CHAPTER 2

THE FIRE THIS TIME

SNCC, Jews, and the Demise of the Beloved Community

ON AUGUST 14, 1967, Irving Shulman, the southeastern director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, publicly laid into SNCC for what its recent newsletter article had said about Israel. He accused SNCC of anti-Semitism and of having followed “the pro-Arab, Soviet and racist lines” on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arnold Forster, the ADL’s general counsel, commented the same day that “it is a tragedy that the civil rights movement is being degraded by the injection of hatred and racism in reverse.”1 At least four other national Jewish groups issued statements denouncing SNCC two days later. Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), summed up their outrage: “Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism whether it comes from the Ku Klux Klan or from extremist Negro groups, ‘Snick’ included.” Abram was also careful to echo what the ADL had said: that SNCC’s article put it in the same anti-Israeli trench as the Arab world and the Soviet Union.² Clearly the article had touched a nerve, and Black Power voices in support of the Palestinians immediately found themselves in the national spotlight in the late summer of 1967.

Jews and Jewish organizations, particularly those who had supported SNCC financially and morally in the past, were outraged by SNCC’s article on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For them, Israel’s victory over the Arabs just two months earlier was nothing short of miraculous. They firmly believed that Israel was a progressive democracy eminently worthy of Americans’ support. The thought that fellow Americans not only would question that view, but actually champion the Arabs, criticize Israel, and compare Israelis to Nazis, came as nothing short of a thunderbolt. The fact that those particular fellow Americans were blacks, whose cause Jews had supported, added to the sense of betrayal.

THE JEWISH BACKLASH AGAINST SNCC

Jews had long advocated for black liberation by, for example, playing a role in the foundation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Jewish support for blacks was well known; as early as February of 1942, the American Jewish Committee published a study titled “Jewish Contribution to Negro Welfare.”3 Having experienced the sting of anti-Semitism, many Jews believed they were fighting in the same trench against discrimination alongside African Americans. When the civil rights struggle grew to become a mass movement in the 1950s and early 1960s, Jewish moral and financial support was crucial, and Jews were disproportionately well-represented among those whites who lent their support to the cause. Jewish financial contributions to civil rights groups were also significant. Jews even were the subject of criticism from some southern whites for the high-profile role they played in helping blacks win their freedom. All this compounded a sense of betrayal by SNCC that was felt by many Jewish Americans.

But the fiercely hostile Jewish reaction to the SNCC newsletter came in the context of years of deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews that were the subject of much public discussion by the early and mid-1960s. Several factors help explain this communal tension. One was the question of alleged “black anti-Semitism.” Blacks had attacked Jews for years about how they treated them; black writers Kenneth Clark and James Baldwin aired such grievances against Jews as far back as the mid to late 1940s.⁴ Some black claims of exploitative inner-city Jewish landlords and shopkeepers who took advantage of them used language speaking of “Jewish” landlords (not just “white” landlords or “greedy” landlords), which Jews interpreted as anti-Semitic.⁵

Another common black refrain was that Jews were taking the money they made exploiting blacks back to their own neighborhoods, neither putting anything back into the community nor hiring local black employees. In his 1961 classic The Black Muslims in America, C. Eric Lincoln quoted an unnamed source in the Nation of Islam (NOI) who described his or her attitudes toward Jewish businessmen: “‘The Jew comes in and brings his family. He opens a business and hires his wife, his mother-in-law, all his brothers-in-law, and then he sends to the old country to get his father and mother, sisters and brothers—even his uncles—and he hires them all. Meanwhile, the so-called Negroes are footing the bill, but there isn’t a black face behind a single counter in the store. . . . But the Jew doesn’t live above the business any more. He’s moved on out to the suburbs and is living in the best house black money can buy.’”6

Yet another source of communal tension was blacks’ complaints that the Jews they regularly encountered as schoolteachers, social workers, employers, and even civil rights volunteers interacted with them in patronizing fashion. As for Jewish financial contributions to the cause of civil rights, some blacks dismissed these as mere “conscience money” given to “keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.”⁷

The rise of Black Power only sharpened such complaints, as blacks and black organizations moved to take control over their own neighborhoods and organizations, sometimes to the direct exclusion of Jews and other whites. An example of this was when SNCC asked all white members to leave in late 1966 and go organize among white communities, leaving blacks to control SNCC’s destiny.

