Jewish Women in the African-American Civil Rights Movement

This paper looks at three Jewish women active in the post-WW2 African American Civil Rights movement, one from the 1950s, the second the 1960s, and the last the 1970s.

In 1948, Chicagoan Stella Counselbaum (1896-1979) won an award from the National Council for Negro Women (NCNW) for her “continuous efforts to fight creed and race prejudice” She befriended the NCNW’s president, Mary McLeod Bethune, and in 1950, received an honorary doctorate from her friend’s Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona, Florida, and then another from historically Black Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio in 1956. From 1949-1951, she penned a column for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American newspaper.

In 1963, Chicagoan Polly Spiegel Cowan (1913-1976) traveled with NCNW president Dorothy Height to Selma, Alabama to observe discrimination and organize women. The following year, they created “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” a program where white and Black women from the North traveled South to meet with white and Black women there. As Cowan continued her activism, she and Height became close friends, communicating regularly from 1963 to 1976.

Zelda Kingoff Nordlinger (1932-2008), former fashion model and schoolteacher, became a leader of the National Organization of Women in Richmond, Virginia in the 1970s. Her interest in abortion rights made her attune to different attitudes among Black and white feminists in the South. This motivated her to elevate sisterhood above racial ties to strengthen the women’s movement.

This paper will examine the role of gender and Jewish identity in three women’s civil rights activism.