Civil Rights Advocacy
In addition to his work with the ADL Zakim was co-founder of A World of Difference Institute, an anti-bias educational project formed in Boston in 1986. The project has been adapted in twenty-nine other cities and six counties.
Lenny Zakim and the Rev. Charles Stith founded an annual Black-Jewish Seder in Boston which inspired many interfaith Seders with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish participants in Boston and nationally. At the time of his death it was the largest black-Jewish seder in the US. He also "used his political connections and friendships with black ministers, Roman Catholic leaders and sports celebrities to establish community organizations and public-service events, including the 12,000-member Team Harmony antiracism rally for teenagers," the New York Times said in its obituary.
During the last years of his life, as he struggled with myeloma, he founded The Lenny Zakim Fund to fight poverty and racism in Boston. Shortly before his death, he organized a Catholic-Jewish pilgrimage to Rome with his friend Cardinal Bernard Law, where he had an audience with Pope John Paul II, prompting the New Jersey native to say: "I've had my picture taken with the Pope, Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama. Now I've got to get the three of them together."
Read more about this topic: Leonard P. Zakim
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil and/or rights:
“Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.”
—Dick Gregory (b. 1932)
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)