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The beginning of the decade saw ADL resume its fight to reform
the laws that had limited Jewish immigration from the 1920's through the 1940's. The
League urged liberalization, but Congress, over President Truman's veto, maintained the
national origin quotas by adopting the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act.
Anti-Semitism intensified as Jews became the target of right-wing extremists' accusations
that they were subversive Communists. President Eisenhower used the 40th anniversary
dinner of the League as a platform to make his first public condemnation of McCarthyism
and the character assassinations common during the period. In the years that ensued, ADL
embarked on one of its earliest campaigns to thwart right-wing extremism by fighting the
terrifying plague of McCarthyism.
During this decade, President Eisenhower signed the first civil
rights bill to be approved by Congress since Reconstruction. ADL joined the struggle for
civil rights and filed an amicus curiae brief in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of
Education, which put an end to the odious ruling of "separate but equal."
Following the decision, ADL Regional Offices helped defuse local community relations
problems arising from desegregation in neighborhoods in the North and South. ADL also
embarked on a campaign to expose resort discrimination and used dual-letter tests and
other ways of proving that resorts such as the Camelback Inn in Phoenix, Arizona, were
closed to Jews. The League's "crack the quota" campaign reached its peak during
the 1950's.
As the systematic purge of all high Czech officials of Jewish
descent -- known as the Prague Purge trial -- exploded, it showed the world that
anti-Semitism persisted. ADL launched a large-scale educational effort to eliminate the
ignorance that inevitably leads to intolerance, bigotry and anti-Semitism, and began
developing and publishing educational tools to teach democracy, including books, posters,
book covers and recordings.
Next: 1960-1970 |
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