Some African Americans tried to put these criticisms of Jews in context, pointing out, for example, that many of the whites with whom blacks had contact in the inner cities happened to be Jewish: black anger at Jews therefore really meant anger at whites. Municipal school districts like some in New York City did have a high percentage of Jews among their teaching and administrative staffs, which meant, as with shopkeepers and landlords, the whites that many urban blacks most encountered there were Jewish. In April of 1967 James Baldwin stated this famously in his opinion piece in the New York Times Magazine titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” A 1967 report on anti-Semitism issued by the American Jewish Committee agreed, noting that “among many Negroes, anti-Jewish feeling appears to be simply an expression of general anti-white feeling, for the Jew is often the white man they know the best.”⁸

Compounding Jewish anger at complaints from blacks in the poverty-stricken inner cities were remarks emanating from noted black leaders and writers that unnerved many Jews in the early and mid-1960s. Malcolm X openly criticized Jews. Black Arts Movement poet LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, incensed Jews with his anti-Semitic poetry.9 Black cultural nationalist writer Harold Cruse created a stir in 1967 when he published The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership, which contained harsh comments on what he perceived as the negative influence on blacks by Jewish intellectuals. Jews, Cruse alleged, had deigned to understand blacks and their needs from their own perspective. Their prominence in the civil rights struggle meant that Jews had passed along this perspective to blacks themselves, who needed to break free of such constraints and develop their own culture and leadership.

Cruse also leveled another criticism of Jews: their claim to be fellow sufferers along with blacks. He dismissed such talk, stating that Jews had not suffered in America and could not seriously expect blacks to believe that they stood on the same level in this regard. Noted writer James Baldwin agreed with Cruse on that point. “One does not wish, in short,” Baldwin wrote that same year, “to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.” He continued by noting that whatever suffering Jews may have experienced, it occurred overseas; black suffering occurred here at home.¹⁰

Moreover, Baldwin said that in the end Jews were still white in an America founded on a racial fault line and therefore had benefited from white-skin privilege: “The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. . . . He is white and values his color and uses it.” Baldwin also argued that Jews’ white-skin privilege led them to lecture blacks about the need for nonviolence in their search for justice: “The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums. . . . While America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers.”¹¹

Jews began firing back publicly in their defense, which added to the friction. One of the most noteworthy early examples was Norman Podhoretz. Using his position as editor of Commentary magazine starting in 1960, Podhoretz began writing about the growing problems between Jews and blacks in America. In February of 1963 Podhoretz published a landmark article titled “My Negro Problem—and Ours” in Commentary. He used the article to discuss his youth as a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1930s and how, from his perspective, blacks were not oppressed but rather were the oppressors—of him personally.12 Six years later sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote that the tension between the two minority groups stemmed from the fact that Jews were disproportionately well-represented among those whites who were involved with the civil rights movement. So when SNCC demanded that whites leave the group so that blacks could run their own groups and set their own agendas, he argued, this in effect meant that Jews should leave.¹³ Lipset also argued that black attacks on Israel in the 1960s actually had nothing to do with Israel itself but were simply a way that blacks could express their anti-Semitism by attacking a surrogate: “They [blacks] attack Israel and Zionism as an expedient way of voicing their anti-Semitism. In essence, therefore, the attack on Israel on the part of some sections of the Negro community reflects tensions in the local American scene, not in the Middle East.”¹⁴

Against this background of communal tension came SNCC’s passionately pro-Arab, anti-Israeli newsletter and the controversy about Israel at the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, both in the late summer of 1967. In the context of these increasingly embittered black-Jewish relations, Jews and Jewish organizations were livid. Two particular themes emerged from the sharp Jewish criticism of SNCC in the months after the newsletter came out. The first dealt with Jews and black anti-Semitism: blacks and Jews had worked together in defense of civil rights in the United States, and therefore SNCC’s article represented an anti-Semitic blot on that record of bicommunal cooperation. The other theme focused on Israel and international affairs: SNCC had now sided with Arab and communist nations, thus representing a threat not only to Israel but to America as well. Faced with the uproar, SNCC fought back.

SNCC ON THE DEFENSIVE

SNCC staffers in Atlanta quickly mobilized to deal with the brouhaha over the newsletter. After all, they knew ahead of time that there would probably be a negative reaction. Decades later, several former SNCC staff members remembered those tense times. Karen Edmonds recalled: “It didn’t catch us by surprise. We made it happen. . . . The Palestinian question was one of many struggles for independence or against colonialism, so to take a position on the Palestinian struggle with the Zionists was not anything out of character for us. We took positions on just about every struggle against oppression. . . . We all knew it was coming.”15 Her colleague Charles Cobb felt similarly: “By this time we weren’t really surprised by any negative reaction to anything we were doing. It was a little surprising in the sense that the piece on Palestine was not an advocacy piece as much as an informational piece. . . . We had learned by this time that any piece of our thinking that was outside the mainstream box would be denounced.”¹⁶ Courtland Cox agreed: “It wasn’t a hard sell in SNCC. We were very clear about what was going on. We had taken our position on Vietnam. I was at the Russell Tribunal. Charlie [Cobb] had been to North Vietnam. What Ethel [Minor] did was focus and give us some facts about what was going on. . . . Palestine was another example of what was happening to us. It was happening to us, and it was the same people involved in our oppression who were involved in their oppression over there. People saw people in like situations.”¹⁷ The resultant hostility leveled at SNCC by whites only deepened SNCC’s determined to speak out on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

SNCC activists knew they were likely to be attacked harshly for the newsletter article but went ahead with its publication because their stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict stemmed from their worldview and their sense of black identity and struggle. SNCC truly believed that American blacks needed to fight more than Jim Crow laws in the South and conditions of racism and poverty both there and in the North; they also needed to take part in the worldwide struggle against imperialism and capitalism—the structural underpinnings that held back the progress of oppressed people of color both in America and across the globe.

