BLACK INTERNATIONALISM
Malcolm X and the Rise of Global Solidarity
ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1964, an Egyptian government car departed Cairo and headed east, crossing the Suez Canal and continuing across the hot desert of the Sinai Peninsula before finally arriving in the town of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. Gaza was crammed full of Palestinian refugees, hundreds of thousands of exiles who had fled or been expelled from their homes by Israeli forces during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. One of the passengers in the car was keenly aware of what it meant to be an exile from one’s original homeland: Malcolm X, who passionately fought for the freedom of blacks in America who lived hundreds of years and thousands of miles from their ancestral homelands in Africa.1
Malcolm X took aim at the structural issues that undergirded racism throughout the United States, and he demanded political and economic power, cultural independence, and identity, even the revolutionary transformation of capitalist America. Famous Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael noted this was what set “revolutionaries” apart from mere “militants” in the 1960s: “This differentiates the black militant from the black revolutionary. The black militant is one who yells and screams about the evils of the American system, himself trying to become a part of that system. The black revolutionary’s cry is not that he is excluded, but that he wants to destroy, overturn, and completely demolish the American system and start with a new one that allows humanity to flow.”2 Malcolm X also was one of the most prominent early voices in the 1960s to connect the black struggle in America with a wider global revolution being waged by peoples of color, a revolution seeking freedom, justice, and independence.
In this context of situating their own movement within the wider anticolonial struggles of the Global 1960s, Black Power activists such as Malcolm X found themselves drawn to the Palestinian cause. It was not only an abstract ideological identification. Indeed, support for the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel became a vital part of the programs and worldviews of several important groups and individuals within the Black Power movement and, in so doing, reflected and deepened their attitudes toward race, identity, and political action at home.
MALCOLM X, GLOBAL BLACK SOLIDARITY, AND PALESTINE
Malcolm X was a towering figure in the emergence of the Black Power movement during the 1960s, and his solidly pro-Palestinian stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict was the culmination both of his Islamic beliefs and of his keen sense of global black solidarity with liberation struggles being waged by kindred peoples of color. While imprisoned in the late 1940s, Malcolm X converted to a black American religious organization, the Nation of Islam (sometimes called the Black Muslims). Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, whom its adherents regarded as a prophet, the Nation of Islam was instrumental in prompting blacks like Malcolm X to connect with their African heritage and identity. It also called their attention to events in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. Afrocentricity certainly was not new to blacks in the United States by the mid-twentieth century, nor was black transnationalism: oppression against blacks abroad had affected black identity in the United States for a long time.3 Coming, as it did, during the era of decolonization in Africa and Asia in the 1950s, however, the Nation of Islam’s internationalist emphasis did much to pave the way for Black Power internationalism and support for the Palestinians later in the 1960s.
Malcolm X was well aware of the Palestinian struggle as he ascended into a leadership role in the Nation of Islam. Muslims of various nationalities, including Palestinians, maintained contacts with the Nation. Jamil Shakir Diab was one such Palestinian. Diab immigrated to the United States in 1948, the year of the massive Palestinian refugee exodus, and thereafter served as principal and instructor of Arabic at the University of Islam, a school in Chicago run by the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number 2.4 Another Arab who maintained contacts with the Nation to promote relationships between black American Muslims and the wider Arab and Islamic worlds was Mohammed Taki (“M. T.”) Mehdi, an Iraqi working for the Arab League’s Arab Information Office in San Francisco. Mehdi first met Malcolm X in San Francisco on February 15, 1958, and two months later worked with him to put together the Third Pakistan Republic Day conference in Hollywood, California, on April 7, 1958.
At this event Malcolm X made some of his first public comments about the Arab-Israeli conflict when he spoke at a press conference held at the Roosevelt Hotel. He forcefully revealed his growing ideas about the interconnectedness between Arabs and American blacks. After all, he stated, they were peoples of color related by blood and shared an identity. “The Arabs, as a colored people,” he noted, “should and must make more effort to reach the millions of colored people in America who are related to the Arabs by blood.” Were the Arabs to do this, he continued, “these millions of colored peoples would be completely in sympathy with the Arab cause.” He also underscored his hostility toward Zionism. Any Arab effort to reach black Americans must not rely on the white media, Malcolm continued, because “it is asinine to expect fair treatment from the white press since they are all controlled by Zionists.” Moreover, he was clear about who was to blame for the problems between Israel and the Arabs: “aggressive Zionists,” just as he blamed the American government for “subsidiz[ing]” Israel.5
A little more than a year later, Malcolm X actually visited the Middle East. His trip came after the Nation of Islam cabled greetings to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, which opened in late December of 1957 in Cairo under the patronage of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. By then Nasser was at the height of his power and influence and was without question the Arab world’s most important leader. He also was a major figure in the neutralist Third World movement that saw formerly colonized nations band together in their refusal to join either the American-dominated First World bloc or the Soviet-dominated Second World bloc. In March of 1959 Nasser reciprocated by sending greetings to Elijah Muhammad on the occasion of the Nation of Islam’s convention in Chicago. Nasser then followed up three months later with a formal invitation for him to visit the Arab world. Because of problems obtaining an American passport, Muhammad deputized Malcolm X to travel in his place.
