CHAPTER 5

THE POWER OF WORDS

The Black Arts Movement and a New Narrative

FOR HARLEM-BASED WRITER Askia Muhammad Touré there was a clear link between the situation faced by blacks in America and that facing Third World peoples. This included the Palestinians. Born Roland Snellings, Touré worked at the SNCC office in Atlanta and joined the Revolutionary Action Movement in early 1964 before becoming a poet. In 1970 he wrote a poem entitled “A Song in Blood and Tears” that specifically compared the black struggle in Harlem with the guerrilla war being waged by the Palestinians against Israel:

Black Brown Red Yellow Brothers starving

in the streets of Calcutta, dying on

the reservations, nodding in the Harlems,

napalmed in Vietnam, or marching with

the people’s armies down the streets

of PEKING/GUINEA/TANZANIA/

PALESTINE GUERILLA

armies marching . . . 1

Touré’s sense of identity as a black man was wrapped up tightly with that of other peoples of color, as symbolized by his conflation of black, Asian, African, American Indian, and Palestinian peoples and their respective armed struggles. His poem clearly showed that Black Power support for the Palestinians extended beyond politics and was surfacing in cultural expressions of black identity by the early 1970s.

The high profile Black Power internationalism advocated by Malcolm X and SNCC helped spread black consciousness about international events, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular, throughout the rest of the 1960s and into the 1970s. One particularly important example is how support for the Arab struggle against Israel emerged among black writers. An essential dimension of Black Power was its commitment to forge a new, revolutionary political image for blacks that was reinforced on a cultural level by black men and women of the arts and letters. This culture was designed to be an essential dimension of overall black empowerment and an important vehicle for expressions of both black identity and sense of place within America. The Black Panther Party’s artist-in-residence, Emory Douglas, once noted the power of a new revolutionary, internationalist black culture: “This new born culture is not particular to the oppressed Black masses but transcends communities and racial lines because all oppressed people can relate to revolutionary change which is the starting point for developing a revolutionary culture.”2

The fact that an awareness of Palestine was spreading among blacks and appearing in forms of black cultural expression underscored its importance for African American identity. From the poetry of the Black Arts Movement to articles in publications like Negro Digest/Black World and to manifestos in underground newspapers, black cultural expression reinforced the shared sense of struggle between black Americans and the Palestinian people. Support for the Palestinians therefore contributed to formulation of an anti-imperialist, revolutionary cultural identity by which blacks could define themselves and subvert the dominant white American cultural hegemony.³ No dimension of this process better exemplified this than the Black Arts Movement.

THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

The Black Arts Movement has been described as the cultural wing of the political Black Power movement. It refers to a host of persons and cultural fora that witnessed the collective expression of black pride and cultural production at the same time that others paraded Black Power on the American political stage.4 The Black Arts Movement proposed creating a vigorous black artistic and cultural community as part of the political attempt to create vibrant, independent black communities and organizations. The roots and development of the Black Arts Movement were varied, but certainly one of its towering figures was Harold Cruse. A major intellectual force and critic of integration, Cruse created a stir when he published The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967. As part of his discussion of black intellectuals, he famously wrote about the tensions between blacks and Jews during a decade when this was becoming a hot-button issue, particularly for Jews who had been sympathetic with the black freedom struggle but were feeling uneasy about blacks by the mid-1960s.

Cruse directed his attention overseas and criticized Israel and Zionism. He understood the Zionist movement that successfully created the Jewish state of Israel out of a predominantly Arab part of the Middle East as a clear example of European imperialism. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual he wrote, “The European experience also shows that European imperialism was not exclusively a Christian affair: Witness the international machinations that brought about the State of Israel.” Cruse also derided the United Nations for its role in causing the Arab-Israeli conflict, describing its partition of Palestine in 1947 as having done “violence” to its own charter.⁵

Cruse saw black political activism in America both as revolutionary and as linked with the wider anticolonial struggles going on around the world. He noted in 1968 that “the revolutionary initiative has passed to the colonial world, and in the United States is passing to the Negro.”⁶ Addressing black-Jewish relations in the United States and the “crisis” of black intellectuals, Cruse had written in 1967 about transnationalism when he noted that affairs in the Middle East could not help but affect Jews’ relationships with American blacks as the latter became more and more concerned with anticolonial movements in Africa. American Jews’ attachment to Israel after 1948, he claimed, had “special significance” to such relations: “Black Nationalism, Zionism, African affairs, and Negro Civil Rights organizations are intimately interlocked on the political, cultural, economic and international fronts, whether Negro intellectuals care to acknowledge it or not.”⁷

