Arkansas’s Conscience: Rabbi Ira Sanders

Rabbi Ira E. Sanders presided over Little Rock's Congregation B'nai Israel from 1926 to 1963, and took literal inspiration from his lifelong study of the prophets: "Learn to do well. Seek justice; relieve the oppressed." A lifetime spent in the pursuit of these goals made Rabbi Sanders a significant force in Arkansas for racial and social justice.

Born in Rich Hill, Missouri in 1984, raised in Kansas City, and educated at the University of Cincinnati and the Hebrew Union College, Sanders recevied ordination as a rabbit in 1919. He later earned a Master's degree in sociology at Columbia University. Following rabbinates in Allentown, Pennsylvania and New York City's prestigious Temple Israel, Sanders accepted the pulpit of Temple B'nai Israel in Little Rock. Intrigued with the challenges offered by a Southern rabbinate in the era of Jim Crow, he immediately immersed himself in the community. In addition to his duties as rabbi, Sanders chaired several community agencies, served for forty years as a trustee of the Little Rock Library, co-founded the Arkansas Lighthouse for the Blind, and helped establish and operate the Little Rock Birth Control Clinic, which provided access to contraception for poor women, black and white. Sanders also founded a number of local Depression-era relief agencies such as the Family Welfare Agency, where as a board member Sanders insisted that relief funds provided be made equally available to the needy regardless of color. In 1927 he founded and taught at the Little Rock School of Social Work, and he fought hard for the School of Social Work to remain racially integrated following the enrollment in the inaugural class of two African American women, but was overruled by the sponsoring University of Arkansas, who demanded he dismiss the women.

Sanders' battles against racial injustice came in many forms. Shortly after his arrival in Little Rock in 1926, Sanders took a seat in the back of a segregated streetcar, an act challenging segregation mandates. Angered over being forced to move, he scrapped his planned sermon for that Friday night and instead railed against "The Jim Crow Law," the first of many such sermons. A member of the NAACP and on the board of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), Rabbi Sanders also co-founded the Urban League of Greater Little Rock, an organization he served for more than thirty years. Sanders later said he helped charter the Urban League in Little Rock in order "to fight for the equality of this community’s black citizens" who as a group "were not being given their just due." In 1951, the University of Arkansas awarded Sanders a Doctor of Humanities degree in honor of his work in the field of racial justice. Over the course of his life he gave dozens of speeches before groups such as the Little Rock Rotary Club emphasizing racial and social justice, many during the Central High School Desegregation Crisis.

Leading to and during the crisis, Sanders played a significant role in pursuing racial justice. In February 1957, defying warnings regarding his personal safety, Sanders spoke passionately in opposition to four proposed anti-integration measures at a public meeting of the Arkansas Senate.  Powerfully and eloquently, he argued against the acts, concluding with "When Jesus died on the cross, He repeated those immortal words 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.'" He then thundered "Legislators! May future generations reading the statute books of Arkansas NOT be compelled to say these words of you!" During the cacophony of both jeering and cheers following his conclusion, Sanders was asked to leave the building immediately for fear that he might be assassinated.

Later that year, at the suggestion of President Dwight Eisenhower, Sanders and Episcopal Bishop Robert Brown organized local clergy to create the Ministry of Reconciliation to help the community deal with the unrest. The clergymen organized a day of prayer and community meetings all over the city in order to help ameliorate the crisis, efforts which garnered national praise and attention. Sanders also worked both publicly and behind the scenes to help with the crisis. His activism led to multiple bomb threats against Temple B'nai Israel in 1958. Sanders later co-founded the Greater Little Rock Conference on Religion and Race, and through that organization worked diligently on issues of housing discrimination in the 1960s.

Ira Sanders believed that the effective rabbi "sees his reward only in the changed attitudes and social activism in behalf of just and righteous causes," and no cause was more just or righteous to Sanders than that of racial equality.