Malcolm’s first trip to the Arab world proved immensely significant for his religious and political development. During the July 1959 trip he visited Egypt, meeting with Nasser’s deputy for Islamic affairs, Vice President Anwar al-Sadat, and other officials before traveling onward to Saudi Arabia. He also traveled briefly to Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem, in the Palestinians’ homeland.6 Muhammad himself traveled to the Middle East a few months later, in November of 1959, where he too visited East Jerusalem briefly, arriving on November 28 and departing the next day for Cairo.7
Malcolm’s trip deepened his belief that a white imperialist world was locked in a struggle with a larger black world combating racism and foreign domination. In using the word black, he said, “I mean non-white—black, brown, red or yellow” people: “The dark masses of Africa and Asia and Latin America are already seething with bitterness, animosity, hostility, unrest, and impatience with the racial intolerance that they themselves have experienced at the hands of the white West.”8 Palestine was such a country, a country of color. A few years later Malcolm X stated clearly that black Americans were part and parcel of the revolution being waged by peoples of color because they, too, had been subjected to that same white racism: “What happens to a black man in America today happens to the black man in Africa. What happens to a black man in America and Africa happens to the black man in Asia and to the man down in Latin America. What happens to one of us today happens to all of us. . . . The Negro revolt [will] evolve and merge into the world-wide black revolution that has been taking place on this earth since 1945.”9
For Malcolm X, the solution for the racism experienced by American blacks lay not in trying to desegregate the United States but in waging a nationalist struggle for independence much like Third World peoples were doing. On November 10, 1963, he delivered his famous “Message to the Grass Roots” speech, in which he articulated clearly his view of a global revolution by peoples of color against imperialism and racism. He spelled out the need for American blacks to identify with this global revolution, start their own nationalist struggle at home, and thereby achieve their aims of nationhood: “In Bandung [Indonesia] back in, I think, 1954, was the first unity meeting in centuries of black people. And once you study what happened at the Bandung conference, and the results of the Bandung conference, it actually serves as a model for the same procedure you and I can use to get our problems solved. . . . When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism. . . . All the revolutions that are going on in Asia and Africa today are based on what?—black nationalism. A revolutionary is a black nationalist. He wants a nation.”10 In his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech a few months later, in April of 1964, Malcolm X stated that “the dark people are waking up. They’re losing their fear of the white man. No place where he’s fighting right now is he winning. Everywhere he’s fighting, he’s fighting someone your and my complexion.”11
As part of this internationalist worldview, Malcolm X continued to connect the plight of American blacks with that of Arabs. He once noted the particular color bond between Arabs and American blacks by remarking acidly, “The people of Arabia are just like our people in America. . . . None are white. It is safe to say that 99 per cent of them would be jim-crowed in the United States of America.”12 He also began linking the specific victimization of the Palestinians in the Middle East with the exploitation of blacks in America—in both instances, he claimed, by Jews. In an interview with C. Eric Lincoln, Malcolm noted: “The Jews, with the help of Christians in America and Europe, drove our Muslim brothers [i.e., the Arabs] out of their homeland, where they had settled for centuries, and took over the land for themselves. This every Muslim resents. In America, the Jews sap the very life-blood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel, its armies and its continued aggression against our brothers in the East. This every Black Man resents. . . . Israel is just an international poor house which is maintained by money sucked from the poor suckers in America.”13
Given that Malcolm X connected Jews with the exploitation of blacks in America, the Jewish nature of Israel probably played a role in his support for the Palestinians. On occasion he pointedly criticized Jews, whom he claimed were exploiting blacks as Jews, not just as white people. In a 1963 interview, for example, he laid into Jews and accused them of having pursued one agenda for dealing with their own oppression but advising blacks, by virtue of Jews’ important roles in civil rights groups, to adopt another, more passive solution for dealing with theirs. Jews, he said, used economic power to improve their lot in America but then told blacks to employ sit-ins and other tactics that would not transform blacks and place them in a position of power or otherwise threaten them. Because they owned so many businesses in the ghettos, Malcolm also complained that Jews took the profits they made there with them when they went home at night, ensuring that the inner cities stayed poor by failing to reinvest those profits in the neighborhoods.14 Yet despite his attitudes toward Jews in America or in Israel, Malcolm X’s support for the Arabs in their struggle against Israel was deeply embedded in his Black Power internationalism.
