Excerpt from
Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor

Rutgers University Press, 2006 (originally: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

Message to the National Urban League Convention, September 16, 1946

Dr. Lester B. Granger
Executive Director
National Urban League
1133 Broadway
New York City

My dear Dr. Granger:

I greet your assembly in the conviction that it deals with one of the most important problems of this country. The contrast among groups is a constant threat which imperils minorities. This threat becomes more acute in times of economic stress and insecurity. However, the defeat of this threat is of importance not only for the minorities but for the country as a whole. For an unleashed war of the groups against each other is the sure way to the loss of civil rights. "Divide and Rule" has always been the maxim of tyrants and betrayers of the people.
   Pessimists have often claimed that mutual hostility among groups is unavoidable, because violence, distrust and lust for power are indestructible and powerful characteristics of human nature that unceasingly influence the actions of men. No man of sound feeling and judgment is deluded by such an argument. Men are also greedy—yet we have achieved a state in which stealing is relatively rare. Every disease of society can be overcome if there is the firm will for a cure in the people.
   The worst disease under which the society of our nation suffers, is, in my opinion, the treatment of the Negro. Everyone who is not used from childhood to this injustice suffers from the mere observation. Everyone who freshly learns of this state of affairs at a the injustice, but the scorn of the principle of the Fathers who founded the United States that "all men are created equal." He feels that this state of affairs is unsound in a country which in many other things is justly proud of a high degree of development. He cannot understand how men can feel superior to fellow-men who differ in only one point from the rest: They descend from ancestors who, as a protection against the destructive action of the radiation of the tropical sun, gained a more strongly pigmented skin than those whose ancestors lived in countries farther from the equator.
   One can hardly believe that a reasonable man can cling so tenaciously to such prejudice, and there is sure to come a time in which school-children in their history lessons will laugh about the fact that something like this did once exist.
   Today, however, this prejudice is still alive and powerful. The fight against it is difficult as is the fight on every issue in which the enemy has thoughtlessness and a fatal tradition on its side. What is to be done?
   There is a sound feeling of justice in the people; if we succeed in putting this feeling to the service of our cause, then the goal will be achieved. First we must make every effort [to insure] that the past injustice, violence and economic discrimination will be made known to the people; the taboo, the "let's-not-talk-about-it" must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practices is a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.
   We must strive [to ensure] that minorities be protected against economic and political discrimination as well as against attack by libelous writings and against the poisoning of youth in the schools. These endeavors are important, but not as important as the intellectual and moral enlightenment of the people. For example, it is clear that in the South, through economic pressure on the colored population, wages in general are kept down, and that thereby the majority of the people [white and black] suffers pauperization through reduced buying power. If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.
   In our times, the consideration of the influence all things exert on world politics plays a special role. The Fathers of our Constitution achieved a world-wide political effect by stating and realizing just principles that found enthusiastic agreement among good men everywhere. In our times, in which circumstances have placed great influence on international affairs into the hands of the United States, this nation could for a second time be the source of health and liberation, if we learned to base our influence not on battle ships and atomic bombs but on being a shining example in our internal affairs and on liberating creative ideas on social and world affairs. But without a just solution of the racial—and more generally the minority—problem, our example cannot be considered shining.
   One more remark. We have become accustomed to judge everything according to tangible and measurable view points. Food in calories, national and private income in dollars, ownership or non-ownership of a bathtub and of a water-closet. In accordance with this attitude I have spoken so far only of such tangible things as economic and political discrimination. These are really important. Yet there are other things which are just as decisive for the happiness or unhappiness of the human being. A man may own every thing that puts him on a high level according to a crudely materialistic point of view, and have a miserable existence. He may be persecuted by fear, hatred or envy, he may be deaf to merry songs and blind to blooming life. It is similar for social groups, even for whole nations.
   There is a thing which one could call the moral climate of a society. In one society, there may be a preponderance of distrust, malice and ruthless egotism; in another, the enjoyment of beauty and of the blooming life, compassion for the suffering of one's fellow-men and rejoicing in their happiness. This moral climate of the society to which we belong, is of decisive influence on the value of life for each of us and it cannot be understood through the tables of statistics of economists or in any scientific way.
   One thing is certain: No mechanism can give us a good moral climate as long as we have not freed ourselves from the prejudices to whose defeat you are devoting yourselves.
   Yours very sincerely,
   Albert Einstein.