early 1942, making San Francisco one of the first cities in the nation to establish a citywide interracial and multiethnic civil rights organization during the war years. According to Hilda Taba, who conducted interracial human relations workshops throughout the nation during the late 1940s and 1950s, some 400 civic unity councils sprang up during the war years,⁴ but nearly all of them expired without tangible accomplishments by the end of the forties. However, the civic unity movement proved successful in San Francisco. The San Francisco Council for Civic Unity, which succeeded the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination in 1944, made legislative gains in the forties and fifties, and it created the institutional and ideological foundation for the later civil rights work of the 1960s.⁵

Previous accounts by this author and by historian Albert Broussard have described the liberal and interracial character of the early civil rights movement in San Francisco.⁶ Broussard credits the interracial liberal coalition for making the city "far more open and integrated on the eve of the historic 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision than at any previous time in the city’s history." He concludes that while full equality had not been achieved by the end of the 1950s, "San Francisco went further [in achieving civil rights reforms] than other American cities."⁷

The interracial character and the accomplishments of the San Francisco liberal civil rights coalition during this period stand out in Professor Broussard’s history of "Black San Francisco." However, neither Broussard nor this author acknowledged the primary role played by Jewish activists and organizations, with support from reform minded Catholics, in creating, staffing, and funding these interracial organizations. The role of liberal white Protestants and Jews has recently received attention in studies of national civil rights organizations and the Southern civil rights movement.⁸ The role of Jews and Catholics in the civil rights movement of the West has not received similar attention. This essay describes the role played by white liberal Jews and Catholics in the civil rights movement in San Francisco, and it highlights how they consciously and deliberately drew upon the resources of their Jewish and Catholic traditions, principles, and institutions.

The city’s tradition of religious toleration played a role in shaping the character of Jewish and Catholic participation in the civil rights movement in the 1940s and 1950s. To Americans today, influenced by events since the 1960s, San Francisco may appear to be a "natural experiment in the consequences of tolerating deviance."⁹ In fact, until after World War II San Francisco – for all its vaunted reputation as a raucous wide-open port city – did not welcome racial diversity, gays, lesbians, or political radicals any more than did the rest of urban America. However, the city’s reputation for religious toleration was well deserved.¹⁰  In 1931 San Francisco Archbishop Edward Hanna received the annual American Hebrew Award for the Promotion of Better Understanding between Christians and Jews in America. In 1950, Earl Raab visited San Francisco and interviewed residents for one in a series of articles on "The American Scene" for Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee. "San Francisco, for cities of its size," Raab concluded, is the nation’s ‘white spot’ of anti-Jewish prejudice" with a "startling poverty of anti-Semitic tradition." ¹¹  Raab described how Jewish residents had created a remarkably assimilated, and unusually secular, community while they forged a century-long record of business, professional, and cultural achievement. Historians have subsequently described how Jewish and Catholic participation in business and political leadership set the urban West apart from the rest of the nation generally, and San Francisco may well have perfected the model.¹²

The San Francisco civil rights coalition during this period originated in and received its greatest support from the liberal center. When judged by such criteria as the sources of financial support for the civil rights coalition, outspoken advocacy by official representatives of religious institutions, and willingness to accept leadership positions in legislative work, the conclusion is unmistakable. Jews played the leading roles, and Catholics occupied secondary roles in the 1940s and 1950s. The coalition depended on the fund-raising talents of members of established families, such as Levi Strauss executives Daniel E. Koshland Sr. and Walter A. Haas, Sr.. Two Jewish philanthropies provided grants for operating expenses in the first years: the Columbia Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation. Postwar Jewish migrants to the city also excelled in drumming up financial support, particularly Fairmont Hotel owner Benjamin H. Swig and Rabbi Alvin I. Fine of Temple Emanu-El, who arrived in 1946 and 1948 respectively.¹³