Malcolm X visited the Arab world a second time in April and May of 1964, and the trip deepened his knowledge of the Palestinians and their struggle against Zionism. He gave a talk at the American University of Beirut, an intellectual center of secular political thought in the eastern Arab world that attracted a number of Palestinians. Malcolm X also met with one of the twentieth century’s most important Palestinian leaders: al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the preeminent Palestinian political and religious leader from the 1920s through the 1950s. The two met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when they both were undertaking the Islamic pilgrimage, the hajj, and were staying as guests at the Jeddah Palace Hotel. Their lengthy discussions included talk about Jewish political influence in the United States.15
It was during his third trip to the Middle East, a few months later, that Malcolm X visited Gaza, the second time he had set foot in the Palestinians’ homeland. Like his 1959 trip to East Jerusalem, it was a short visit. He left the United States in early July of 1964 for what turned out to be a four-month sojourn throughout the Middle East and Africa. The first stop was Cairo, where he attended a summit meeting of the Organization of African Unity from July 17 to July 21. During a speech he gave to the summit, Malcolm X hailed the fact that many African leaders had for the first time denounced Israel and “supported the right of the Arab refugees to return to their Palestine homeland.”16
After the summit ended, Malcolm embarked on a two-day trip to Gaza on September 4, 1964.17 After checking in to the Kuwait Hotel along the Mediterranean Sea, he spent some time shopping in town inasmuch as the Egyptians had declared Gaza a duty free zone and many products were available in the markets there that could not be found back in Egypt. The next day, he met with the Egyptian assistant military governor of Gaza, Colonel Mustafa Khafaja, and visited several Palestinian refugee camps, a hospital, and the area along the cease-fire lines with Israel. He also lunched with some Islamic religious leaders and heard about Israel’s brief 1956–57 invasion and occupation of Gaza from an eyewitness, a man named Harun Hashim Rashid. Malcolm also held a press conference at the Palestinian Legislative Council building in Gaza City. Topping off a long day, he performed evening prayers at a mosque along with the mayor of Gaza City, Munir al-Rayyis. He returned to Cairo the following day, September 6.18
Back in the Egyptian capital, Malcolm publicly showcased his embrace of the Palestinian cause. First he attended a September 15, 1964, press conference given by Ahmad Shuqayri, chair of the newly founded Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Afterward, he met with Shuqayri and posed for pictures with him and other PLO officials. Two days later, he published a major statement about Zionism and the Palestinians in the Egyptian Gazette, an English-language Egyptian newspaper. A confidant of his, Maxwell Stanford Jr. (later known as Muhammad Ahmad), claimed that it was President Nasser himself who had asked him to write the piece.19
The article, “Zionist Logic,” offered a hard-hitting attack on Zionism and Israel. Malcolm argued that while Zionism was tinged with messianic religiosity, it was essentially only a new form of colonialism in disguise that threatened not only the Arabs but also the newly independent black African countries that accepted Israeli development aid and expertise:
These Israeli Zionists religiously believe their Jewish god has chosen them to replace the outdated European colonialism with a new form of colonialism, so well disguised that it will enable them to deceive the African masses into submitting willingly to their “divine” authority and guidance without the African masses being aware that they are still colonised. . . . Their colonialism appears to be more “benevolent,” more “philanthropic,” a system with which they rule simply by getting their potential “victims” to accept their friendly offers of economic “aid,” and other tempting “gifts,” that they dangle in front of the newly-independent African nations, whose economies are experiencing great difficulties. . . . The modern, 20th century weapons of neo-imperialism is Dollarism! The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism.20
Malcolm also focused on the plight of the Palestinians, dismissing Zionism’s logic of returning the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland (at the Palestinian’s expense) after thousands of years of exile:
Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves? Just bassed [sic] on the “religious” claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a “new Moroccan nation” . . . where Spain “used to be” . . . as the Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?21
He went on to question whether it would be legal and moral for blacks in the Western hemisphere to do likewise and return to Africa, dispossess the Africans currently living there, and establish a nation for themselves, or for Native Americans to retake their lands and evict white settlers. He ended the article by saying, “In short the Zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history . . . not even in their own religion!”22
By the time of his murder a few months later in February of 1965, Malcolm X was fully convinced that the black freedom struggle in the United States was part of a larger global, black anti-imperialist revolution. The struggle at home had to be part of this wider revolution if for no other reason than that there was strength in numbers: through global unity American blacks could count on the support of oppressed peoples overseas and force white America to recognize the power and determination behind the black struggle. Three months after visiting Gaza, he noted as much in November of 1964: “But the point and thing that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied with the over-all international struggle. You waste your time when you talk to this man just you and him. So when you talk to him, let him know your brother is behind you, and you’ve got some brothers behind that brother. That’s the only way to talk to him, that’s the only language he knows.”23 An important cornerstone of this international solidarity was the Arab world, including the Palestinians: “The African representatives, coupled with the Asians and Arabs, form a bloc that’s almost impossible for anybody to contend with. The African-Asian-Arab bloc was the bloc that started the real independence movement among the oppressed peoples of the world.”24
Malcolm X did not live long enough to draw further attention to the Palestinians. Yet pro-Palestinian sentiments such as his would surface time and time again among other African Americans, particularly after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This process started when a little-known friend and follower of his published an article about Israel and the Palestinians a few weeks after that war ended.