Moreover, perhaps more than any other foreign policy issue except Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli conflict was recognized by SNCC activists as an example where their own government was playing a leading role in supporting the side that they considered to be the aggressors, the local client of American imperialism. Israel’s ties with racist South Africa also enraged them. It was for these reasons that supporting the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel was not simply an abstract issue of revolutionary solidarity with another oppressed people of color but part and parcel of SNCC’s deeply held belief that America was the enemy both of its black citizens and of the Palestinians. This belief introduced a new discourse into American political life: open support for the Palestinians.

To explain this and defend their position on Israel and the Palestinians, staff members from the Atlanta office called a press conference on August 14, 1967. Ethel Minor joined Program Director Ralph Featherstone and Executive Secretary Stanley Wise in explaining the article to the assembled journalists. Featherstone ended up bearing the brunt of media attention at this and subsequent press conferences. Featherstone had taken part in Minor’s Arab-Israeli conflict book group in the mid-1960s. In May of 1966 he joined SNCC’s central committee and was elected program secretary one year later in May of 1967. The New York Times quoted Featherstone as saying at the press conference that SNCC sought a “third world alliance of oppressed people all over the world—Africa, Asia and Latin America,” adding that Arabs were oppressed, too. More controversially, the Times also claimed that Featherstone linked Israeli oppression of Palestinians to Jews’ oppression of blacks in the United States by saying that SNCC was not against Jews as a whole but “only Jewish oppressors” in Israel and “those Jews in the little Jew shops in the [American] ghettos.”18

The attribution to Featherstone of the phrases “Jewish oppressors” and “little Jew shops in the ghettos” drew additional opprobrium from Jewish organizations. In their minds SNCC’s attack on Zionism and Israel seemed linked to the group’s own anti-Semitic views of Jews in America. Those words put SNCC generally and Featherstone personally on the defensive. But did he actually utter them? The historical record is not clear. In an internal document written in the fall of 1967, an SNCC staff member denied that Featherstone had used such language at the August 14 press conference and claimed that the New York Times had misquoted him. Based on conversations the document’s author had with Featherstone, the writer stated “that the term Jew shop and some of the other formulations were foreign to his [Featherstone’s] thinking.” The author also claimed to have researched other newspapers and press agencies that covered the press conference and found that none of them quoted Featherstone as having said anything like that.¹⁹

The Chicago Defender, however, a noted black newspaper, did quote Featherstone as saying something similar: “Some people might interpret what we’re saying as Anti-Semitic. But they can’t deny it is the Jews who are exploiting black people in the ghettos. And there is a parallel between this and the oppression of the Arabs by the Israelis.”20 Whether or not Featherstone actually used phrases like “Jew shops in the ghettos,” the New York Times story, appearing as it did in the most prestigious newspaper of record in the United States, became the official public record of what transpired at the Atlanta press conference and did little to dampen the mounting hostility against SNCC.

The day after the press conference, the Atlanta office issued a press release titled “The Middle-East Crisis.” Perhaps trying to address the charges of anti-Semitism that were being leveled against SNCC, the first sentences of the document mentioned the Holocaust and noted, “SNCC understands this tragedy of what happened to the Jews and sympathizes with them since we black people possibly face the same fate here in the United States. . . . We recognize Hitler’s massacre of the Jews as one of the worst crimes against humanity.” It then connected this with Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians: “By the same token, we do not see how the Jewish refugees and survivors could ever use this tragedy as an excuse to imitate their Nazi oppressors—to take over Palestine, to commit some of the same atrocities against the native Arab inhabitants, and to completely dispossess the Arabs of their homes, land and livelihood.”²¹

The press release then went on to reiterate, sometimes verbatim, the points raised in the newsletter article, points that the statement claimed “have been completely hushed up in the United States press and T.V. news media.” Connecting Middle Eastern events with the United States government, it boldly noted: “Gentlemen, the facts are that Israel is and always has been the tool and foot-hold for American and British exploitation in the Middle-East and Africa. . . . In the Middle-East, America has worked with and used the powerful organized Zionist movement to take over another people’s home and to replace these people with a partner who has well served America’s purpose, a partner that can help the United States and other white western countries to exploit and control the nations of Africa, the Middle-East and Africa!”²² The hard-hitting press release probably did little to assuage SNCC’s critics, but it did clarify SNCC activists’ thinking about why they were taking the Palestinian side.