Amiri Baraka was another great figure associated with the founding of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, and he concurred with Cruse’s sentiments. Born as Everett LeRoi Jones, he first became a poet and writer associated with the Beat movement in New York City before changing direction radically after the assassination of Malcolm X in February of 1965. Along with Cruse, Jones went on to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem later that same year. Constantly reinventing himself, Jones changed his name to Ameer Barakat a few years later after studying Islam with Heshaam Jaaber, a black American who claimed Sudanese roots. Barakat then changed his new Arabic name shortly thereafter to its Kiswahili (Swahili) variant, Amiri Baraka, under the influence of the Los Angeles–based black cultural nationalist figure Maulana Karenga.8

In 1968 Baraka coedited and published one of the early seminal works of the Black Arts Movement, an anthology of literature titled Black Fire, which featured a poem by Charles Anderson that mentioned Israel and the Arabs. It was titled “Finger Pop’in,” and one stanza of Anderson’s poem dealt with how Israel raised money to bomb Egypt:

And in Israel a monster was put on stage, in a blood campaign to sell bonds in order to buy more bombs to drop on Cairo.

And the rats skipped across the floor.

Finger pop!⁹

Baraka continued to champion the Palestinians from his base of operations in Newark, New Jersey—the city that exploded in violence during the black rebellion in July of 1967. His increasingly virulent criticisms of Israel were given voice by the Congress of Afrikan People, which emerged from the Pan-African Congress that Baraka had helped organize in Atlanta from September 3 to September 7, 1970. As a writer, it was not surprising that Baraka used the congress’s newspaper, Unity and Struggle, to launch strident attacks on Israel and Zionism. In one issue the paper denounced Zionism as “a form of colonialism,” noting that “Israel was created by, for and because of imperialism.” In a 1975 issue Unity and Struggle commented on the “Zionism is racism” issue being raised at the United Nations by asserting that Zionism was indeed racism, as well as reactionary nationalism, and that racism long had been one of the main weapons used by imperialism against peoples of the Third World: “progressive forces in the world will hold up a mirror to zionism [sic],” the paper declared, “so the world can see the ugly face of racism.” Another article in that same issue proclaimed, “Zionism is a form of colonialism, which has erected the settler colony of ‘Israel.’ The land that is supposedly called ‘Israel’ is Palestine.”10

Cruse and Baraka were not alone. Another indication of the pro-Palestinian sentiments in the Black Arts Movement was the fact that Baraka coedited Black Fire with Lawrence P. Neal, who also was strongly anti-Zionist. Neal also was involved in the formation of the Black Arts Theater Repertory Theater/School and helped form a group in Harlem called the Black Panthers based on what SNCC had done in Lowndes County, Alabama.¹¹ The same year that Black Fire came out, Neal published a piece in which he bemoaned the fact that black nationalists could not compete with the pro-Israeli propaganda issued by the mainstream black leaders in America during the 1967 war. There was, he claimed, “no adequate means of presenting the Arab side of the conflict.” What black support there was for Israel came not from “Biblical mysticism” but rather from “good propaganda for over forty years.” Neal called for educating the black community about the fact that “Zionist interests are decidedly pro-Western and . . . these interests are neo-colonialist in nature and design.”¹²

Other poets associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed similarly strong support for the Palestinian struggle. One of these poets was Don Lee (he adopted the Kiswahili name Haki R. Madhubuti in the 1970s). Lee helped found the Third World Press in Chicago in December of 1967 and two years later traveled to Africa, where he attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria, at which a representative from al-Fateh spoke. His feelings about the Arab-Israeli conflict were evident in his 1970 poem “A Poem for a Poet,” which was dedicated to the famous Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, a refugee from the 1948 war who, as the Palestinians’ modern poet laureate, was noteworthy for his aching poetry of exile from Palestine. Lee’s poem links the Palestinian exile with that faced by American blacks, who had been exiled from Africa by the evil of slavery. Part of the poem noted, “Our enemies eat the same bread.”¹³

Lee blasted pro-Israeli blacks in another 1970 poem titled “See Sammy Run in the Wrong Direction,” which was a scathing attack on a group of black editors and publishers from the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) who visited Israel—what Lee called “occupied Palestine”—in November of 1969. Lee accused the journalists of being untrue to themselves as black people by trying to imitate Jews. Like many Black Power activists, Lee used negro as a term of denigration, referring to blacks who tried to please whites by acting in ways deemed submissive and respectable in white eyes. The title and several parts of the poem refer to Sammy Davis Jr., a famous black American performer who converted to Judaism several years after losing an eye in an automobile accident. Lee introduced his poem as follows:

