Black History Month was celebrated at the Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue on Friday evening with the help of a local famous face: Lou Gossett, Jr.
Gossett was joined by Clarence B. Jones, a man who is often touted as a hero of the Civil Rights Movement. The two met with Jewish scholars and other interested locals for a Shabbat dinner and discussion of civil rights and the evolving relationship between the African American and Jewish peoples.
As he gave a blessing at the start of the dinner, Jones, a lawyer, speechwriter and confidante to Martin Luther King, Jr., said he was privileged to work alongside King and called him “one of the greatest apostles” in the pantheon of American history.
Now a visiting professor at Stanford University, the 85-year-old tells his students that in the 12 years preceding King’s assassination in 1968, “with the exception of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, MLK, Jr. may have done more to achieve political, social and racial justice, and equality in America than any other person or event in the previous 400 years of the history of the United States of America.”
One of the highlights of the evening was Jones’ recollection of how he came to work with the iconic civil rights leader. Jones was
a young lawyer just starting his practice in Southern California in 1960 when he first met King. Jones was asked by King’s legal team to join in its efforts to defend King against tax evasion and perjury charges in Alabama, but Jones rebuffed the offer.
King then went to Jones’ home and pleaded with him to join his effort to fight for freedom in the South. Jones refused again, but King persisted by inviting Jones to hear him preach in Baldwin Hills. Jones called King’s speech “mesmerizing.”
In it, King encouraged black professionals to help their less fortunate brothers and sisters struggling for freedom in the South. King never mentioned Jones’ name, but Jones realized the speech was directed to him specifically when King quoted a Langston Hughes poem about a domestic worker struggling to make life better for her son.
“Tears came to my eyes because I had a picture in my mind of my mother in a domestic servant uniform,” Jones said.
Jones said he shook King’s hand at the end of the service and asked, “Dr. King, when do you want me in Montgomery, Alabama?”
Jones and Gossett are now working with the Spill the Honey Foundation, whose goal is to advance public awareness of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, and to promote cultural tolerance. They have made a movie in an effort to teach today’s generation of the historic coalition that developed in the 1960s between the African American and Jewish communities. That documentary, “Shared Legacies,” revisits the alliances that, in many cases, have broken down over the past 50 years.
A screening of the incomplete film, hosted by the Malibu Film Society on Friday night, sold out.
Jones told The Malibu Times that the film focuses on how the end of racial segregation was made possible with the support of the American Jewish community. He credits countless Jewish supporters who marched with King on the front line in Selma and for helping to end what he termed “American apartheid.”
To finish the film, producers will take a delegation of African Americans and people of Jewish faith to visit slavery’s origins in Senegal and then to Auschwitz to see where roughly one million Jews were imprisoned and killed at the hands of Nazi Germany.
“I do this because if King were alive, this is what he would do,” Jones explained.
Gossett spoke Friday evening about his efforts to break down barriers between people in an effort for peace. The 80-year-old’s Eracism Foundation is developing an after-school center in Los Angeles for children of all ethnicities to learn conflict resolution, cultural sensitivity and a unified vision of being an American first before any other race or culture.
“Then when they finally create a society … that thing that separates us is at a minimum,” Gossett said. The actor is a self-described product of multiculturalism, having grown up in Brooklyn, New York alongside Jews and families of other backgrounds.
Gossett said the greatest impediment to peace is racism, sharing that he believes “it’s more than color: it’s religion, it’s the rich against the poor, the left against the right, and the number one thing we have to do on this planet is get rid of all that so we can cooperate together to save mankind.”
As a grandfather of nine, Gossett said his contribution as an elder is to teach people a better way to live. And while he loves working as an actor, he says his number one agenda is to try to make the world a better place.