Bob Smith and John A. “Johnny” Miller of SNCC’s fund-raising office in New York also quickly held a press conference on August 15 amid the uproar. Miller, who was head of the office, used the opportunity to state that staff members in his office had been caught unawares by the article, and he further stated that it did not represent any official SNCC position.²³ Three days later, Featherstone joined SNCC’s new chair, H. Rap Brown, in New York at yet another press conference, where they rebutted charges of anti-Semitism and stood by the group’s criticism of Israel and Zionism. Featherstone stated, “Our position was clearly anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. It was a bit disconcerting to us, the reaction from the Jewish community, in that anything that is not pro-Jewish is interpreted as anti-Jewish.”24

Brown chimed in as well. He went on to become one of the most visible figures associated with the Black Power movement in the 1960s, once famously writing that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”²⁵ Resenting the focus on alleged black anti-Semitism, Brown stated at the press conference that “white America has a longer history of anti-Semitism than black America.” He continued: “We are not anti-Jewish and we are not anti-Semitic. We just don’t think Zionist leaders in Israel have a right to that land.” Finally, Brown also denied that SNCC obtained money from Arab sources but did state that SNCC had obtained the information on which the newsletter article was based from information obtained from research conducted in Atlanta libraries, as well as material obtained from Arab embassies.²⁶

Critics of SNCC quickly made political hay out of this last point: that SNCC had used Arab public relations/propaganda material as the basis for the newsletter article. Several Jewish groups had claimed right away that the SNCC article, in the words of American Zionist Council chair Israel Miller, sounded like “propaganda statements, which pattern those of the Communist and Arab extremists.”²⁷ Several months after the article came out, the ADL issued a publication in October of 1967 claiming that the article in fact had cited almost verbatim from two texts written by Palestinian authors.²⁸ The first source was a pamphlet published in May of 1965 by the PLO’s Research Center in Beirut titled Do You Know? Twenty Basic Questions About the Palestine Problem.²⁹ The pamphlet had been written by Fayez Sayegh, a leading Palestinian-Syrian scholar, public relations/propaganda official, and member of the PLO executive committee. The other source was The Enraging Story of Palestine and Its People,³⁰ published in 1965 by the head of the PLO’s office in New York, Izzat Tannous. The ADL offered no reason why using these sources should cast doubt on the validity of the facts contained in SNCC’s article; no doubt the ADL thought that the public would consider that use of Arab-produced material somehow had a sinister ring to it and therefore would make SNCC seem to be hapless dupes of Arab propagandists.

Behind the scenes SNCC staff members were concerned enough about the newsletter controversy that they prepared internal guidelines and explanations for how they should deal with the ongoing queries about the group’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was apparent from a draft document written by SNCC’s New York office that the organization decided publicly to distance the group’s leadership from the newsletter article. The unsigned, undated, handwritten document declared that the SNCC Newsletter did not represent the official position of SNCC, of its international affairs commission in the New York office, or of its central committee. It stated that SNCC’s central committee “has no policy for or against the Arabics [sic], or for or against the Jews.” As for the newsletter, the document suggested that staff members say that the group sought to print the viewpoints of all sides to the conflict, although “it so happens that we printed the Arabic side first.”31

Another internal document, titled “Suggested Response to Questions Dealing with SNCC and Israel,” was probably produced in the Atlanta office to help staff members deal with media inquiries. It stated, “Our opposition is political opposition to the state of Israel, not to Jews.” If some Jews equated Jewishness with Zionism, and thus felt attacked, that was their “error,” not SNCC’s. Pressing on a sensitive nerve in black history, the document suggested that the hostile reaction to SNCC’s position was tantamount to a lynching. The document argued that this was the case because no one yet had refuted any of the actual facts printed in the newsletter, facts that hitherto had been suppressed by the American media. The document then waxed bitter: “It is also evident that there has been no honest discussion of the Middle East Crisis among Jewish liberals, whose liberality suddenly has become strangely like facism [sic]. It is unfortunate that Jewish liberals have allowed their often times acute political perceptions to have dissolved under the power of emotion.”³²

The two Kofi Bailey cartoons that appeared in the newsletter were singled out for particular attack because many perceived them as anti-Semitic, pandering to vicious stereotypes of Jewish money controlling the world. SNCC denied that Bailey’s drawings were anti-Semitic, explaining in a subsequent newsletter what the cartoons really had been about. The Stars of David and dollar signs had not been making a statement about Jews at all, SNCC claimed, but rather were symbols of Israel and the United States, respectively. An editor’s note in the September-October issue of the SNCC Newsletter explained: “In the Cartoon with Nasser and Muhammad Ali, the Star of David on the hand holding rope symbolized ZIONISM strangling the Arabor [sic] Muslim World. The dollar sign was used to show the United States strangling Muhammad Ali, and also the Arabas [sic] through using Israel. Both signs were placed on the hand to indicate the close relationship of the United States with ZIONISM and U.S. support of the Zionist State—Israel.”33

