In September 1946, Albert Einstein called racism America’s “worst disease.” Earlier that year, he told students and faculty at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest Black college in the Western world, that racial segregation was “not a disease of colored people, but a disease of white people, adding, “I will not remain silent about it.”
When Albert Einstein moved to America, he was disappointed to see how black people were being treated. Even in his new hometown of Princeton, he observed separation of the white and black societies. Einstein thought of segregation as “unacceptable.”
"There are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious, but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the ‘whites’ toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion. 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. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery”
Albert Einstein, very rarely accepted honorary doctorates but he did so for Lincoln University, a small historically black college in Pennsylvania in 1946. He also gave a lecture before a small group of students who are seen with him in the picture.
After 70 years, photo of Einstein's visit to Lincoln surfaced when a woman appeared in "Antiques Roadshow."
Her husband, who was a photographer, was present in that classroom.
What a find those photos are. Einstein looks distractedly spiritual, like an elderly silver-haired angel in tweed.
ReplyDeleteWhen Dvorak lived in the USA for a few years, he identified with American Indians and blacks, because as a Czech he was surrounded by people he regarded as foreigners in his country - Germans - and felt oppressed by them.
Z