The liberals believed that well meaning men and women could put aside their different class, religious, and ethnic loyalties in the interest of civic pride and national progress. Their goal was not to "change the system" but rather to make incremental reforms in the system. They sought to protect Americans in the exercise of their constitutional rights and to improve the everyday lives and future opportunities of thousands of disadvantaged and underprivileged Americans. The liberals saw themselves as building upon the work of the previous Progressive Era and New Deal reform generation, and several of the founders of the civil rights coalition began their public careers as Progressive Era activists.¹⁴

The Progressive Era heritage appears clearly in the origins the Survey Committee, a 1930s Jewish defense association that produced offshoots that supported African American, Asian, and Mexican American civil rights during and after World War II. In 1937, Judge M. C. Sloss, Jesse Steinhart, Walter A. Haas, Sr., and Daniel E. Koshland, Sr., established a San Francisco branch of the American Jewish Committee’s Survey Committee. Sloss, the son of one of the city’s most influential Jewish business leaders in the late nineteenth century, served on the California Supreme Court from 1906 to 1919. Sloss, Steinhart, Haas and Koshland brought in their contemporary, Eugene Block, to direct the daily affairs of the Survey Committee. Block was a journalist who had started his career as a protégé of the Progressive activist Fremont Older, editor of the muckraking afternoon paper, The San Francisco Bulletin. The Survey Committee, together with the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League and a newly established branch of the American Jewish Congress launched a counterattack on the local Nazi Bund and other anti-Semitic organizations. Then Japanese relocation threatened the liberties of Issei and Nisei residents, debates intensified over citizenship status for Chinese residents, and wartime migration brought nearly a 1000 percent increase in the African American population of San Francisco. Activists in the Survey Committee, the International Institute, and other local groups addressed themselves to the protection of civil rights generally. The Bay Area Council Against Discrimination began its work in 1942 and was active until 1944. Mayor Roger D. Lapham established a Mayor’s Civic Unity Committee in 1944, which operated parallel to the Council for Civic Unity (CCU) for several months and then disbanded. The CCU then began a more than twenty-year period of work with local and state African American, Asian American, and Mexican American organizations on behalf of racial equality in education, employment, and housing.¹⁵

Daniel E. Koshland, Sr., Eugene Block’s associate in the Survey Committee later characterized Harold J. Boyd as "the real founder of the Council for Civic Unity."¹⁶ Boyd, the city’s Controller in 1940, was born in 1890, but whereas Block grew up in the French American Jewish community, Boyd came of age in the Irish American Catholic Mission district. A labor union activist as well as a city official, and a "champion of the underdog" since the Progressive Era, Boyd stirred the community when he made an outspoken public speech at the Treasure Island Golden Gate Exposition in 1939 condemning Nazi attacks on Jews and Catholics. Boyd assumed leadership in the local Citizens Committee for Democratic Freedom in North Africa, the Bay Area Committee of the National Committee Against Persecution of the Jews, and the local branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ).¹⁷

The president of the NCCJ during the war years, Catholic manufacturer Frederick J. Koster, also began his career in the Progressive Era, serving as president of the local chamber of commerce. He also played a leading role in establishing the Law and Order Committee of 1916, following the Preparedness Day Parade bombing that killed ten and wounded forty people on Saturday July 22, 1916. A businessmen’s association dedicated to eradicating violence, eliminating class enmity, and banning all collective bargaining agreements produced by "duress or coercion," the Law and Order Committee operated according to the principles of Pope Leo XIII’s labor encyclical. Koster’s California Barrel Company developed a reputation for fair management practices, including establishment of the eight-hour day, and the Coopers’ Union honored him with a certificate of appreciation at the height of local hysteria about the 1916 bombing. During the 1930s, he championed New Deal labor reforms and vigorously condemned fascism and Nazism.¹⁸

Party loyalties did not keep supporters of the civil rights movement of the forties and fifties from coalescing on behalf of local and state legislation. As Benjamin Swig recalled in a 1978 interview: "In those days there wasn’t so much stress [among liberals] on whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. So I went to anybody I knew [when I was raising money]."¹⁹ The founders of the Jewish Survey Committee possessed impeccable Republican Party credentials, as did Catholic Frederick J. Koster, whereas Harold Boyd prided himself in being a New Deal Democrat. Nonetheless, Walter A. Haas, Sr., who like Koster presided over the local chamber of commerce, regarded Harold Boyd as "a special friend."²⁰

