Martin Luther King III joined Black and Jewish leaders who came together in the District on Oct. 14 to discuss their communities’ long-standing partnership.
Held at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the interfaith panel celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the Scotland African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church built by hand by Black congregants in Potomac.
The four panelists — King; Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Rabbi David Saperstein, the former United States ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom; and Dr. Erica Gault, the director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the NMAAHC — educated about the importance of interfaith efforts during the Civil Rights Movement and today.
The event, moderated by WUSA9 news anchor Lesli Foster, began with an 8-minute video detailing the Scotland AME Zion Church’s history.
Jewish Housewife Helps Preserve Black History
The church was built by formerly enslaved African Americans in 1924 on Seven Locks Road on land that had been passed down for generations. In July 2019, a major storm caused flooding that nearly destroyed the center of faith.
The flood tore through the church’s foundation, but this was more than a natural disaster. The Scotland community dealt with racism and gentrification. In the 1960s, Montgomery County officials rebuilt Seven Locks Road on higher ground around the church, which led to the flooding.
The Scotland community aims to raise $11 million for its 2nd Century Project, which would protect the landscape against floods, reconstruct the original church and build a new community center space.
The Scotland church is one of the last standing structures created by this community of people who had been pushed off their land by developers, who coveted those 500 acres. It was 1965 when a Jewish mother saw these injustices.
“When the community was about to be wiped off the Potomac map in the 1960s, it was a young Jewish housewife named Joyce Siegel who stood up and said, ‘Not on my watch,’” Foster said at the event. “She helped form a coalition known as the Save Our Scotland committee with Christian ministers and government leaders, and Joyce helped to establish a roadmap for communities across America.”
The campaign saved the Scotland community from government action. The 2nd Century Project held its groundbreaking in July 2022 and the community has raised about $8.7 million as of September.
Siegel received a standing ovation at the event, which she attended with her now adult daughter.
The Panel Discussion
At the event titled “Interfaith Collaboration Then and Now,” King reflected on the restoration efforts.
“Scotland, as a community, [owned] 500 acres, and now it’s just a few acres,” King said at the event. “That’s what restoring Scotland AME Zion Church represents: rebuilding a community that almost potentially had been lost, and restoring that community.”
The panelists discussed the interfaith symbolism of the 1965 photo of Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marching arm-in-arm from Selma to Montgomery.
“Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was perhaps known as one of the greatest Jewish scholars in the world, and he and Dad, it was not an accident that they met and became dear friends,” Martin Luther King III said. “It was providential.”
He added that the credibility of an “intellectual giant” such as Heschel significantly boosted the Civil Rights Movement, a “very pivotal time in our nation’s history.”
Saperstein said the photo represented the many levels of connection between the Black and Jewish communities despite their differences, such as the common value of helping those who are less fortunate.
“It was a shared history of slavery that made us feel a connection with each other: a shared experience of prejudice and persecution and discrimination that Jews had faced in so many countries over the millennia and that Blacks were facing so vividly at that time,” Saperstein said. “It mobilized these two communities to see in each other that their destiny was tied up with each other, that the two of them would thrive in America.”
He said the iconic photo prompted Black and Jewish activists, lawmakers, college students and religious leaders to collaborate, adding that 40% of the Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement were Jewish.
Gault spoke to the importance of documenting historical photos such as this one to preserve our nation’s past and to use as a model of allyship.
“Images like that become most important for us, pointing towards the kind of futures that we would like to see come to fruition,” Gault said.
Spitalnick discussed the importance of interfaith cooperation, as both Black and Jewish Americans experience discrimination and bigotry.
“Jewish history and their safety in this country are inextricably linked to Black history and Black safety, and that’s what this image reminds me,” Spitalnick said.
She talked about how the antisemitic conspiracy theories that led to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally are dangerous for both the Black and Jewish communities.
“At the core of what we saw is a fundamental racism and antisemitism that underscores what we’re talking about,” Spitalnick said, referencing the neo-Nazi belief that Jewish Americans are trying to replace white Americans with Black and brown immigrants. “Black and Jewish communities have been targeted over and over again by these conspiracy theories. We see it in these acts of hate.”
She added that white supremacists often try to pit the two communities against one another, but that we shouldn’t let hate and bigotry win.
“That was just so deeply meaningful for me, … hearing [King] talk about his father, about the legacy of his family’s work, and specifically how, in the moment, when there are so many efforts to tear communities apart, how he is resisting that,” Spitalnick told the Washington Jewish Week. “That is precisely at the core of the work that we’re doing at JCPA.”
Spitalnick, who ate lunch with members of the Scotland community and visited the construction site of the church on Oct. 14, said Scotland community members plan to include “symbols of interfaith cooperation” around the reconstructed church, including a Star of David made out of recovered wood from the original church.
“It’s so beautiful and meaningful that at the core of the rebuilt Scotland will be the recognition of the interfaith coalition that stood up to help make it possible,” Spitalnick said.
