"You have so much to learn," she said with a sigh. "Under Israel's Law of Return, you can be an atheist Communist and still immigrate to Israel. There are plenty of them too. You only qualify to immigrate if you are a Jew, and a Jew is described simply as being of Jewish descent. So, you see, you can be Jewish and still be an atheist and still be a Communist - and I tell you, Communism is Jewish!"

"All Jews are Communists?" I retorted sarcastically.

"No, no, no," she emphatically replied, with much patience in the way she paced her words. "All Jews are not Communists, any more than all snakes are poisonous. But most leading Communists in America are Jews, as well as most of the convicted Russian spies in America, as well as the leaders of the New Left. And historically, most of the Commie revolutionaries in Russia were Jewish as well!"

What Mrs. Smith said made me very uncomfortable. Although it was not yet time to leave, I claimed that I had to catch my bus back home. I left the office hurriedly. Mrs. Smith had to be wrong, but I just didn't have the facts to challenge her statements. I resolved to research the issue so that I could show her why she was wrong. Something else bothered me as well, for I felt a little guilty for even talking with someone who said such things about Jews. I was staunchly anti-Communist, and to suggest that Jews were behind the horrors of Communism was, to me, such a terrible allegation that my heart told me that it just could not be true. It was the first time I had been face to face with a person I presumed was an anti-Semite. I was soon running to catch my streetcar.

During the next couple of days I avoided even thinking about the issue, and I stayed away from the Citizens Council office. Finally I picked up and read the two copies of Common Sense I had taken home. One copy maintained that the NAACP was a Communist front organization dedicated to the eventual overthrow of our way of life. It purported that 12 Jews and one Black had founded the NAACP, and all the founders were dedicated Marxists with decades of documented Communist affiliations. The article asserted that the only major Black founder of the NAACP, W. E. B. Dubois, was an avowed member of the Communist Party who immigrated to Communist Ghana (where he eventually was buried). Furthermore, the scandalous publication purported that the NAACP was financed by Jewish money and always had a Jewish president. It said that a Jew, Kivie Kaplan, was the current NAACP president and that he was the real leader of the organization rather than its Black "front man," Roy Wilkins. Although the public perceived Wilkins as the NAACP leader, the paper asserted that he actually had the lower rank of national secretary.