Robert and Lucy McWilliams, both left of center Democrats, brought a Catholic point of view to the civil rights coalition during the forties. Superior Court Judge Robert L. McWilliams, who like Koster was active in the local chapter of the NCCJ, took his law degree from UC, Berkeley. He began his career at the high point of the Progressive Era as an assistant district attorney before opening his own practice and teaching at Hastings Law School and the San Francisco Law School. Among the many students influenced by his commitment to Catholic principles of social justice, future governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown is the best known. Both Judge McWilliams and his wife Lucy frequently publicized their support for interfaith cooperation and for civil rights legislation.²¹ Lucy McWilliams, an honorary member of the Hadassah Zionist organization, also served as the vice-chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee. In 1935 she led a campaign to establish healthy migrant worker camps in the Pescadero and Half Moon Bay farms in San Mateo County. In 1942 she chaired the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination, and in 1944 she served as one of the founders of the Council for Civic Unity.²²

During the latter half of the 1930s and the first years of the 1940s, a new and younger contingent of white liberal activists joined the older veterans of the Progressive Era in the civil rights coalition. Some, as mentioned earlier, were neither Jewish nor Catholic, but they all brought to the coalition a political consciousness forged in the heat of New Deal debates over the failure of American capitalism and the use of government policy to secure the American dream for all. Many had embraced the socialist cause before the war.²³ When they moved to what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in 1947 called "the vital center," their work expressed a continued commitment to economic equality as well as racial justice.²⁴

Three leading activists in the coalition typified this process. David Selvin moved from work at the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau, to the Jewish Survey Committee, and then became the executive secretary of the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination. Selvin, a Jew, grew up in Utah, sensitive about his minority status and sympathetic with those forced to live on the margins of society. Edward Howden worked for the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association and the California Housing Association, and after three years in the service became the director of the Council for Civic Unity. Earl Raab, who worked with Eugene Block in the Jewish Community Relations Council, also represented this new, younger, cadre of civil rights activists. Like the Council Against Discrimination, the Community Relations Council evolved out of the Jewish Survey Committee. Raab’s writings, sometimes co-authored with political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, reached a national audience, and he also chaired the Bay Area Human Relations Clearing House.²⁵

Neither Selvin nor Earl Raab, also of Jewish background, grew up in an actively religious household. Each of them, however, drew upon the tradition that represented the Jews as a people with an historical destiny to alleviate suffering and to right wrongs. They used their academic training in research and writing, Selvin at Berkeley and Raab at City College in New York, to further the cause of economic justice and racial and religious freedom. Howden grew up in Oakland, attended University High School near the Oakland-Berkeley border and then graduated from the University of California. Howden found himself drawn to the liberal activism of Harry Kingman and Ruth Kingman. Harry Kingman served as General Secretary of Stiles Hall on the Berkeley Campus, the only location where members of the Young Communist League could meet. Born in China, the child of Protestant missionaries, Harry Kingman counseled hundreds of future activists about the importance of protecting civil liberties and civil rights. Harry and Ruth worked as partners, and their inspiration directly influenced Howden as well as Yori Wada, a Japanese American student who would go on to become the director of San Francisco’s Japantown YMCA and to a long career as a civil rights activist and a stalwart Liberal Democrat. In September 1958, Edward Howden left the Council of Civic Unity to head the new city CEEO and then a year later was appointed by Governor Brown to head California’s Fair Employment Commission. At the same time, Harry and Ruth Kingman established their Citizen’s Lobby in Washington, D.C., with Daniel E. Koshland, Sr. serving as Treasurer. Both Harry and Ruth Kingman and Edward Howden worked closely with Clarence Mitchell, director of the Washington, D.C. division of the NAACP in the lobbying campaign to pass what became the 1964, 1965, and 1968 Civil Rights Acts.²⁶

