Pierre M. Atlas writes about his uncle, Rabbi Seymour Atlas:
…From, Rabbi Seymour Atlas was the spiritual leader of Congregation Agudath Achim, an Orthodox synagogue in Montgomery, Ala. One day while going for a walk, the young rabbi bumped into the young minister who led the church down the street. That church was Dexter Avenue Baptist, and the minister was Martin Luther King Jr.
The men began a cordial relationship based on common interests as clergy. Uncle Seymour spoke several times to King's congregation. King asked the rabbi to teach him to read Hebrew.
But as my uncle told me the other day, King had to enter the synagogue through the back door for his Hebrew lessons. "That was the tradition of the South," Seymour said. "If you let a black man come in the front door, you'd be ostracized. It was rough. There was lot of hatred there."
Many Southern Jews walked a fine line in those years, not wanting to anger the whites who held all the power, who were often anti-Semitic as well as racist. The synagogue board of directors took a "don't rock the boat" attitude toward racial issues and they were hypersensitive to anything that might look like a pro-civil rights stance. Some Jews had even joined Montgomery's racist White Citizens' Council, which was linked to the Ku Klux Klan. "They said it was better to be on the inside knowing what the enemy was doing rather than guessing," Seymour told me. "They wanted me to join the WCC, but I wouldn't do it."I asked my uncle if he became involved in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. He said no. But in the next breath, he told me a story showing that he did, in fact, take his own stand.
Seymour had a black "domestic" who cleaned the house and helped his wife with the kids. The boycott meant that the maid, who refused to ride the bus, could not make it across town to the Atlas home. So Seymour drove her back and forth from her "colored" neighborhood to his home each day.
In response, his car was vandalized on several occasions. " 'N-lover' and N-words were painted on my car from top to bottom," he told me. "It was a very dangerous time." As the boycott progressed, my uncle got a gun permit and carried a revolver with him as he drove across town to bring the maid to his home. "I only had to use it once," he said. "I fired it in the air to scare off some people."…
Rabbi Atlas was forced out by his synagogue shortly afterward. Here is more on Rabbi Atlas from a scholarly article on Jews and the Civil Rights Movement:
…Twenty years later, as events surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott began to unfold, another local Rabbi, Seymour Atlas of Congregation Agudath Israel would suffer the same fate as Rabbi Goldstein. Known for his liberal sermons and his outspoken support for civil rights, Rabbi Atlas caused a split among members of his congregation, many of whom were afraid of retribution from the larger anti-civil rights population. Appeals for him to moderate his rhetoric instead pushed him to the other extreme. Much to the consternation of his congregation, he frequently appeared on local television and radio stations with Martin Luther King, publicly discussing issues relating to desegregation, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and other civil rights problems. To dramatize his activism, Life magazine featured Rabbi Atlas in an article that included his photograph. The article depicted him as a maverick, whose views were so progressive they were out of place in a southern city such as Montgomery. At an emergency meeting summoned by his congregation's board of trustees, Rabbi Atlas was invited to recant his support for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and asked to henceforth submit all public speeches he intended to deliver to the board two to three days prior to delivering them (Life, 1956). Rabbi Atlas remained unrepentant. At his next service he offered a defiant prayer in support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was more than the increasingly irate trustees were willing to tolerate. Snubbed by his own congregation, a dispirited Atlas tendered his resignation, and gave up his career as Rabbi of the synagogue (Webb, 476).…