Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Throwback Thursday: Carole King, Civil Rights Crusader

Forward Association

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives.

At a time when supporting the rights of the accused in deportation and civil rights cases frequently invited harassment, Jewish New York City attorney Carol King was a noted expert on both.

Unafraid of being called a “red” in an environment in which defending both known Communists, and those accused of being party members was nearly impossible and certainly not advisable — attorney King pursued justice for all.

Described as possessing dynamic brilliance, strategic pragmatism and humility she frequently prepped difficult cases she herself would not be deemed right to argue in court, most likely due to her gender. And she must have seemed heaven sent to her clients, the list of whom reads like a who’s who of progressive American politics. She was chief defense counsel for labor leader Harry Bridges’ deportation hearings and was part of the Scottsboro Boys’ legal team. She took on the immigration cases of labor activist Irving Potash of the Furriers Union and that of a lesser known client, Benjamin Saltzman who, accused of being a Communist, stood to be deported back to his native Lithuania — in 1942.

To witness her image in the Forverts’ archive is to see her exude a passionate commitment to human rights which she did, all the days of her short but phenomenally productive life. Before her death in 1952 she helped found several organizations devoted to enriching American democratic standards, including the Anti-Fascist Refugee Commission and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born as well as the Civil Rights Congress.

She was known to serve the poor and the needy. Her work informed decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the Bill of Rights. And for that she earned FBI surveillance, a file of over 1,500 pages and a historic role that defined the meaning of public service.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.