San Francisco’s large and active communist community developed an ambivalent relationship with the liberal civil rights movement. Communists worked with liberals on civil rights during the period of the "popular front" line of World War II and before the Cold War. This common front approach was evident in the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination in 1942 to 1944, in Mayor Roger D. Lapham’s Civic Unity Committee in 1944, and in the first two years of the Council for Civic Unity in 1944 and 1945. Devout Catholic anti-Communists such as attorney Maurice Harrison and Paulist priest Rev. Thomas F. Burke, served on these committees. So did Communist Party officers and activists such as Oleta O’Connor Yates and Aubrey Grossman. They investigated rumors of an impending race riot in Hunters Point (it never happened), and they listened to complaints filed by black tenants against the city’s Housing Authority (the discriminatory policy was eventually outlawed).²⁷

Tensions developed in late 1945 and 1946 and the common front collapsed. The party line changed and forbade cooperation with liberal reformers, and the party’s credibility suffered as knowledge of Soviet repression of civil liberties increased. Liberals distanced themselves from communists by declaring that their determination to eradicate racial injustice did not call into question their loyalty to America. For these reasons and because of the social and ideological changes in the city’s African American community after the war ended, the coalition experienced a variety of tensions and challenges during the years of its most widespread appeal. Many on the left and on the right as well remained outside the liberal coalition, opposed to its reformist principles, critical of its legislative strategies, determined to eliminate its influence.²⁸

In 1938, Elliot M. Burstein, Rabbi at Temple Beth Israel from 1927 to 1969, and Saul E. White, Rabbi at Beth Sholom from 1935 to 1983 founded the Northern California Branch of the American Jewish Congress. Then they organized a boycott of German goods in protest against Nazi repression.²⁹ Burstein and White stood out as outspoken advocates of the establishment of a Jewish state in a Jewish community that generally eschewed Zionism.³⁰ The principles of freedom and self-determination central to their work earned White and Burstein a wide following among civil rights activists. Both men appeared frequently before non-Jewish audiences and spoke to local radio audiences. Rabbi White developed a close personal and professional relationship with Howard Thurman, minister of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, a pioneering Protestant interracial church in the heart of the Fillmore district.³¹

Burstein’s sermons and lectures from the late 1930s and the years of World War II exemplify the ideological connection linking the defense of Jewish freedom, the struggle of the Allies against the Axis powers, and the campaign for civil rights. On March 27, 1937, a year after Hitler demilitarized the Rhineland and seven months after the Anschluss with Austria, Burstein presented a lecture to the radio audience of station KFRC on "Slavery in Modern Times." The rabbi exhorted the audience to "eternally give battle to every robber of human freedom" and argued that the story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt was everyone’s heritage, not just that of the Jews. "The story of the Exodus is a warning to be eternally vigilant against all lash-masters . . . that is why we regard with dismay the mushroom growths of fascistic movements in the world today." Speaking at Odd Fellows Hall on "What is Americanism" ten days after Hitler opened the Balkan campaign and the day before Yugoslavia surrendered to the Nazis, Burstein anticipated the civic unity council efforts that marked the war years. "There is still plenty of prejudice against the negro, the Jew, the Catholic. As long as this exists, our democracy will be sick and needs a good dose of tolerance. But even tolerance is not enough. Tolerance is arrogance. Our Americanism should include definite efforts made to unite all Americans on their common tasks and to urge groups not to capitalize on their differences."³²

On June 30, scarcely a week after Adolf Hitler danced for joy before photographers after forcing a humiliating armistice on France, Rabbi Burstein addressed an audience at the First Methodist Church. "The Christian – Jewish answer to the World’s Crisis," he insisted, is to stand up to the "force, trickery, ruthlessness…of communism, nazism, or fascism." However, "We must not, if we value our democracy and liberties they allow us, employ their tactics . . . We must bend over backwards and give sympathy and love in greater measure than ever." "World conditions are such that shortly they will demand tremendous sacrifices from all of us. But the greatest sacrifice of all is a subjugation of passion to reason. We must not lose our wits. We must fight not with hate and vengeance, but with a calm sense of a serious duty to perform."³³

