Posted: April 13th, 2010 Greg Lacour

The Rabin-King Initiative started a little more than a year ago in the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. established his ministry.

The initiative's founders in Atlanta saw it as an opportunity to educate students about black and Jewish cooperation in American history, something they thought had been largely forgotten. In Charlotte, a rabbi and university president heard about it and thought it might be a good thing for the Queen City.

So on April 12, Johnson C. Smith University announced the launch of its own wing of The Rabin-King Initiative, one that builds on a class on black-Jewish relations already at the school. Like its counterpart in Atlanta, it aims to offer classes and sponsor academic and community programs joining African-Americans and Jews.

“Each community holds pieces to everyone else’s puzzle,” said Rabbi Judith Schindler, the senior rabbi at Temple Beth El, who decided with JCSU President Ronald Carter to bring the initiative to Charlotte.

The initiative began with two men: Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta; and Reda Mansour, an Israeli serving as the country’s consul general to the southeastern United States.

They wanted to launch classes and academic and community programs that would teach African-Americans and Jews about longstanding ties between the communities. In its name, they wanted to honor the memories not only of King but former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who helped broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement in 1993 and was assassinated two years later.

It’s important for minority groups to join to work on common problems rather than define themselves solely by their relation to the majority, Mansour said. When that happens, minority groups are often pitted against each other in a zero-sum game, in which one’s success means the other’s failure.

“I do believe in the urgent need sometimes to open the channels of dialogue. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to dialogue for the sake of dialogue,” Mansour said. “We wanted to create something where people could come together and do something meaningful.”

Jews and African-Americans have worked together more deeply and for longer than many Americans realize. People generally remember the contributions of Jews to the Civil Rights movement; for instance, that Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two of the three civil rights workers murdered in Neshoba County, Miss., in 1964, were Jewish.

But people tend not to remember people like Joel Elias Spingarn, the Jewish professor and activist who served as one of the NAACP’s first presidents. The organization’s annual award for outstanding achievement by an African-American is named after Spingarn, who established the award.

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen accidentally,” Lawrence Carter said. “If we are going to survive in this world, we have to find the common ground.”

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