Throughout the late summer and fall of 1967 SNCC continued to fight back against its critics and uncompromisingly state its support of the Palestinians against Israel. This was more than just defending a stance; it was SNCC defending its very identity and vision of principled activism. Two weeks after the brouhaha over the newsletter article first broke, H. Rap Brown spoke at an event titled “Vietnam and Black America,” which drew three thousand people at the Village Theater in New York City on August 29, 1967. Brown criticized the white antiwar movement, calling it “hypocritical” for protesting against the war in Vietnam but remaining silent when Israel attacked the Arabs. “When the shit hit the fan in the Middle East,” Brown intoned, “you dug in your pockets and supported it [Israel’s war].”³⁴ An opinion piece in the September 1967 issue of The Movement, a San Francisco publication associated with SNCC, continued this questioning of SNCC’s erstwhile white allies. The article bluntly questioned the motives of those who opposed US president Lyndon B. Johnson but hailed Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, as well as those who opposed dropping napalm bombs on Vietnamese people but supported the napalming of Arabs as “necessary.” It also acidly claimed that whites who denounced SNCC did so out of fear that blacks were starting to make foreign policy statements opposing those of the elites in the country.³⁵

This last point was significant in that it reflected the fact that SNCC’s specific stance on Israel and the Palestinians reflected deeper existential issues bubbling below the surface—an indication of how the group’s attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict was central to its identity and evolving sense of self as a black organization. SNCC’s charge that white critics were actually afraid of militant blacks daring to speak out on foreign policy issues reflected the attitudes that some blacks already had been feeling for some time: that their voices were not welcome in the realm of foreign policy and other elite fields traditionally dominated by well-educated whites. Thus, for SNCC it was not merely a question of a Black Power group siding with the Palestinians out of Third World solidarity but one that also reflected a deeper black complaint about the patronizing nature of the liberal white elite that claimed to support black aspirations. One of the earliest manifestations of Black Power to have emerged within SNCC in 1966 was the desire for blacks to run the organization themselves and not cede leadership to well-intentioned white liberals. SNCC activists insisted on attacking the perceived enemies of people of color both at home and abroad regardless of what whites or even establishment blacks thought.

Subsequent SNCC publications picked up on the theme of black autonomy. The September–October 1967 SNCC Newsletter claimed that the hostile reaction to the article on the Middle East in the previous issue was rooted in American racism, in the unspoken question, “How dare blacks comment on foreign affairs?” An article in the newsletter written by Junebug Jabo Jones (a pseudonym) seems to have been based on internal “talking points” documents drawn up by SNCC staff members as the controversy broke. The article challenged Jewish liberals to examine the Arab-Israeli conflict without emotion. Black radicals “have no emotional hang-ups about criticizing reactionary African governments” or “Uncle Tom leaders in this country,” Jones wrote, so by that logic, why should American Jews be reticent to criticize Israel? The article also conceded that SNCC’s liberal Jewish allies could not be expected to back SNCC’s ongoing efforts to support Third World revolutionary movements such as that being waged by the Arab world: “perhaps we have taken the liberal Jewish community or certain segments of it as far as it can go. . . . Our message to conscious people everywhere is ‘Don’t get caught on the wrong side of the revolution.’” Jones continued by noting that Arabs are Semites, too, like Jews, and that “our position is that it is anti-Semitic to napalm a Semitic people, as Israel did to the Syrian Arabs in June.”36

The same issue of The Movement also challenged Jews to reread the original newsletter article “in good faith, quietly and without malice aforethought” rather than resorting to “hysterical” attacks on SNCC that amount to “slander.” This, the writers suggested to SNCC’s critics, indicates that “you have lost you [sic] cool: you are afraid.” The opinion piece stated that SNCC knew all too well that a people must not be judged as a group. It took care to point out that SNCC’s position on the Arab-Israeli conflict required it to examine the actions of Israel as a state, not Jews as a people. If such an examination determined that the actions of that state were wrong and require it to be condemned, then “SNCC has never flinched from speaking its mind.”37 SNCC argued that true progressives were those who were consistent in their advocacy for justice and their condemnation of oppression—regardless of who or what country was the aggrieved or who the oppressor was. If SNCC’s Jewish critics were aghast that the group had dared to position Israel as an aggressor, SNCC activists were equally vehement in their denunciation of what they considered pseudo-progressives who hypocritically were willing to criticize everyone except their own people.

By the end of 1967, SNCC was still not apologizing and was taking no prisoners in its public pronouncements about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The December issue of the SNCC Newsletter proudly proclaimed that the organization “reaffirms its political opposition to Zionism.”³⁸ Internal SNCC documents also reflect a stiffening of the back in the face of the withering criticism the group had received. An article that seems to have been written in SNCC’s New York office derided the claims that SNCC was anti-Semitic as a “big lie” propagated by a “wolf pack” consisting of “establishment Jewish organizations” and even many progressive Jews. Again referencing the image of lynching, the article asserted that these people were “out to get SNCC’s blood.” Furthermore, the document noted that many Jews considered criticism of Israel anti-Semitic. If this is the case, then, “SNCC qualifies as such. It admittedly is ‘guilty’ of charging Israel with aggression and with acting as the imperialist’s catspaw against the Arabs.”³⁹ A September 1967 editorial in The Movement had put these same sentiments bluntly a few months earlier: SNCC is “partisan” and “political.” As such, “SNCC clearly supports the revolutionary aspirations of the Third World: and Israel, as characterized by the actions of its statesmen and military men, is opposed to these aspirations.”⁴⁰