By the summer of 1944, one month after the Allied invasion at Normandy, Burstein spoke on "Religion and Democracy" over radio station KSFO. He suggested that "the religious idea . . . that humanity is one great family – a family of equals in its own eyes and the eyes of God . . . will not be established unless the democratic idea is first established." In a democracy, "man must at least respect his neighbor, his person, his opinions, his wants and his rights. If this cannot be achieved positively by persuasion, it can at least be achieved negatively by legislation."³⁴

Burstein summed up his talk about the link between religion and democracy with a call for "not love of neighbor, but an understanding of, a sympathy with, a healthy respect for, our neighbor."³⁵ Social theorist Horace Kallen had for years popularized this model of social relations as "Pluralism" or "Democratic Pluralism." As Burstein explained, "Discrimination or attacks against any group anywhere, no matter what its beliefs, origin, or skin pigmentation, is an attack against humanity as a whole."³⁶

Burstein’s endorsement of pluralism found an echo in the sermons and lectures of Paulist priest Thomas F. Burke, pastor of Old St. Mary’s church and brother of Monsignor John J. Burke, the General Secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and a prominent national spokesman on Catholic social justice matters. Archbishop John J. Mitty, whose term of office extended from 1935 to 1961, frequently delegated Burke to represent the Archdiocese at interfaith gatherings. Burke’s 1937 Thanksgiving Day sermon at the Civic Auditorium, under the auspices of the NCCJ, urged San Franciscans to "gather for common interests and for common action" against "bigotry and intolerance and bitterness and war."³⁷

By the time Father Burke died in 1947, his prewar message about the need for pluralism as the basis for cooperation to protect "the very soul of America" had an even greater appeal to liberal Catholics and Jews. Earl Raab recalls how when he involved himself in the civil rights coalition in 1951, he did so because "I had a great interest . . . in strengthening democracy in this country, coming out of the experiences of the 1930s for the Jews." "My underlying philosophy and this related to my main interest in Jewry, was that the important objective of [this work] was to strengthen democratic pluralism . . . and civil rights demonstrated this principle at the time more than anything."³⁸

In the spirit of Rabbi Burstein’s conviction that "our big positive guns are persuasion and education" and if that failed then "negatively by legislation," the civil rights liberals used the Council for Civic Unity to educate and inform the public and lobby for new civil rights laws. The Council adopted an inclusive strategy, bringing together representatives of established groups and new organizations. From Chinatown came Henry Shue Tom, Executive Secretary of the Chinatown YMCA, and Lim P. Lee, a lawyer and Democratic Party activist who became San Francisco postmaster in 1967. The Chinese American Citizens Alliance sent Kenneth Fung, a San Francisco born attorney, three-term president of the organization, and its Washington, D.C. lobbyist for immigration law reform. The Council also worked with Robert B. Flippin of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Seaton W. Manning of the city’s new branch office of the National Urban League, established in 1946³⁹.

During and after the war, new migrants to the city added their voices and energy to the emerging coalition. Terry A. Francois, an African American Catholic, and 1940 graduate of Xavier University in New Orleans, moved to San Francisco after his discharge from the Marine Corps in 1946. Francois immediately immersed himself in civil rights activity. In 1950, with a Hastings law degree in hand, he joined the boards of directors of both the local NAACP and the national Catholic Interracial Council. He and his law partners Loren Miller and Nathaniel Colley carried the NAACP suit against the city Housing Authority that culminated in the banning of its so-called "neighborhood pattern" policy of segregation. Francois served as NAACP local president and with Edward Howden and Irving Rosenblatt he conducted the negotiations with the San Francisco Employers’ Council in 1957 that resulted in their endorsement of the city CEEO ordinance. In 1964 Terry Francois became the first African American to serve on the Board of Supervisors when Mayor Shelley appointed him to that position.⁴⁰