(for the ten negro editors representing n.n.p.a.

who visited occupied Palestine [known as Israel]

on a fact finding trip, but upon their return—

reported few facts, in any.)14

In addition to the likes of Cruse, Baraka, and Neal, another noteworthy pro-Palestinian voice in the Black Arts Movement was the influential writer and editor Hoyt W. Fuller. Fuller lived abroad for several years in the late 1950s as a refugee from American racism, and after returning in 1960, he began editing the Negro Digest. The periodical changed its name in 1970 to Black World to keep pace with the changing times and was a leading intellectual organ of the Black Arts Movement. One of Fuller’s earliest comments on the Arab-Israeli conflict came in 1969, when he covered the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria and noted the mingling of American blacks with Palestinians from the al-Fateh guerrilla movement: “They [al-Fateh members] are indeed heroic figures. . . . They apparently are particularly interested in making contact with the American blacks, and vice versa.”¹⁵

Fuller continued to express black concerns about the Middle East throughout the early and mid-1970s. In July of 1973 he wrote and published the short article “Possible Israeli Attack in Africa?” in which he referred to comments made by Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Libya.¹⁶ Much like Stokely Carmichael had done earlier, Fuller linked blacks’ concerns about the African motherland with those Arab states, like Libya, that were part of that continent.

Fuller’s strident comments elicited concern from some who worried about the direction Negro Digest/Black World was taking. Fuller was, as one writer noted presciently in late 1974, questioning Zionist statements “even at the risk of his job.”¹⁷ In February of 1975 Fuller wrote that American blacks were not going to fight the Arabs for oil, echoing the boxer Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight against the Vietnamese people, who had done nothing to harm him as a black man in America. “There are thousands of Black men in and out of uniform,” Fuller wrote, “who stand ready to refuse to fight the Arabs on the very same grounds: The Arabs have done nothing to Black People.”18 Later that year, Fuller published a hard-hitting article by Ronald Walters that not only accused Israel of “military imperialism” but also noted the degree to which American Jews had veered away from supporting struggles for justice by giving their support to Israel. “Since the Israelis have no intention of returning to the status quo ante,” Walters wrote, “they are guilty of military imperialism, with the material support of the United States.” Israel was now part of a “Western power structure” that put the Jewish state in a “defense role vis-à-vis those interests and the oppressed.”¹⁹

Several months later, in February of 1976, John H. Johnson, the famous black publishing magnate, decided to stop publishing Negro Digest/Black World, thereby depriving Fuller of his pulpit. Johnson was no Black Power zealot. Several years earlier, in June of 1970, he had lent his signature to Bayard Rustin’s strongly pro-Israeli advertisement in the New York Times titled “An Appeal by Black Americans for United States Support to Israel.” Yet some have claimed that the real reason Johnson shut down Negro Digest/Black World was because Fuller’s very public anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian statements had led to Jewish threats to stop buying advertising space in Jet and Ebony, two of Johnson’s widely read and more mainstream magazines targeting black audiences.²⁰ The intrablack war over what to say about the Arab-Israeli conflict continued unabated.

BLACK ESSAYISTS AND JOURNALISTS

In a fiery article published a month after the three-week-long October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, noted writer Shirley Graham Du Bois forcefully articulated Black Power’s view of a global color line whereby peoples of color were struggling against white imperialism. The conflict between Arabs and Israelis was just one front in this wider contest: “[In the Middle East] it is ‘colored folk’ battling with the ‘white folk’ of Israel! . . . Surrounded as they are by an ocean of suntanned peoples, Israel has repeatedly, defiantly and arrogantly asserted its superior ‘whiteness.’ . . . Nobody was allowed to forget that the State of Israel belonged to the dominant, ‘enlightened’ white world.” Du Bois also hailed the pan-African support extended to Egypt during the 1973 war, deriding the Israelis and other “white folks” who were surprised that all of Africa stood up and stood by their fellow African state:

Israel had no idea that when Egypt’s Anwar el Sadat lifted his hand signaling, now is the time and dark-skinned troops crossed to the occupied east bank of the Suez Canal throwing themselves against the “invincible” invaders, with their mighty US armaments, dug deep in African soil—no white folks dreamed that all Africa would get the message and line up! . . . I do not believe he [al-Sadat] was putting his entire trust in “superpowers.” He knew thtt [sic] the world’s majority peoples were behind him—that dark-skinned majority ingenuously referred to as the Third World. He trusts them to enforce the just peace to which he aspires.21

The early 1970s witnessed more and more African American essayists and journalists adopt pro-Palestinian stances as part of the new black aesthetic and culture set in motion by the Black Arts Movement. One was the very significant woman of letters, Shirley Graham Du Bois. She studied music at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1929 before obtaining her BA and MA at Oberlin College in 1934 and 1935, respectively, and went on to become a nationally known playwright and author. She married the venerable W. E. B. Du Bois, the intellectual and cofounder of the NAACP, in 1951. She followed her husband to Ghana in 1961, the same year she helped found the influential black intellectual and cultural journal Freedomways.