THE LONG-TERM IMPACT ON SNCC

SNCC’s fortunes changed forever after the newsletter controversy in 1967. First, it helped seal the financial fate of the old civil rights SNCC, leaving the new, revolutionary Black Power SNCC without the budgetary wherewithal to grow. Donations to SNCC had already dropped off dramatically in 1967 for a number of reasons. Decades later, SNCC worker Dorothy Zellner noted that while much of the group’s financial support was already gone by mid-1967, the newsletter issue “was the death blow” to SNCC.41 Cleveland Sellers had served as the organization’s program director since 1965. He agreed with Zellner’s assessment that while SNCC was only receiving a “little money” by August of 1967, even most of that evaporated thereafter.⁴² The FBI also concurred. It claimed in a classified internal report that by December 1, 1967, SNCC had to close its Chicago office for lack of funds, had its telephone service at its Atlanta headquarters turned off for lack of payment of a $2,200 bill, and also had electricity service in Atlanta turned off for failure to pay a $400 bill.⁴³

At the same time, Cleveland Sellers also pointed out a second impact that the controversy had on SNCC: it stiffened the group’s resolve and solidified its determination to take stances against American foreign policy and in favor of armed Third World liberation movements. The negative reaction to their stance on the Middle East convinced SNCC cadre that whites cynically thought that blacks were welcome to talk about domestic race relations at home but not to take stances on foreign policy issues. For some black SNCC activists, the vitriolic backlash against the organization also showed that many white critics were simply racists: they would encourage blacks to be nonviolent but then criticize them and withdraw their support if blacks condemned American violence in Vietnam or Israeli violence against Arabs. Sellers later recalled: “Rather than breaking our will, this made us more convinced than ever that we were correct when we accused the majority of America’s whites of being racists.”⁴⁴ SNCC support for the Palestinians clearly was an exercise in the forging of a revolutionary identity: African Americans would support Third World liberation regardless of what whites wanted.

Two of the most influential and nationally recognized SNCC figures, James Forman and Stokely Carmichael, nonetheless later admitted that SNCC should have handled the issue differently. In his memoirs Carmichael (by then known as Kwame Ture) discussed the flaws he saw both in the content of the newsletter and the way it had been issued without a more systematic discussion within SNCC, although he insisted that support for the Palestinians on a “moral level” was the right stance to have taken. He claimed that the majority of SNCC staff members in Atlanta would have supported justice for the Palestinians had they sat together and formally talked about the issue.

Carmichael believed that despite such pro-Palestinian sentiment, SNCC should have had such a formal discussion first to debate the political wisdom of issuing a public statement at that time. Should SNCC even have a foreign policy at all? If so, why adopt a stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict? Other civil rights groups had not done so, for an important reason: “A good deal of their financial support came from mainstream liberals, quite often from the progressive elements of the Jewish community.” Among such supporters, he noted, “anything other than unquestioning support of Zionist policies was unthinkable, taboo.” Given the amount of criticism already directed at SNCC because of its opposition to the war in Vietnam and its drift toward Black Power, was it worth it to generate another political controversy? Moreover, Carmichael also believed that a public statement should have been more “nuanced,” written in “properly diplomatic language,” lest SNCC “offend or alienate our Jewish friends on a personal level.”45

James Forman also had opposed SNCC’s coming out with a statement on the Arab-Israeli conflict when the 1967 war broke out. After the article was published, he was disappointed that his advice to Stanley Wise had been ignored and that, as SNCC’s international affairs director, he was not consulted. Forman also believed that the article itself was not written properly. He wrote that the thirty-two questions had been “hastily edited” and were “not framed to make the kind of educational presentation desirable—especially for the black movement.” Forman also believed that while the article did not represent an official SNCC position, it was interpreted as such by the public. But he wrote in his memoirs that regardless of how “raggedy” the arguments in the article had been stated, “I knew we had to support the people of the Arab world in their fight to restore justice to the Palestinian people.”⁴⁶

Despite their respective beliefs that the newsletter issue should have been addressed differently, both Carmichael and Forman continued to support the Palestinians. In this way they are emblematic of the way that the SNCC’s stance on Israel and the Palestinians helped change the political attitudes both of SNCC and other Black Power activists. It was now not only a matter of defending a cause they supported but also a matter of racial politics and identity: defending the principle that blacks could form and articulate their own stances independently of liberal white interference.