SNCC’S SUPPORT FOR THE PALESTINIANS
Twenty-eight-year-old Ethel Minor surely had no idea that she was making history when, in August of 1967, she published an article in the newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced “Snick”) that strongly criticized Israel and championed the Palestinians. Yet that was the event that first rocketed the Black Power movement into the American public’s view in terms of black support for the Palestinians and the mixing of domestic racial identity with Middle Eastern politics.
SNCC was established in 1960 as a student-based civil rights organization that became famous for its grassroots organizing among working-class southern blacks. From its inception SNCC sought to do more than just integrate the South and push for black rights as traditional, middle-class civil rights organizations had been doing. The group increasingly “sought structural changes in American society itself” as it matured, and this included foreign policy.25 Malcolm X’s internationalization of the black freedom struggle was one of several factors that helped propel SNCC in new and broader directions beginning about 1964. SNCC activists who traveled outside the United States began to find themselves being asked about Malcolm X and what their respective stances on global issues were, too.
This development became abundantly clear to John Lewis and Donald Harris when they traveled to Guinea in September of 1964 as part of an SNCC delegation and thereafter as they spent a month traveling elsewhere in Africa. On their return to the United States, Lewis and Harris informed their SNCC colleagues that they had been bombarded with questions in Ghana and elsewhere about their group’s relationship with Malcolm X. In a December 1964 report they wrote for SNCC, the two men told their comrades that SNCC immediately should begin explaining where the group stood on important world issues like the Cuban revolution, the Congo crisis, and the widening war in Vietnam.26
SNCC did, in fact, devote increasing attention to global issues. In January of 1966 it famously became the first civil rights organization to come out in public opposition to the Vietnam War, receiving tremendous criticism for that stance. Later, the group moved even further away from its hitherto exclusive focus on domestic issues by issuing a press release in May of 1967 stating that it had changed from a civil rights group to a human rights organization. Among other things, the statement noted: “We assert that we encourage and support the liberation struggles of all people against racism, exploitation, and oppression. We see our struggle here in America as an integral part of the world-wide movement of all oppressed people.”27 In the late 1960s, SNCC’s rising profile as a militant Black Power group was exemplified by some of its leaders, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who became some of the most prominent public figures associated with the Black Power movement. It was Carmichael, for example, who garnered national attention by using the phrase “black power” for the first time in public in June of 1966.
Ethel Minor, by contrast, was a relative newcomer to SNCC in 1967 and stayed out of the limelight. While studying elementary education at the University of Illinois at Urbana, she became acquainted with some Palestinian students and thereby learned of the history of their people. In 1962 she first encountered Malcolm X speaking on television. Impressed by what she saw and heard, Minor became involved with the Nation of Islam and worked as a teacher at its University of Islam in Chicago.28 She later worked for the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which Malcolm X formed in 1964, and joined SNCC after his assassination.
Having worked with Malcolm X, and having met and interacted with Palestinians while in college, Minor was in a good position to merge her own interest in their cause with Malcolm X’s concern for the Palestinians and transmit the connection between their plight and that of American blacks to her staff colleagues at SNCC. Longtime SNCC activist Courtland Cox remembered that Minor was passionate about the Palestinians and often talked about their plight. “Ethel would talk to everybody! Ethel was dogged on this question. She was very focused on this question. [For her] it was not something peripheral.”29 Minor’s good friend Stokely Carmichael recalled, for example, that Minor organized a Middle East study group among SNCC staff members in the mid-1960s in Lowndes County, Alabama, where SNCC was active. Members of this group, which included Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, used to read one book a month and discuss it together. Carmichael also recalled that the group had spent two years reading about Zionism, the Palestinians, and the Arab-Israeli conflict by the time he assumed the chair in May of 1966. As a result of these discussions, Carmichael was dismayed by what he learned about Israel’s relationship with South Africa: “I have to say, discovering that the government of Israel was maintaining such a long, cozy, and warm relationship with the worst enemy of black people came as a real shock. A kind of betrayal. And, hey, we weren’t supposed to even talk about this? C’mon.”30
SNCC activists were also familiar with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a widely read book in the 1960s that described the Algerian struggle for independence from France and spoke of “Negroes and Arabs” together as one when discussing the colonized peoples of Africa. Algeria’s bloody war of independence proved quite influential in SNCC’s thinking, and the fact that Algeria was both African and Arab helped solidify the bond between blacks and Arabs in their minds. This no doubt deepened SNCC’s growing interest in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world.