As a widow, Graham Du Bois fled Ghana for Cairo in 1966 after a coup d’état toppled the government of Kwame Nkrumah, taking up residence in the Duqqi district of the Egyptian capital where the PLO maintained an office. While living in Cairo, Graham Du Bois followed Arab-Israeli affairs closely in the 1960s and 1970s, even publishing a biography of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1972. The October 1973 Arab-Israeli war affected her deeply given Egypt’s prominent role in the fighting. Graham Du Bois’s sentiments of a racial fault line in the Middle East echoed those of her late husband, who more than fifty years earlier had prophesied that the main issue that would define the twentieth century was what he called the color-line.²²

James Baldwin was a major American writer of the mid-twentieth century, and he, too, voiced criticisms of Israel. Baldwin visited the Jewish state in September of 1961 as part of a trip he intended to make to Africa. He traveled throughout the country and crossed over the cease-fire lines into Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem to visit the Christian shrines there. Despite appreciating seeing the holy places he had read about as a religiously oriented youth, Baldwin came away from his journey with a clear view of what he considered the wider Western imperialist purposes that Israel served. In a 1970 interview he mused:

When I was in Israel I thought I liked Israel. I liked the people. But to me it was obvious why the Western world created the state of Israel, which is not really a Jewish state. The West needed a handle in the Middle East. And they created the state as a European pawn. It is tragic that the Jews should allow themselves to be used in this fashion, because no one cares what happens to the Jews. No one cares what is happening to the Arabs. But they do care about the oil. That part of the world is a crucial matter if you intend to rule the world.

Baldwin hastened to tell his interviewer that he was “not anti-Semitic at all, but I am anti-Zionist.” He noted: “I don’t believe they [Zionists] had the right, after 3,000 years, to reclaim the land with Western bombs and guns on biblical injunction. When I was in Israel it was as though I was in the middle of The Fire Next Time.”23

Outside of the Black Arts Movement and the black intelligentsia, various editors, journalists, and black newspapers in the late 1960s and 1970s were noteworthy for their hostility to Zionism and Israel. The Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks long had sided with the Arabs. In the run-up to the June 1967 war, the paper carried an article that asserted an internationalist Black Power analysis of the rising tensions in the Middle East: “a more profound appraisal indicates that it [the crisis] is essentially a conflict between the newly emerging nations of the East and the old West, led by White America.”²⁴ The same sentiments were expressed in a full-page title in the June 23, 1967, issue: “Arabs: By Proxy the White West Is Sowing New Colonialism in Our Midst.”²⁵

Underground black political newspapers were another source of pro-Arab, anti-Israeli sentiment in the 1960s and 1970s. Detroit’s Inner City Voice exemplifies one publication that vocally supported the Palestinian cause. Established in September of 1967 in the wake of the Detroit disturbances, it was edited by John Watson, a young activist involved in a number of black working-class issues in the city. Watson had a long history of activism, having worked with SNCC’s Detroit chapter until he and his colleagues were expelled for extolling a more militant course for northern blacks than SNCC was willing to support at the time. Watson studied Marxist thought and later was involved with the Negro Action Committee. In early 1963 he helped found UHURU (Kiswahili: freedom), a civil rights and black nationalist student group. UHURU members expressed a great interest in the Middle East that was fueled by the fact that several of them met some Middle Eastern revolutionaries during a 1964 trip to Cuba.26 By the late 1960s, Watson was involved with the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. He later helped form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in June of 1969 and served on its governing committee. Later, in 1971, the LRBW created a broader grouping in Detroit called the International Black Workers Congress.