Carmichael’s continued focus on the Middle East was part and parcel of his wider worldview that situated blacks within a global struggle against imperialism and racism, and his ongoing support for the Palestinians specifically reflected the beginning of a growing trend among Black Power advocates to see the black struggle linked with that of the Palestinians. Carmichael would repeat his contention in the years after 1967 that the same colonialism against which blacks were struggling in Africa had harmed Palestine. “My brothers and sisters,” he said in 1970, “Israel is a settler colony. European Jews leave Europe, go to Palestine, change the name to Israel, expel the original inhabitants, the Palestinian Arabs, and dominate the land.”47

At the time the newsletter issue erupted, in August of 1967, Carmichael was traveling overseas, and he quickly spoke up from abroad in SNCC’s defense despite his misgivings about how and why SNCC published the article. In fact, while he was in Cuba, Carmichael gave a statement about Israel and the 1967 war shortly before the newsletter story had broken in the United States. On August 2, 1967, a journalist sent a dispatch to the Algerian Press Service that included comments Carmichael made during an interview in Havana. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, which was monitoring his trip, he reportedly said, “Israel represents an enclave of imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa.” He also compared the fate of Africans and the descendants of African slaves with that of the Palestinians:

Suppose I own a house and someone takes possession of one of its rooms, and then 20 years later comes to discuss the matter. I tell him: First I shall take back my room. We’ll discuss it later. It is true that the Jewish people lost 6 million dead in World War II, but the Africans have been abused everywhere throughout the world. They lost their lands and 100 million persons in the time of slavery, but we do not weep over it. We shall take the land back from the hands of those who stole it. The Zionists must get out of Israel.⁴⁸

Carmichael continued on his lengthy trip, which took him to a number of countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In early September of 1967 he sent a letter from Moscow to an unnamed SNCC colleague in which he noted that he was traveling onward to the Arab world: “So SNCC can get ready for the anti-semitic Blast. You know I’m going to denounce the Jews as a pocket of U.S. Imperialism and compare the aggression [the 1967 war] to that of the U.S. in Vietnam. So bro get ready to go DEEP, DEEP into the Black Community.”⁴⁹ From the Soviet Union Carmichael traveled to North Vietnam and then to the Middle East and North Africa. While in Algeria, he spoke publicly about the controversy when he granted an interview with the Algerian Press Service in Algiers on September 7, 1967. Pulling no punches, he addressed the charges of anti-Semitism being leveled against SNCC: “The persecution of the Jews came from the white man. There is no need for the Jews to turn around because the white man persecuted them, and persecute the Africans and especially the Arabs.” Carmichael also stated that if the Jews wanted a state, they should have created one in Germany when it was divided into occupation zones following the Nazi defeat in 1945, rather than unjustly taking land from the Arabs. As for the Palestinians, “the only solution to the Palestine question lies in taking up arms.”50

Carmichael then traveled to Egypt on September 16, 1967, and arrived in Syria three days later, where he visited Palestinian refugee camps and even apparently pledged that American blacks would provide military support to the Arabs in their struggle against Israel.⁵¹ He was escorted in Syria by Randa Khalidi al-Fattal, a thirty-two-year-old Palestinian-Lebanese scholar and writer who worked with the Arab League’s Arab Information Office in New York. Expanding on his belief in black-white global racial conflict and that Arabs were a fellow people of color, Carmichael jokingly told al-Fattal—whose complexion was very fair—“Sister Randa, you don’t know it, but you are blacker than I am.”⁵² If the Arabs were black in Carmichael’s mind, Israel certainly was part of the white world. He later said, in December of 1968, “It is important because the so-called State of Israel was set up by white people who took it from the Arabs.”⁵³

Carmichael continued to correspond with his SNCC colleagues back in the United States during his trip, offering ongoing advice about how to deal with the question of SNCC’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He wrote several times to his old friend Ethel Minor. In one letter Carmichael urged that SNCC go on the offensive against the Zionists and “hit them hard! Don’t give them any slack!” He ended that particular letter with a little ditty: “Guns for the Arabs, sneakers for the Jews.”⁵⁴ In another letter, Carmichael told Minor that they should generate black support by stressing that Israel was not just fighting the Arabs but that in occupying part of Arab Egypt, it also was attacking Africa: “We must step up our propaganda against Zionism—we should include in the propaganda the fact that the Zionists have invaded Egypt [i.e., Sinai]—that Egypt is in Africa and Africa is our motherland and an aggression against the motherland is an aggression against us—This is very important because every time we get a chance to hook-up with Africa WE MUST!55

After his return to the United States, Carmichael continued to hammer on the theme of black American support for the Arabs in their struggle against Israel and to link that struggle with black solidarity with Africa. At a February 17, 1968, Black Panther Party rally in Oakland, California, Carmichael delivered a speech that included a long section on Israel and the Palestinians. He noted: “We must declare on whose side we stand! We can be for no one but the Arabs. There can be no doubt in our mind! No doubt in our mind! No doubt in our mind! We can be for no one but the Arabs because Israel belonged to the Arabs in 1917. The British gave it to a group of Zionists, who went to Israel, ran . . . the Palestinian Arabs out with terrorist groups. . . . That country belongs to the Palestinians.” Continuing to emphasize the need for blacks to back the Arabs, especially an African state like Egypt, Carmichael chided his audience: “Not only that: they’re [Zionists] moving to take over Egypt. Egypt is our Motherland—it’s in Africa! Africa! We [blacks] do not understand the concept of love. Here are a group of Zionists who come anywhere they want to and organize love and feeling for a place called Israel, which was created in 1948, where their youth are willing to go and fight for Israel. Egypt belongs to us. Four thousand years ago, and we sit here supporting the Zionists. We got to be for the Arabs. Period! Period!”⁵⁶