One day in May of 1967, Carmichael and Brown were in Alabama chatting with Donald Jelinek, a lawyer who worked with SNCC. Jelinek, who was Jewish, expressed his positive feelings about Israel and his concerns about the Jewish state’s situation in that tension-filled month as war clouds were on the horizon in the Middle East. “So it was a shock to me,” Jelinek later recounted, “when my SNCC friends mildly indicated support for the Arabs.” Mildly stated or not, their sentiments prompted Jelinek to reply, “But they may wipe out and destroy Israel.” Carmichael adroitly changed the subject with some humor, and the men began laughing. Jelinek thereafter overheard Brown quietly singing to himself, “arms for the Arabs, sneakers for the Jews.” When Jelinek asked him what that song meant, an embarrassed Brown explained that he had learned the song as a student in Louisiana. It implied that the Israelis would need sneakers (tennis shoes) to run from the Arabs, who were armed with weapons from abroad. Brown then apologized.31 It was just one example of how Israel and Palestine were clearly on the minds of SNCC activists as the world focused on the situation in the Middle East. Another occurred later that same month, on May 31, when SNCC picketers participated in a pro-Arab demonstration in front of the White House staged by the Organization of Arab Students.32
SNCC headquarters in Atlanta was also focusing attention on the Middle East that spring of 1967. As tension between Israel and the Arab states rose in the Middle East, leading to considerable press coverage in the United States, several SNCC staff members were at work writing background papers on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to educate SNCC activists about what was happening. One staffer was Robert Moore of SNCC’s research department. On June 5, 1967, the day that Israel broke the tension and launched a war against the Arabs, Moore and two others, Karen Edmonds and Warcell “Tex” Williams, issued a news summary for their colleagues in Atlanta. The three authors noted that the news summary was designed to enlighten SNCC staffers who may have missed the stories coming out in the press or who did not have enough background information to make sense of the news. Because of the large amount of press coverage of Middle Eastern events, a full four pages of the document included a “History of Zionism and the Isreali-Arab [sic] Conflict.”
The section on the Arab-Israeli conflict discussed in detail subjects like the rise of Zionism and the British government’s November 1917 Balfour Declaration; the growth of the Jewish population of Palestine during the interwar period; the Holocaust and its effect of generating global sympathy for the Jewish people; the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine and the Arab response to that plan; the April 1948 massacre of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the village of Dayr Yasin during the first Arab-Israeli war; the exodus of Palestinian refugees during the war; and the rise of Palestinian guerrilla groups like al-Fateh in the 1960s. Perhaps realizing that they were treading on potentially hazardous political ground, the three writers also told the staff, in a memorandum attached to the news summary, “We welcome all constructive criticisms of the research department with open minds and open hearts, and without malice. If any of you have comments on the news summary, it would especially be appreciated. PLEASE READ.”33
By the time that SNCC’s central committee met that month to discuss the group’s position on Palestine, most committee members apparently supported the Palestinians. They could not agree, however, on whether this position should be articulated publicly because of the likelihood that it would affect fund-raising negatively—a reference to the fact that Jews in the North provided a good percentage of SNCC’s budget and were not likely to take kindly to a pro-Palestinian position. When the committee asked for more information on the Arab-Israeli conflict, it was Ethel Minor who apparently responded.34
Minor was at that time working as SNCC’s communications director in Atlanta, where she was described as “very efficient and we could not ask for a better worker.”35 She began researching the history of Israel and the Palestinians. Carmichael later claimed that in his last act as outgoing SNCC chair, he and Minor cowrote a “hard-hitting position paper, much of it in the form of sharp questions against a background of incontestable facts.” The paper, which was written in a question-and-answer format, was intended to generate discussion within SNCC and was only “possibly for distribution in the SNCC newsletter.”36
Minor in the communications department and the three staff members in the research department were not the only ones at SNCC who conducted research on the Arab-Israeli conflict. So had Jack Minnis, a legendary researcher who directed the research department until 1966. Several SNCC staff members recalled that his research on the Middle East also played a role in developing SNCC’s eventual policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict.37 Edmonds noted decades later that these various efforts were really all part of the same process of educating SNCC members about the issue. Her office abutted Minor’s, and she was in frequent daily contact with her about this and other issues. She recalled once overhearing Minor discussing the idea of actually publishing her piece with SNCC project director Ralph Featherstone: “I can remember Ethel discussing it ahead of time with ‘Feather.’ I remember him saying to her, ‘This is going to raise a real barnstorm.’ I think that was the term he used. And she said ‘Well, do you think we publish it?’ And he said ‘Yes.’”38
The topic therefore was not a secret around the office by the time that Minor decided to publish an article on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the SNCC Newsletter. “The publication was reviewed,” Edmonds recalled. “She [Minor] circulated it. There were discussions about it. She didn’t spring it on anybody. The sign-offs were done.”39 Years later, former SNCC staffer Charles Cobb Jr. remembered the document as it circulated within the office in the spring of 1967: “This was when we were beginning to look more seriously at the liberation struggles, particularly in Africa. But the 1967 Arab-Israeli War was very much in the air. What I recall about that position paper was a very general ongoing conversation in the Atlanta office. Folks would stop by, read it, make comments or suggestions. It was all very casual. On the level of ‘Hey, these folks [Palestinians] once had a country. Now they don’t, they’re all scattered and displaced. There’s something very wrong about that.’”40
Some of SNCC’s national leaders outside Atlanta knew about the pro-Palestinian feelings among SNCC staff members and worried about the domestic political repercussions of issuing any kind of statement critical of Israel during or shortly after the war, a war that many American Jews viewed as a war of survival forced on Israel by its Arab neighbors. James Forman was one of them. Forman was a major figure in SNCC and the growing Black Power movement. He served as SNCC’s executive secretary from 1961 to 1966, after which he became the head of the group’s newly created International Affairs Commission in May of 1967. The outbreak of war found him traveling overseas as part of his new assignment. A concerned Forman wrote in detail about the political ramifications of the issue to SNCC Executive Secretary Stanley Wise on June 7, 1967, the third day of the war.
