Baldwin’s condemnation of the silence of the Birmingham white majority in the face of the killing of children was similar to the speech of Rabbi Joachim Prinz (a refugee from Germany) at the March on Washington. “When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime . . . the most important thing I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent and most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.”[51]