Watson was also a journalist whose strong pro-Palestinian viewpoint was expressed in the underground publications with which he was associated. He edited the Black Vanguard in 1965 before starting the Inner City Voice, which became a major voice for the black community in Detroit. In November of 1969 the paper ran an article by student and journalist Nick Medvecky titled “Revolution Until Victory—Palestine al-Fatah.” The piece reported on a trip Medvecky had made to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel in August of that year.²⁷ Starting in the fall of 1968, Watson also edited the South End, the newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit. When that newspaper ran a front-page story (also written by Medvecky) about al-Fateh, the response of Detroit’s Jewish community was immediate and vociferously negative. Years later, Medvecky recalled, “We [Watson and I] had no idea that we were then grabbing hold of the third rail in American politics. We were quite literally astonished at the response.”²⁸

Just over a year later, in February of 1971, Watson traveled to Kuwait to attend the Second International Symposium on Palestine. He visited Jordan as part of the trip and interviewed writer and spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani, for the radical paper The Guardian. In a letter to The Guardian Watson wrote, “The major point is that the Palestinian Revolution is facing enemies on several fronts, struggling internally, and needs the wholehearted support, materially and verbally from all progressive forces at this time.”²⁹

Other black underground or political party papers supported the Palestinians, as well, in the early 1970s. Among them was the African World, published by the Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU) in Greensboro, North Carolina, which ran an article in October of 1973 titled “How the Palestinian People Were Driven from Their Lands.” An issue the following year asserted that YOBU would “never compromise in its struggle against Zionism.”30 Another newspaper was Jihad News, established in the wake of the September 1972 arrest of former RAM activist Max Stanford Jr. (Muhammad Ahmad). The issue that came out as the 1973 Arab-Israeli war was under way carried an article on the history of conflict that described Israel: “In short, Israel is a settler-state built on a foundation of oppression and discrimination of Arab peoples. In that regard it is similar to the South African or Rhodesian settler-states.”³¹ That same issue carried an editorial noting the whiteness of Israel: “The huge attacks by Israel on Egypt shows [sic] the emphasis the United States and the Israelis place on the military conquest of Africa by white troops.” Toward the end the editorial noted, “A victory for the African and Arab people is a victory for us.”³²

Black essayists, journalists, and underground newspapers were not alone in articulating revolutionary international solidarity with the Palestinians in the early 1970s. The Drum and Spear Bookstore was opened in Washington, DC, in June of 1969 by former SNCC activists Charles Cobb Jr., Courtland Cox, and several others. Cobb had played an important role in running SNCC’s famous Freedom Schools in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Cox had been one of the founders of SNCC and was also deeply involved in SNCC’s activities in Mississippi. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Both men later attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria in July of 1969 and had talked with Palestinians while there.

The short-lived bookstore they established became a major source of information and literature for the black community in Washington and was an important place for showcasing black poetry in particular. The year after Drum and Spear Bookstore opened, it established the Drum and Spear Press, which quickly decided to publish a series titled Poets of Liberation. The first book in this series was Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance and contained poems from noted Palestinian poets such as Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Zayyad.³³

Why did Drum and Spear Press decide to focus on Palestinian poetry in the first work to come out in its Poets of Liberation series? Years later Cobb and Cox credited Drum and Spear’s managing editor, Anne Forrester, with coming up with the idea. Cobb also pointed out, “‘Poets of Liberation’: it seemed to us that the Palestinian struggle symbolized that. They wanted land, they wanted a nation.”34 Cox agreed:

This [pro-Palestinian stance] was not a big deal. We saw that the Palestinian struggle was part of our struggle against what was characterized as an imperialist nature of the United States and other countries. We also saw that Israel was engaged in very aggressive colonial activities. . . . My sense is that the book was one of several things that we were doing, relationships and conversations, around our support for the Palestinians and other people who we felt were oppressed. It was just a manifestation of that.³⁵

Cox also noted that the two men’s experience traveling in the Arab world in the late 1960s had further sensitized them to the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its relevance to the black freedom struggle in America:

Charlie and I had been traveling in Africa. We were in Morocco when the Six Day War broke out. My sense was that there, [it] was not just an academic discussion of what was going on in the Middle East. We were in Morocco. We were getting the perspective of what was going on, on the ground from there, as opposed to what was going on in the United States. We understood that we had to make alliances with various people in the world. We were moving to becoming pan-Africanists. If we were going to deal with the situation in the United States, we were going to have to include Africa in the discussions. And we had to make allies of other people who were being oppressed in the world.³⁶

Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance ended up being the only book ever published by Drum and Spear Press that did not directly deal with black issues, demonstrating the importance that the Question of Palestine had for black cultural activists and poets by the 1970s. Black poet Samuel W. Allen noted the similarity between Palestinian and black American poetry in the book’s preface: “It is striking that the powerful title piece of this volume, ‘Enemy of the Sun’ by Sameeh Al-Qassem seems to correspond to an earlier period in the Black American poetic experience.”³⁷

The Black Arts Movement, journals, underground newspapers, and other fora in which black men and women of letters wrote in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites in which the dominant discourse of American support for Israel was contested by black writers seeking to express a new black cultural identity. Like political Black Power advocates, they were embracing a culture of anti-imperialist resistance and African American solidarity with peoples of color struggling for independence and cultural-national authenticity overseas. Nor were they alone; other black voices began expressing their support for the Palestinians in the 1960s and 1970s in realms as varied as the world of sports and the world of national black political conventions. Here, too, the new discourse of pan–Third World support for the Palestinians began emerging as an integral part of the construction of a revolutionary black identity.