For several years thereafter, the themes of the Africanness of Egypt, Israel’s threat to the African Motherland, and the need for American black support for the Arabs featured regularly in Carmichael’s speeches around the world. Yet despite his Black Power–inspired emphasis on the wider Arab world and the particular African Arab state of Egypt, Carmichael never lost sight of the particular problems and struggles of the Palestinians. In an August 1968 speech to the convention of the Organization of Arab Students Carmichael stated, “We feel very close to the commandos in Palestine. We feel they are the group that will get most of our support.” Waxing sentimental, he also told the assembled students, “Now there are two dreams I have in my life. My dreams are rooted in reality, not imagery. I dream, number one, of having coffee with my [South African] wife in South Africa; and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine.”⁵⁷

SNCC’s other leader who maintained a great interest in foreign policy, James Forman, did not address the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict after 1967 nearly as much as Carmichael did. Unlike Carmichael, Forman insisted that other factors besides race were involved with the Arab-Israeli conflict as the 1967 war broke out. He continued to preach that blacks must understand this and all political issues in class terms, not merely in black vs. white racial terms. When Forman wrote to Stanley Wise from overseas earlier in June of 1967 to caution him about SNCC issuing a formal statement on the war, Forman affirmed his opposition to the “race war theory,” carefully noting that SNCC “must have ‘clarity’ about the real essence of the Arab-Israeli struggle: class and not merely racial analysis.”58 Israel was, for Forman, a “powerful conservative state in the Middle East.” It was its role as a conservative, pro-American client that concerned him, not the fact that it was, as seen by other black militants, a “white” state fighting people of color.⁵⁹

Forman believed that American blacks must take part in the worldwide struggle against imperialism, racism, and capitalism and not just support Palestinians because they were a people of color. He understood that one of the roles that blacks could play in this international revolutionary upsurge was to keep United States imperialism tied down, struggling against black militants at home and therefore unable to intervene against other peoples’ struggles overseas.⁶⁰ Forman also believed that supporting the Palestinians served to propel SNCC toward greater involvement in the global anti-imperialist struggle—an important part of its identity as a Black Power group. As he noted in his memoirs: “Our position against Israel, as I saw it, took us one step further along the road to revolution. For SNCC to see the struggle against racism, capitalism, and imperialism as being indivisible made it inevitable for SNCC to take a position against the greatest imperialist power in the Middle East, and in favor of liberation and dignity for the Arab people.”⁶¹

Forman’s statement underscored the centrality of Black Power’s support for the Palestinians in its overall vision of the revolutionary transformation of America and the world. It was not an incidental chapter of SNCC’s history. The Palestinian cause had become a very important dimension of the Black Power movement’s agenda, as well as its self-conceptualization, and was something that would transform many aspects of American political life in the 1960s, far beyond what SNCC could possibly have imagined when it published its newsletter article in 1967.

Black Power’s pro-Palestinianism revealed its truly revolutionary nature, a force for what Frantz Fanon called “complete disorder.”⁶² Threatening enough in terms of what it called for in the way of domestic change, the Black Power movement’s embrace of the Palestinian struggle revealed itself to be a real threat to the establishment: the white, liberal, capitalist order that controlled their lives and the lives of people of color overseas. Opposing America’s war in Vietnam was hardly revolutionary by 1967; even Martin Luther King Jr. and famed pediatrician Benjamin Spock had turned against the war by that time. Going after Israel, however, was another matter, one that struck at the heart of the very establishment Black Power was challenging. Vietnam was important to American Cold War interests, but the Middle East contained the world’s largest reserves of oil. Challenging America’s unofficial ally Israel represented a serious challenge to longer term American interests, not to mention a challenge to American Jews.

The domestic political fallout of Black Power’s embrace of the Palestinian cause in 1967 proved to be immense. Indeed, black militants’ attacks on Israel and open embrace of the Palestinians had a dramatic impact on the American political landscape in the late 1960s. It started an earthquake in terms of attitudes in the United States toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. The pro-Arab publications and speeches of black militants were mightily unpopular among white liberals, and particularly among Jews of all political stripes, and provoked a viscerally harsh reaction. The fact that the anti-Israel chorus started by black militants also was quickly echoed by white New Left activists and partisans of Old Left Marxist parties starting in 1967 and 1968 only heightened the importance of this new discourse on foreign policy in the country.

Of particular note is how mainstream civil rights organizations responded to the pro-Arab rhetoric of black militants. Caught between their desire to work within the system alongside Jews and other white liberals and their need to remain relevant to young African Americans in an era of increasingly shrill black militancy, these groups were far from united in how they responded to blacks who openly championed the Palestinians and demonized Israel. The idea of Palestine as a country of color was proving immensely divisive among African Americans in the late 1960s.