Einstein on Race and Racism.

Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor Rutgers University Press, July 2005 $23.95, ISBN 0-8135-3617-0

The world's preeminent scientist significantly confronted race issues, but this facet of Albert Einstein's life is omitted from "more than one hundred biographies and monographs," say Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, coauthors of this new book.

Einstein: Nobel Prize winner in physics, Time magazine's "Person of the [Twentieth] Century," the scientist whose formula E=M[C.sup.2] and General Theory of Relativity led to monumental scientific advances. The same Einstein took part in antilynching campaigns; befriended Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois; corresponded with the National Urban League; wrote for the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis; and gave a landmark speech at the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

In this work, copious notes and documents accompany descriptions of these and other occurrences. The authors also present the scientist's activities in the context of Princeton, New Jersey's odious racial history. Einstein left his native Germany in 1933 for Princeton, where he lived until his death in 1955. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his home adjoined the neighborhood where the African American community was centered.

Regularly, he invited black men and women into his home, and he went into theirs; frequently he chatted with their children. At age ten, Wallace Holland, now a senior citizen, went to Einstein's home to ask the scientist why smoke disappeared. "I had no problem going by to see him;' Holland says. "He was always talking with kids when he walked through the neighborhood."

At Lincoln in 1946, Einstein told a campus-wide audience, "My trip to this institution was on behalf of a worthwhile cause. There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it."

The black press--The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier, New York Age and the Baltimore Afro-American, whose page-one story yielded the preceding quotation--published extensive accounts of the speech. A New York Times story had one sentence on the address: "Dr. Einstein said he believed there was 'a great future' for the Negro" if the students "worked long and hard with lasting patience."

--Reviewed by C. Gerald Fraser C. Gerald Fraser is a writer in New York City.