BLACK POLITICAL CONFERENCES

At the third National Conference on Black Power, held in Philadelphia from August 31 to September 2, 1968, Omar Abu Ahmed, a CORE activist from the Bronx in New York submitted a minority report describing Zionism as a threat to African Americans. Ahmed had been a Freedom Rider in 1963 and a member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. His report stated: “The Black Power Conference recognizes that the Zionist Movement is a threat to the internal and external security of the Black people in America and in Africa. It is further recognized that the Zionist ideology is a force of colonialism, racism, and western imperialism, therefore, a threat to world peace.” Ahmed included recommendations urging a condemnation of groups like the American Jewish Congress and American Jewish Committee for their “racist and violent attacks on the members of the Black American people,” as well as a condemnation of Israel for attacking African states like Egypt, the Sudan, and Morocco. It also stated that Israel had attacked “occupied Palestine while expelling its people.” Ahmed’s recommendations concluded: “It is recommended that the Third International Conference on Black Power demand the withdrawal of Zionist forces from occupied lands in Africa and Asia. Finally, it is recommended that the Conference support the Palestinian people in their just struggle to liberate their land from Zionist colonialism. Finally, let it be known that the Third International Conference will oppose Zionism with all its strength and resources towards defeat of this racist, imperialist movement.”38 Strong words indeed.

Expressions of black support for the Palestinians began emerging from the various Black Power conferences that convened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the most significant (and notorious) examples was at the National Black Political Convention (NBPC) in Gary, Indiana, from March 10 to March 12, 1972. The convention drew not only advocates of radical Black Power but more conventional civil rights organizers and black elected officials as well. The gathering was held in an industrial suburb of Chicago that was home to Richard Hatcher, one of the first elected black mayors of a major American city. Three men organized the convention: Hatcher, Representative Charles C. Diggs (D-MI), and Amiri Baraka. More than eight thousand blacks attended as delegates and spectators. The convention strove to adopt a common black political agenda to guide black political activity in the United States.

During the proceedings, a delegate from Washington, DC, Douglas Moore, offered a resolution denouncing Israel. Moore’s mainstream pedigree was different from most black activists who had spoken up against Israel in the past. He was a Methodist minister who was active with the SCLC, NAACP, and SNCC and was famous as the “godfather” of the sit-in tactic. Moore was sensitized to anticolonial movements after serving as a missionary in Africa in the early 1960s. He later moved to Washington, DC, and became involved with the Black United Front in the capital city.

Despite his establishment background, Moore had a radical streak and shared Black Power advocates’ inclinations about Israel and the Palestinians. He had criticized Israel’s ties with South Africa at the first African Liberation Day in Washington several months earlier, and at Gary he introduced a resolution that reiterated this same criticism, plus several more. Moore’s resolution included the following:

Whereas, the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel constituted a clear violation of the Palistinians’ [sic] traditional rights to live in their own home land,

Whereas, Israeli agents are working hand-in-hand with other imperialistic interests in Africa, for example, South Africa,

Be it therefore resolved that the United States Government should end immediately its economic and military support to the Israeli regime . . . ; that the Arab peoples’ land holdings be returned to Palestinians; and that negotiations be ended in the freedom of the representatives of Palistinians [sic] to establish a second state based on the historical right of the Palistinian [sic] people for self-government in their own land.39

The resolution was adopted, but controversy about the language on Israel immediately broke out and continued for another two months after the NBPC adjourned. As the National Conference for New Politics similarly had done in 1967, the NBPC eventually softened the language of the Israel subresolution for eventual inclusion in the final “National Black Political Agenda” (NBPA). The convention’s continuations committee developed alternative language for the subsection on Israel that was presented at a May 19, 1972, press conference in Washington, during which the three NBPC cochairs announced the NBPA. The subsection on Israel had been changed significantly to read as follows:

Be it resolved that the convention go on record as being in agreement with the OAU [Organization of African Unity] positions that call for:

1. The Israeli government to be condemned for her expansionist policy and forceful occupation of the sovereign territory of another state.