Mayor George Christopher appointed Francois to the new city CEEO in 1957, where he served with Peter E. Haas, the son of one of the founders of the Jewish Survey Committee. The son and the father, incidentally, disagreed about liberal civil rights legislation: "I remember big arguments with my father," Haas recalled in 1992, "[he] said you can’t legislate these things. You can’t legislate morality."⁴¹ Richard L. Sloss, son of another of the four men who organized the Jewish Survey Committee, served on the board of the Urban League after World War II and brought his liberal point of view to his work on behalf of its projects. In his lay sermons at various synagogues during the 1940s and 1950s, Sloss returned again and again to the importance of eradicating prejudice and fostering pluralism, as in this 1948 talk. "Differences in thinking are not only inevitable, they are healthy signs of freedom of the mind; but they need not, and should not, become the basis for groundless suspicions and unreasoning distrust. Let no man believe unkind generalizations about groups other than his own."⁴²

Richard Sloss belonged to the Temple Emanu-El congregation. Alvin Fine, a staunch liberal from Cincinnati who arrived in San Francisco in 1948, served as senior rabbi at Emanu-El until 1964. A native of Portland, Oregon, Rabbi Alvin Fine quickly moved to the center of the civil rights coalition playing an active public role in a variety of initiatives, including the campaigns to establish a city and state FEPC.⁴³

Rabbi Fine also took active leadership in the National Council of Christians and Jews. Throughout the 1950s, quietly and with considerable tact, he nudged Archbishop John J. Mitty to place the church actively in the forefront on interfaith cooperation and civil rights reforms.⁴⁴ One instance is particularly revealing of Fine’s strategy. When the criticism over Harry Truman’s appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican made headlines across the country in late 1951 and early 1952, the local NCCJ met behind closed doors for a confidential discussion of how to limit the damage to interfaith relations in San Francisco. When several of the Protestant representatives "vehemently" declared their opposition to Truman’s action, Rabbi Fine "told [them] that he didn’t think it was any of their business whether the Vatican was a State or not a State." Archbishop Mitty’s representative to the meeting, superintendent of Catholic schools Father James N. Brown, confided to Mitty that while Fine’s arguments expressed "the Jewish attitude toward religion in the public schools . . . he is one of the Zionists who does not believe in a Church-State set up there."⁴⁵

The Vatican ambassador controversy, like the concurrent battle over whether tax monies should be allowed to support Catholic schools, underscored the long-standing mutual suspicions between the Catholic Church and Jewish and Protestant organizations that persisted during this period. Archbishop Mitty, who had served as Bishop in Salt Lake City from 1926 to 1932, brought to San Francisco considerable experience in negotiating interfaith tensions. He facilitated the practice of "mixed marriages" between Catholics and non-Catholics, and he led the successful campaign to reform the Church’s national policy so as to allow such marriages to take place in parish churches. During and after World War II, Mitty received a crescendo of requests from Protestant and Jewish organizations and Catholic laymen for greater interfaith cooperation and support for domestic civil rights. The Archbishop allowed the formation of an Interracial Communion League at St. Benedict the Moor Church in 1952. Father Bruno Drescher, the pastor of the church, which stood in the heart of the Western Addition African American community, was a civil rights stalwart who served on the CCU board. However, attempts to obtain Mitty’s approval for a citywide Catholic Interracial Council did not succeed until 1960.⁴⁶

Given his experience in Salt Lake City, where he had coexisted with the Mormon majority as well as expanded efforts to make converts to Catholicism, Mitty responded to calls for interfaith cooperation with ambivalence. He was determined to refuse a forum to unfriendly liberal and left-leaning Protestant and Jewish ministers and rabbis who might vilify the Church because of its support for Spain’s General Francisco Franco. "Catholics" as he put it in a confidential letter, should not be placed "in a compromising position." Additionally, "There is the possibility that the ordinary rank and file of the people may begin to feel, as a result of these meetings, that one faith is as good as another."⁴⁷ The Archbishop resolved his ambivalence in a way that typified his administrative practice generally. He made almost no public statements whatsoever about either the interfaith movement or the civil rights movement. At the same time he delegated to trusted priests and laymen the authority to act on behalf of the Archdiocese. Mitty began this policy in 1941 and did not change course during the nearly twenty years following. He explained to a colleague on the faculty of Holy Redeemer College that he had been influenced by the opinions of "a very splendid Catholic judge" and "a very splendid Catholic lawyer." No doubt he referred to Judge Robert L. McWilliams and attorney Maurice A. Harrison, both of whom were on close personal terms with the Archbishop. "Their opinion," he confided, "makes me a bit slow in condemning these meetings." Besides, "the big difficulty I foresee in not giving some participation in these meetings is the possibility of a charge of un-Americanism."⁴⁸

