Albert Einstein on Race and Racism

This week, Dr. Cynthia Tyson sent me a piece about Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist who discovered the Theory of Relativity. While we all know about his work as a physicist, few of us know that he spoke out about racism, which he called the “American disease.”

It seems that in 1946, Dr. Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a college located about 60 miles from the prestigious Princeton University. Dr. Einstein almost never spoke at universities, because he was too busy, because it seemed like a venue to be showy or arrogant, and because he was in frequent pain from an abdominal aneurysm, which eventually killed him.

But in 1946, Dr. Einstein accepted an invitation to lecture at Lincoln University, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall, and which was the first university in America to grant degrees to black students.

He was invited to speak about the theory of relativity, but while there, he called racism “a disease of white people,” and, he said he was not going to keep quiet about it.

It was quite a stand for this Jewish immigrant, who had adopted America as his new home, but he had seen the horrors of racism in his native Germany. He remembered well how Germans had oppressed Jewish people and eventually, imprisoned and killed them, just because they were Jewish. He had suffered because of his religion even as a professor at the University of Berlin, and though he was glad he had been able to escape the oppression, what he saw in America reminded him of what he had left.

He was actually in America when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Because he was fearful that if he went back home to Germany he would be killed, he accepted a position offered to him at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This little town, boasting of one the world’s greatest institutions of learning, was segregated. There was no high school in the town that black students could attend until the 1940s.

What Dr. Einstein did was to cultivate relationships with the black students and black residents in Princeton; he was known to walk through African American communities, forming friendships with the local inhabitants. He was once said to have housed Marian Anderson in his home when she was refused at the town’s local hotel, and is also said to have paid the college tuition of at least one young man who lived in the community.

He met Paul Robeson (who graduated from Princeton) in 1935 and the two became great friends; together, they worked with the American Crusade to End Lynching, an organization which developed as Black soldiers, returning from service in World War II, were being subjected to lynching. When in 1951 W.E.B. DuBois was indicted by the federal government for “failing to register as a foreign agent,” Einstein offered to appear as a character witness on behalf of the Civil Rights activist who founded the NAACP.

Nobody really reported Einstein’s comments; the local media ignored his comments about racism when he appeared at Lincoln University, and it is a fact that I never read anything about his aversion to racism, even as I studied his physical theories.

These aspects of Einstein’s life have been captured in a new book entitled, “Einstein on Race and Racism,” authored by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor and published by Rutgers University Press in 2006.

I think it is a book we should all read.