2. Measures be taken to alleviate the suffering and improve the position of the Palestinian people in Israel.

3. The NBPC should also resolve to support the struggle of Palestine for self-determination.

4. The NBPC concurs also with the UN Position that Israel rescind and desist from all practice affecting the demographic structure or physical character of occupied Arab territories and the rights of their inhabitants.40

Even then, the controversy continued. Various mainstream black political figures took pains to distance themselves from the Israel subsection, including NBPC cochairs Diggs and Hatcher (Baraka did not). They issued a statement on the day of the press conference that read, in part, “We feel obligated to point out that in our judgment the resolution regarding Israel . . . [is] not representative of the sentiments of the vast majority of black Americans.” Washington’s congressional delegate, Walter E. Fauntroy (D-DC), also attended the press conference and concurred. Joining in the rejection was the entire Congressional Black Political Caucus.⁴¹ Representative Louis Stokes, chair of the caucus, had issued a press release at the end of the convention that read: “As the black elected officials to the U.S. Congress, we affirm our position that we fully respect the right of the Jewish people to have their own state in their historical national homeland. We vigorously oppose the efforts of any group that would seek to weaken or undermine Israel’s right to existence. . . . We pledge our continued support to the concept that Israel has the right to exist in peace as a nation.”⁴² Stokes’s press release was politically motivated overkill. No portion of the resolution had denied Israel’s right to exist or called for its dismantling. Quite the opposite: the original resolution had called for the right of Palestinians to create a second state in the area for themselves, leaving Israeli Jews to continue living in their own state.

The fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict continually emerged at African American political conferences illustrates how pervasive pro-Palestinian sentiments were becoming among left-leaning blacks and how much more conservative blacks were fighting back. At a time when the Vietnam War was the biggest foreign policy issue facing the country, the fact that black Americans continued to denounce Israel and support the Palestinians at one national conference after another reveals the depth not just of pro-Palestinian feeling among blacks but also the degree to which they viewed themselves as part and parcel of the same anti-imperialist forces in the Middle East opposed both by Israel and their own government. In the lens of the great racial divide predicted by W. E. B. Du Bois, they were people of color, and Palestine was a kindred country of color.

THE COMMITTEE OF BLACK AMERICANS FOR TRUTH ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST

On November 1, 1970, a hard-hitting statement denouncing Israel, hailing the Palestinians, and opposing US military aid to Israel appeared in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The text was unequivocal: “We, the Black American signatories of this advertisement, are in complete solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who, like us, are struggling for self-determination and an end to racist oppression. . . . We stand with the Palestinian people in their efforts to preserve their revolution, and oppose its attempted destruction by American Imperialism aided by Zionists and Arab reactionaries.” It stated, furthermore, the signatories’ absolute opposition to Zionism, which was linked to imperialism and colonial settler states like South Africa, as well as their support for the Palestinian resistance movement:

We are anti-Zionist and against the Zionist State of Israel, the outpost of American Imperialism in the Middle East. Zionism is a reactionary racist ideology that justifies the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes and lands, and attempts to enlist the Jewish masses of Israel and elsewhere in the service of imperialism to hold back the Middle East revolution. . . .

WE STATE that the Palestinian Revolution is the vanguard of the Arab Revolution and is part of the anti-colonial revolution which is going on in places such as Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, Laos, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Because of its alliance with imperialism, Zionism opposes that anti-colonial revolution and especially revolutionary change in the Middle East.

WE STATE that Israel, Rhodesia, and South Africa are three privileged white settler-states that came into existence by displacing indigenous peoples from their lands.

The advertisement appeared as a direct rebuttal to the advertisement that pro-Israeli acolyte Bayard Rustin had placed in the same newspaper six months earlier, and it was the work of a small group of activists called the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, which had been formed by Paul B. Boutelle of New York.43 Boutelle had joined Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, and in fact he was at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom to meet someone the day Malcolm was murdered there. In 1964 Boutelle ran for election to the New York State Senate on the Freedom Now Party ballot. The following year, Boutelle joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and became active in the early movement against the war in Vietnam, founding Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam in December of 1965. He also served as secretary of the Black United Action Front and was the SWP’s vice presidential candidate in the 1968 national elections.

In addition to all his other political activities, Boutelle was well aware of the Arab-Israeli conflict and had developed clear pro-Palestinian sympathies by the time of the 1967 war. “Israel was totally an extension of US imperialism,” he recalled years later.⁴⁴ On July 15, 1967, he organized a small rally in Harlem to “tell the other side” of the war that featured black speakers like SNCC’s H. Rap Brown and the SWP’s 1964 presidential candidate, Clifton DeBerry.