The question of how to define and practice Americanism took center stage in American political culture during these years. The Jewish community, heterogeneous in outlook, debated the question of whether support for a Jewish homeland in Israel could be compatible with loyalty to America. The Catholic community, heavily Irish American, questioned whether racial prejudice and discrimination could coexist with its profession of Christianity.⁴⁹

Amidst these tensions and ambiguities, the most public Catholic institutional support for the civil rights movement in San Francisco during these years came not from archdiocesan priests but from priests associated with particular religious orders. The activism of Father Thomas F. Burke, whose Paulist order might be expected to take the vanguard on these matters given its program of interfaith cooperation, has already been noted. In addition, the Jesuit University of San Francisco developed institutional relationships with the NAACP and the Urban League during the first decade after the war, and these relationships increasingly brought Catholic lay and clerical civil rights activists together with a variety of African American leaders. The connection came about largely through the initiative of Father Andrew C. Boss, the director of the University’s Labor-Management School. Boss grew up in a blue-collar working class family in the city’s Mission district. By the late 1940s, like Earl Raab, who first clashed with the Communist left during his student days at City College of New York, Boss was a principled anti-Stalinist as well as a firm advocate of civil rights. The Labor-Management School opened its doors in the spring of 1948, after Boss and Father Hugh A. Donohoe decided that the city needed a Catholic alternative to the California Labor School, because Communist Party members dominated the administration and the curriculum of the California Labor School. Donohoe wore several hats. In the late 1930s he began a 25-year service as chaplain to the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. During the war years he edited the official newspaper The Monitor. In 1948 the Archbishop appointed him Auxiliary Bishop and delegated him to represent the Archdiocese on the board of the Council for Civic Unity.⁵⁰

During the decade between the founding of the school and the passage of the city and state FEPC laws, Father Boss opened the pages of the School’s periodical, Labor Management Panel to articles by local African American leaders. He also organized conferences to expose discrimination in employment and generate support for Fair Employment legislation.⁵¹ The USF events provided a forum for opponents of liberal civil rights legislation as well as an opportunity for its supporters to spread their gospel. In an April 1951 Institute on Minority Group Employment, for instance, Adrien Falk, then president of the California Chamber of Commerce criticized the legislative approach and called for voluntary job training and skill development initiatives by employers. Falk, a confidant to mayors Roger Lapham and George Christopher, would persist in this argument all the way to the passage of the city ordinance in 1957.⁵²

One of the Labor-Management School’s civil rights programs, a panel discussion broadcast on radio station KNBC in January 1954, featured D. Donald Glover, industrial relations secretary of the city Urban League. Judge Sylvester McAtee, another discussant, raised the issue of the Communist Party’s influence in the civil rights movement. John F. Henning, a 1939 St. Mary’s College graduate, then research director of the California State Federation of Labor, also appeared on the program. In August 1957, Henning would join Peter Haas and Terry Francois on the city FEPC, and in 1959 Governor Brown appointed Henning the Director of the California Department of Industrial Relations. Now Henning bristled at McAtee’s claim that "FEP legislation provides the ideal opportunity for propaganda by … communists …who wish to create racial animosities, and employer-employee conflict." Henning responded: "On this matter of associating the drive for racial justice in this country with any Communist purpose. The Communist apparatus must be opposed if democracy is to survive but to exploit the issue and associate the campaign for racial justice with the Communist movement is actually the last refuge of those who are morally sterile and philosophically bankrupt."⁵³