From the outset in his letter Forman noted that public opinion in the United States was pro-Israeli, especially among Jews. The challenge was that there were many Jews in the “liberal-labor leadership circle” that had proven so supportive of SNCC in the past. Therefore, Forman wrote, “any black person of national stature who speaks against Israel must expect a certain isolation from the press—all white controlled and so forth.” He added, “I am trying to make an analysis and I am not saying that we should be worried about these matters, but we do need to analyze them.” He was careful to tell Wise that “if by chance or by design we were to take a position on the Arab-Israeli war such as we took on the war in Vietnam, the reaction would be fantastic against us. . . . I am not personally sure we can take a position at this moment.”41
Forman’s letter indicated how ambivalent he was personally about SNCC coming out with a pro-Palestinian stance at that time. On the one hand, he offered Wise a cautionary note. Yet later in the same letter, Forman pointed out that “the ‘gut’ reaction in many [black] people is against Israel and for the Arabs, reflecting black-white tension, the hardening of racism, and the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves in this country.” He also believed that if the war continued, the “class struggle in the black community will become sharper.” Forman wrote, “Actually Israel represents an extension of United States foreign policy as well as an attempt by the Zionists to create a homeland for the Jews.” In this regard he was careful to note that SNCC “must have ‘clarity’ about the real essence of the Arab-Israeli struggle: class and not merely racial analysis.” Despite his caution and desire for more “clarity,” Forman’s letter also revealed an activist’s frustration with play-it-safe politics and a desire to speak out on Palestine, no matter what the consequences: “Is it not sheer opportunism to keep silent for the sake of trying to please the crowd? Is the role of leadership always to think that it is enough to know what people are thinking, and only to say those things we know will be acceptable? How are we going to lead people within the United States and relate them to international forces, when we ourselves are afraid to say those things which we know are true?”42
A few days later, with the war winding down and Israel poised to complete a massive victory over Arab forces, Forman again wrote to Wise about the issue. Setting aside his activist’s inclinations, he again cautioned SNCC to be extremely cautious about taking a public stance against Israel. Three issues were of particular concern to him. The first was that SNCC needed to call a special meeting to educate its staff about this issue before going public, so that staff members would understand more about the issue and why SNCC was taking such a position. Second, Forman remained very worried about the hostile reaction that was sure to come should the group come out publicly in favor of the Palestinians and other Arabs. “I know that we would be united internally, but the external pressures would be fantastic, especially in New York,” where SNCC maintained a fund-raising office. Finally, he was concerned that the situation in the Middle East was “very muddy,” and he believed that SNCC should wait to see what transpired. In this regard Forman seemed to be concerned “about the wording of any position, for that is a very delicate question given the nature of the governments of some countries.”43
At some point in midsummer of 1967, after Israel’s six-day victory in the war, Minor and the SNCC staff in Atlanta reached the fateful decision to publish an article on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the SNCC Newsletter. The publication was done as a local initiative for educating SNCC activists; Minor never claimed that the piece she published represented SNCC policy or an official stance reached by the group’s leadership. On the contrary, she made it clear that it was presented simply to help readers understand the Arab-Israeli conflict better and to explain “how it relates to our struggle here.” The reasons readers should become more familiar with overseas events, Minor wrote in the piece, echoed the Black Power internationalist sentiments of Malcolm X and the growing consensus within SNCC: black Americans were “an integral part of the Third World (Africa, Asia, Latin America, American Indians and all persons of African descent)” and therefore needed to know what “our brothers are doing in their homelands.”44 It was a question of revolutionary black identity. Minor’s article stated bluntly why SNCC Newsletter staff members were taking it on themselves to provide such information on the conflict: “Since we know that the white American press seldom, if ever, gives the true story about world events in which America is involved, then we are taking this opportunity to present the following documented facts on this problem [Palestine Problem]. These facts not only affect the lives of our brothers in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, but also pertain to our struggle here.”45
The article that Minor published in the June-July 1967 SNCC Newsletter was titled “The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge” and consisted of thirty-two statements about Israel and the Palestinians that were answers to the question “Do you know?” All were strongly critical of Zionism and Israel, which it called an “illegal” state. Such sentiments were apparent from the very first statement:
[Do you know] THAT Zionism, which is a worldwide nationalistic Jewish movement, organized, planned and created the “State of Isreal [sic]” by sending Jewish immigrants from Europe into Palestine (the heart of the Arab world) to take over land and homes belonging to the Arabs?