Three years later, Boutelle was outraged by Rustin’s advertisement and decided to respond. He and six others formed a group called the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East (COBATAME). Boutelle served as COBATAME’s chair; cochairs included Patricia Robinson, a writer from New Rochelle, New York; Lydia A. Williams, Adult Adviser for Youth Unlimited in Brooklyn, New York, and a member of the executive board of the American Committee on Africa (ACOA); and Gwendolyn Patton Woods, former national coordinator of the National Association of Black Students in Washington, DC. Attorney Robert F. Van Lierop of New York City, who was another member of ACOA’s executive board, served as COBATAME’s secretary treasurer.

The activists quickly circulated a text among blacks who opposed US aid to Israel and managed to raise the $4,000 needed for the advertisement, which appeared in the New York Times on November 1, 1970. Entitled “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel,” it was specifically worded to mimic, in the negative, Rustin’s advertisement, which had been titled “An Appeal by Black Americans for United States Support to Israel.” COBATAME’s advertisement decried Israel’s affirmation of American policy in Vietnam: “WE STATE that Israel continues to support United States policies of aggression in Southeast Asia, policies that are responsible for the death and wounding of thousands of black youths.” It championed groups like al-Fateh and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and it ended by stating: “WE DEMAND THAT ALL MILITARY AID OR ASSISTANCE OF ANY KIND TO ISRAEL MUST STOP. IMPERIALISM AND ZIONISM MUST AND WILL GET OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST. WE CALL FOR AFRO-AMERICAN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’S STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION AND TO REGAIN ALL OF THEIR STOLEN LAND.”45 Like Rustin’s advertisement had done, Boutelle’s statement included a coupon that could be cut out and returned to COBATAME.

Boutelle managed to secure fifty-six signatures for inclusion, including his own. Some of those who signed were activists, such as Ella L. Collins, head of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and Malcolm X’s half-sister; the advocate of armed black self-defense Robert F. Williams; Clifton DeBerry, SWP presidential candidate in 1964; Grace and James Boggs, intellectuals from Detroit (although Grace was not black; she was of Chinese ancestry); former SNCC chairman Philip Hutchings; and Albert B. Cleague, noted clergyman and activist from Detroit. Poets and writers added their names, including Askia Muhammad Touré and his wife, Halima; A. B. Spellman; and Earl Ofari, as did musicians Keito (L. McKeithan) and Mahade Mohammed Ahmed. Legendary Harlem bookstore owners Lewis H. Michaux and Una G. Mulzac signed, as did journalists John Watson and Charles Simmons. Three people associated with the ACOA, staff member Charles Hightower and board members Robert F. Van Lierop and Lydia A. Williams, also signed. Finally, other signatories included union members, lawyers, students, and activists in the women’s movement like Frances M. Beal and Maxine Williams of the Third World Women’s Alliance. More than three hundred people responded to the COBATAME advertisement. They were about evenly split between positive and negative responses. Of the negative responses, Boutelle reported that more than 90 percent of the letters “were of a very vulgar, racist, emotional, ignorant nature with five of them being physically filthy i.e. contents of the envelope.”46

COBATAME did receive some requests for speaking engagements, and in late 1970 Boutelle prepared a fund-raising proposal for writing a pamphlet or book to be titled “Black Americans, Jews, and the Middle East Crisis.” He estimated that it would require between $1,200 and $3,500 and hoped to complete it by January 1971.⁴⁷ Apparently, he was never able to publish it, and ultimately COBATAME ceased to function fairly shortly thereafter. Funds were short, and its members all had regular jobs that kept them from performing too much free labor for the group. COBATAME’s newspaper advertisement was the group’s only contribution to Black Power’s counterattack on Bayard Rustin.

The expressions of support for the Palestinian struggle against Israel that exploded out of the pages of black journals and newspapers and at black political conferences stood as testament to the growing sense among black activists that the Arab-Israeli conflict was a major component of their identity and sense of political mission. If Malcolm X and SNCC had opened the door of internationalist black solidarity with Palestine as a country of color, black women and men of the arts and letters pushed it further open. This kind of internationalism became a key element in the construction of a new black cultural identity envisioned by African Americans like those in the Black Arts Movement. They were not alone; a new force within the Black Power movement was emerging that also sought to create a new, revolutionary identity for black Americans. But it aimed not at educated blacks but rather those on the street corners in the inner cities it called the “lumpen” (after the Marxist term lumpenproletariat): the Black Panther Party.