The state FEPC bill passed five years later, on April 16, 1959. The campaign to pass the legislation began with the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination and the Civic Unity Council in the early to mid-1940s. Then in 1953, the Civic Unity Council and its Southern California counterparts, along with the California State Labor Federation and the Jewish Labor Committee, all worked with the NAACP’s 1953 "Fight for Freedom" program and revived the campaign. Augustus Hawkins and Byron Rumford, African American members of the California State Assembly, saw the bill through the legislature. C. L. Dellums of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the uncle of future congressman Ron Dellums, served as chair of the labor, minority, and religious coalition. White liberals William Becker and Max Mont from the Jewish Labor Committee managed the day to day operations.⁵⁴ By the time the state FEPC began its work in 1959, the liberal coalition had desegregated San Francisco’s public housing projects, won an anti-discrimination clause in urban redevelopment housing policy, and successfully campaigned to establish the city CEEO ⁵⁵

This essay describes how Jewish and Catholic activism in a centrist political coalition during the 1940s and 1950s in San Francisco moved the civil rights agenda further toward the goal of full equality. Jews and Catholics campaigned for civil rights as part of a broad coalition, and Jewish and Catholic activism during this period, as this account makes clear, should not be read as a narrative of a golden age of interfaith cooperation. Nor should the degree of success of the interracial civil rights coalition be exaggerated. All the same, the moderate goals and measured successes of the campaign should be acknowledged. The white liberal Jews and Catholics who participated in the civil rights movement of the forties and fifties prepared the ground for an expansion of interfaith cooperation, as well as for further legislative victories at the state and local levels during the 1960s. The Sixties saw Catholic activists moving into full partnership with Jews rather than continuing as secondary players. Liberal Catholics established a local branch of the Catholic Interracial Council in 1960, and the Archdiocese established an official Social Justice Commission in 1964. In the same year, Father Eugene Boyle, a diocesan priest, brought together Protestant, Catholic and Jewish activists in a San Francisco Conference on Religion, Race, and Social Concerns. The new organization publicized and expanded upon the work of existing groups such as the Council for Civic Unity, the NAACP, and the Urban League.⁵⁶ Also in 1964, the State’s fair housing legislation of 1959 faced the challenge of Proposition 14, an initiative measure designed to block government bans against discrimination. The new Archbishop, Joseph T. McGucken forthrightly defended fair housing, and two citizen’s groups, Catholics Against Proposition 14 and Californians Against Proposition 14, campaigned against the measure.⁵⁷ When California voters overwhelmingly endorsed the proposition, Earl Raab of the Human Relations Clearing House and John Delury of the new Catholic Interracial Council worked on behalf of the ultimately successful legal campaign to overturn the voter mandate in the courts.⁵⁸

In 1964, Mayor John F. Shelley, a former state senator and U.S. congressman whose early career as a labor union activist included a charter membership in the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, proposed to the city Board of Supervisors a permanent Human Rights Commission. The Board established the Commission on July 13, and Shelley quickly appointed the fifteen Commissioners, including Rabbi Alvin Fine, Earl Raab and Sister Rose Maureen Kelly. Father Eugene Boyle and Daniel E. Koshland, Sr. served on the Advisory Council. The Commission’s Chairman Edgar D. Osgood, and its Director, Frank A. Quinn, took office after serving in the same positions in the Council for Civic Unity. Quinn had been associate director of the NCCJ during the early 1950s and then worked as a field officer among Native Americans in California for the American Friends Service Committee before succeeding Edward Howden at the CCU. The new Commission wielded subpoena power and it soon developed a national reputation as an aggressive advocate of racial, religious, gender, and sexual orientation equality in education, employment, and housing.⁵⁹

The author would like to thank Andrew R. Heinze for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper in the fall 1999 Lecture Series of the Swig Judaic Studies Program, University of San Francisco, on October 28, 1999. Glenna Matthews deserves thanks for thoughtful comments on that version of the paper. Bruce Melendy and Max Silverman provided research assistance above and beyond the call of duty. Special thanks to my students in 790 for their curiosity, critical spirit, and often inspired research work, and to Jeffrey M. Burns and the late Father John J. Reilly of the Chancery Archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and Kim Klausner and Susan Morris of the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah Magnes Museum for sharing their wealth of knowledge and for help in tracking down sources.