Albert Einsteins Little-Known Correspondence with W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Racial Justice
- Details
- Category: Social Action
- Created: Tuesday, 17 March 2015 19:01
- Published: Tuesday, 17 March 2015 18:48
- Hits: 1878
Albert Einstein endures as the quintessential modern genius for his seminal contributions to science, but he was also a great champion of human rights. In fact, despite having taken a backseat to his scientific legacy, Einsteins strong humanistic and political convictions are no less notable and revolutionary amid the assumptions of his era. Nowhere do they shine more brilliantly than in his lesser-known exchanges with people of radically different backgrounds and beliefs, always deeply thoughtful, irrepressibly respectful, and driven by an earnest desire for mutual understanding and encouragement including his conversation with the Indian philosopher Tagore about science and spirituality, his correspondence with Freud about violence, peace, and human nature, and his letter to a little girl in South Africa on why her gender shouldnt hold her back from pursuing science.
Some might assume that Einsteins compassionate outlook and unflinching commitment to equality were shaped by his own experience of being on the receiving end of historys deadliest anti-Semitism. When Hitler took over Germany on January 30, 1933 twelve years after Einstein earned the Nobel Prize, which had already exposed him to anti-Semitism he had just left Berlin with his wife Elsa to spend their third winter at CalTech, where Einstein had been invited as visiting faculty. The trip may well have saved his life mere months later, the situation in Germany became inhumane, then gruesomely lethal, for Jews.