61 years ago, American Jewish Committee president Rabbi Joachim Prinz delivered a searing speech at the 1963 March on Washington.
Prinz was one of the “Big Ten” civil rights leaders behind the march. He spoke before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Prinz served as a rabbi to the Jewish community in Berlin during Hitler’s reign. He emigrated to the United States in 1937.
Here’s what Prinz said in his speech:
“When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence. A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder.
America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent. Not merely black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.”
“Our children, yours and mine in every school across the land, each morning pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands. They, the children, speak fervently and innocently of this land as the land of ‘liberty and justice for all.’
The time, I believe, has come to work together — for it is not enough to hope together, and it is not enough to pray together, to work together that this children’s oath, pronounced every morning from Maine to California, from North to South, may become a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.”
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