Some of the statements merely stated facts that, while perhaps not widely known in America, were fairly straightforward:
THAT this [Israeli] conquest of Arab land took place, for the most part, before May 15, 1948, before the formal end of British rule, before the Arab armies entered to protect Palestinain [sic] Arabs, and before the Arab Israeli War?
Others, while based on the historical record, were presented in hard-hitting, polemical fashion:
THAT the Zionist terror gangs (Haganah, Irgun, and Stern gangs) deliberately slaughtered and mutilated women, children and men, thereby causing the unarmed Arabs to panic, flee and leave their homes in the hands of the Zionist-Israel forces.46
Other statements underscored SNCC’s growing identification with African liberation struggles and the racial prism through which it increasingly viewed international issues. One asked readers if they knew that the Rothschild family of Jews not only conspired with the British to create Israel but also “THAT THE ROTHSCHILDS ALSO CONTROL MUCH OF AFRICA’S MINERAL WEALTH?” Another asked if they knew that “dark skinned Jews from the Middle East and North Africa are also second-class citizens in Israel, and that the color line puts them in inferior position to the white, European Jews?”47
The article featured three photographs and two cartoons. Two of the photographs carried the caption “Gaza Massacres, 1956. Zionists lined up Arab victims and shot them in the back in cold blood. This is the Gaza Strip, Palestine, not Dachau, Germany.” The cartoons in particular proved to be immensely controversial, perhaps even more so than the article and photographs. They were the work of Herman “Kofi” Bailey, who drew cartoons for SNCC publications although he was not actually a member of the staff. The cartoons he drew for the article gave visual depth to Minor’s themes. The first one featured the face of retired Israeli general Moshe Dayan, easily recognizable by his trademark eye patch, who as Israel’s defense minister had overseen its victory in the recent war. In addition to a Star of David on Dayan’s uniform, there were dollar signs on each of the two epaulettes on his shoulders. The other cartoon featured the American boxer Muhammad Ali along with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, each with a noose around his neck. The nooses were at opposite ends of a rope that was grasped by a hand emblazoned with a dollar sign within a Star of David. Another, scimitar-carrying arm labeled “Third World liberation movement,” was preparing to cut the rope and free the two men.48
The issue of the SNCC Newsletter containing the article was dated June-July 1967 but was actually published in mid-August. The public reaction was immediate. Some reacted quite hostilely, others more positively. SNCC activist Phil Hutchings recalls how anxious people were to read the issue. He showed up at an event in New York City in August of 1967 with a number of copies of the newsletter to distribute shortly after it came out. Decades later Hutchings recalled how people thronged to get a copy: “And I got there at the very end of the meeting, and people were walking out the door and I went up to the person who was chairing the meeting and said, ‘Can I make an announcement?’ And I said, ‘I have the new newspaper of SNCC with the article on Israel and Zionism.’ People literally turned around who had walked outside. I got mobbed. I mean not physically mobbed, but I mean, these people, everybody wanted that paper because that was the issue, and I was sold out in probably about five minutes.”49
As attested to by the positive reception Hutchings experienced that day, SNCC activists clearly were not alone in their attitudes about the Arab-Israeli conflict in the summer of 1967. Supporting and identifying with the Palestinians in their struggle with Israel came naturally, easily, and sincerely to Black Power militants. For them it was a question of identity. Global anticolonial movements deeply affected the development of Black Power consciousness in the United States. African American solidarity with colonial peoples overseas helped these activists redefine blackness.50 Transnational oppression abroad affected black identity in the United States in symbiotic fashion: blacks viewed racism, imperialism, and oppression around the world as extensions of the American racism they faced at home, and in turn they considered it their duty to fight oppression overseas.51 Nigerian scholar E. U. Essien-Udom had written five years earlier, in 1962, that African independence struggles already had had a transformative effect on the self-consciousness and conceptualization of identity—what he called a “new psychology”—among American blacks.52
SNCC’s stance on Palestine therefore served as an important example of its attempts to build a revolutionary identity and culture for black Americans. Fanon was clear in The Wretched of the Earth when he wrote that people of color needed to destroy the vestiges of mental colonialism and instead foster a culture of “negritude.” He also consciously compared the need for blacks in America to decolonize their minds with the need for Arabs to do the same: “The poets of negritude will not stop at the continent. . . . From America black voices will take up the hymn with fuller union. . . . The example of the Arab world might equally well be quoted here.”53 Black Power had fired its first major shot in its battle to include support for the Palestinians in its definition of negritude in the United States.
BLACK DEMANDS AT THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR NEW POLITICS
By August 1967, young Harvard professor Martin Peretz had been at work on his plan for months. Peretz was one of a number of left-wing activists who believed that the time had come for the various sections of the black freedom struggle, the white New Left, and their respective sympathizers to come together and discuss joint political action. Such action to create a “third force” in American politics might even include running candidates as an electoral alternative to the Democratic Party in the upcoming November 1968 presidential elections. Peretz and his colleagues therefore decided to plan a conference around the “new politics” that had emerged in the 1960s, and he became one of the main organizers and financial backers of the conference. Little did he realize that the meeting that eventually was held in the late summer of 1967 once again would showcase Black Power criticism of Israel, much to his chagrin.
