Stella Counselbaum: A Portrait of Civil Rights Activism Through Friendship

• In Event: Another Kind of Sisterhood: American Jewish Women in Unusual Spaces

Abstract

One way the saga of Black-Jewish relations can be told is as a story of friendship. The most famous example is Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, but there are other examples: Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Joel Spingarn come to mind. Historians have written about these figures, celebrating how people from different backgrounds came together to advance civil rights and fight for justice. Women, however, are usually absent from or marginal to these narratives.

This paper looks at one little studied figure: Stella (Levinkind) Counselbaum (1896-1979). Counselbaum was born and lived her entire life in Chicago. She married clothing manufacturer Alexander Counselbaum but had no children. She became involved in the National Conference for Christians and Jews in the 1930s, but left in 1944 following her husband’s death. After WW2, she joined the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, and through that organization, the African American civil rights movement. Her activism focused on ending discrimination in institutions of higher education.

Counselbaum’s story is exceptional for a number of reasons. In 1948, she 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. In addition to Bethune, Counselbaum befriended other prominent African American civil rights activists, including union organizer Willard S. Townsend and National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs president Irene McCoy Gaines. From 1949-1951, she penned a column for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American newspaper.

Relying on her columns and press coverage of her initiatives, as well as unpublished archival material, this paper shows how friendship across religious and racial lines helped inspire a white Jewish woman’s civil rights activism.

Author

• David Weinfeld, Virginia Commonwealth University