Hmmm: Relativity and Racism

Everyone knows E=MC² but did you know that Albert Einstein was a staunch opponent of racism, longtime friends with Marian Anderson and with Paul Robeson with whom he worked to stop lynchings in the US? The following is, in part, excerpted from an article in the Harvard University Gazette

Einstein, who was Jewish, was sensitized to racism by the years of Nazi-inspired threats and harassment he suffered during his tenure at the University of Berlin.

“Einstein realized that African Americans in Princeton were treated like Jews in Germany,” said Rodger Taylor, co-author of the book “Einstein on Race and Racism”. “The town was strictly segregated. There was no high school that blacks could go to until the 1940s.”

Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community [located around the street called Witherspoon].

[He] invited Marian Anderson to stay at his home when the singer was refused a room at the Nassau Inn in Princeton. In 1935, Einstein met Paul Robeson when the famous singer and actor came to perform at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre. The two found they had much in common and developed a long lasting friendship. Einstein and Robeson worked together on the American Crusade to End Lynching, in response to an upsurge in racial murders as black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War II.

Despite almost never speaking at universities during the last 20 years of his life, in 1946, Einstein traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks.

At Lincoln, Einstein received an honorary degree, lectured on relativity to Lincoln students (pictured above). and gave a speech in which he stated, “There is ... a somber point in the social outlook of Americans ... Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am dearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of ‘Whites’ toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. ... The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.”

...Einstein [spoke out again] in 1951, when the 83-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, was indicted by the federal government for failing to register as a “foreign agent” as a consequence of circulating the pro-Soviet Stockholm Peace Petition. Einstein offered to appear as a character witness for Du Bois, which convinced the judge to drop the case.

For more information go to:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/einstein3.html
http://www.einsteinonrace.com/