There was considerable momentum behind the idea of a new politics conference. The idea for the conference emerged out of meetings among civil rights advocates, the student New Left, and anti–Vietnam War groups that had begun to emerge in mid-1965, conversations that led to the eventual establishment of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP). Its cochairs were Julian Bond, an SNCC activist and member of the Georgia House of Representatives, and reformist Democratic Party activist Simon Casady. A number of nationally recognized figures, both blacks and whites, served on the NCNP national council, including Peretz, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., and several dozen others. The NCNP was seen by many on both the liberal Left and radical Left as a major opportunity to discuss united action to change America. Indeed, preconference publicity stated, “We want to talk about 1968 and Beyond. We start with one committment [sic]! Don’t mourn for America—ORGANIZE!”54
More than twelve hundred delegates from some two hundred organizations arrived for the opening of the NCNP on August 31, 1967, at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. More than two thousand others also attended the gathering as observers before it closed on September 4. Expectations were high. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the keynote address at an opening rally held at the Chicago Coliseum. But the NCNP was immediately beset with black-white tensions, which quickly led to conflict over what position to take vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The mostly white NCNP organizers had worked hard during the summer of 1967 to ensure black participation in the conference, months that included not only the June war in the Middle East but the bloody black insurrections in July in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan, as well. Their efforts did lead to several hundred African Americans showing up, but the politics of Black Power, combined with the angry mood in black America after Newark and Detroit, quickly created an atmosphere of tension. Some 350 blacks immediately staged a walkout to form their own separate conference, while approximately 400 others remained and formed a black caucus within the NCNP that presented a thirteen-point policy statement to the other conference delegates. They demanded that it be adopted lest they, too, abandon the meeting. Anxious to support black aspirations and worried that disunity could tear apart the meeting, whites voted three-to-one to adopt the statement.55
One part of the policy statement that caused long-lasting controversy even after the conference ended was a condemnation of Israel’s attack on Arab states three months earlier. A group called the Ad Hoc Committee on the Middle East later claimed that one of its members, a black American who had embraced Islam named Ali Anwar, introduced the statement on Israel in the black caucus.56 Beyond Anwar, SNCC’s H. Rap Brown and James Forman reportedly were among those who had lobbied for inclusion of the statement.57 The policy statement condemned “the imperialistic Zionist war” and added that “this condemnation does not imply anti-Semitism.”
Many delegates were surprised and outraged by this particular part of the black policy statement. The fact that SNCC had just issued its own blistering attack on Israel earlier that month exacerbated the situation. Some white liberals and leftists saw Israel as a beleaguered little country that had acted in self-defense in the recent war to prevent another Holocaust and that the Arab territories it now controlled were merely the fruits of a war it was forced to fight. Debate immediately broke out after the statement was presented for a vote. NCNP official Robert Scheer proposed changing the wording of the statement to call for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and Arab recognition of Israel. Despite his high position in the NCNP, the assembled delegates voted to deny even giving him the floor to speak.58 Martin Luther King Jr. later claimed that the director of voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Hosea Williams, raised “spirited opposition” to the black caucus’s Israel plank from the floor.59 Militants within the black caucus even pulled a gun on SCLC’s James Bevel and threatened to kill him when he tried to speak out against the Israel resolution.60
In the end the uproar partially succeeded in forcing the black caucus to back down. Caucus members agreed to remove specific references to Zionism in the policy statement and to refer the final wording of the document to the conference’s executive board. On September 4, 1967, the day the NCNP concluded, a spokesman for the caucus said that the condemnation of the “imperialist Zionist war” in the statement had been changed to a condemnation of “the Israeli government” for starting the war.61 Critics were hardly mollified.
The NCNP highlighted several growing fissures among the black freedom struggle, the Left, and the antiwar movement. First, it became clear that the divide between traditional civil rights groups like King’s SCLC and Black Power militants was widening, with significant implications for their respective understandings of black identity, activism, and relations with white groups. Second, it was becoming more obvious that liberals and even moderate white leftists were following different trajectories than were Black Power advocates in their assessments of international affairs and the United States’ role in the Third World. Finally, with the antiwar movement adopting the new strategy “from protest to resistance” in 1967, both liberals and the moderate Left were coming face-to-face with a radical black nationalism that was not merely content to challenge American society and foreign policy but to revolutionize it. It also had become clear that support for the Palestinians was part and parcel of that revolution.
The public attacks on Israel mounted by SNCC and blacks at the NCNP in the summer of 1967 stunned many in America and indicated that the Black Power movement was interested in more than just domestic race relations and the war in Vietnam. These attacks set in motion the drama of different black views on the Arab-Israeli conflict, views that competed with one another throughout the rest of the 1960s and 1970s. How African Americans understood the Arab-Israeli conflict was becoming a major component of how they understood their country and their world during that period.