CHAPTER 8

RED, WHITE, AND BLACK

Communists, Guerrillas, and the Black Mainstream

ON JULY 28, 1970, the director of the Washington office of the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), Charles Hightower, wrote an angry letter to some of those who had signed Bayard Rustin’s pro-Israeli advertisement in the New York Times expressing his “profound opposition and outrage” at what they had done.1 Hightower’s action triggered a strong backlash from Rustin and led to a small avalanche of intra-ACOA meetings and letters lasting several months. Hightower’s bitter opposition to Rustin and his establishment cohorts represented a challenge to the very sense of inside-the-system legitimacy that ACOA represented and brought up the same issue of white paternalism that SNCC had confronted several years earlier. Hightower found that he was not alone among his ACOA colleagues in his outrage—a feeling that led to some profound soul searching within ACOA about who really controlled the organization and what its purpose was. Who, then, was Charles Hightower, and why did his letters of pro-Palestinian pique set off such a chain reaction? And why was it that the question of Israel and the Palestinians set off the brouhaha within a mainstream organization focused on Africa?

CONTROVERSY WITHIN THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE ON AFRICA

The ACOA hired thirty-six-year-old Charles Hightower in 1970 to head its Washington, DC, office. The committee had been formed in 1953 to support anticolonial struggles in Africa. ACOA emerged from an earlier ad hoc group, Americans for South African Resistance, which had been formed by two ministers in New York to support the African National Congress call for a “Campaign of Defiance Against Unjust Laws” in South Africa. From its headquarters in New York, ACOA tried to reach out to a broad coalition of labor, religious, and civil rights groups, as well as politicians and other constituencies, to draw attention to the black anticolonial and antiracist struggles emerging on the African continent. In 1967 ACOA established a branch office in Washington to monitor Congress and bring attention to African struggles in the seat of American power.

On July 28, 1970, one month to the day after Rustin’s advertisement appeared, Hightower wrote his angry letter to some of the blacks who had signed it. He wrote the letter on ACOA stationery and signed it as the Washington director of ACOA. The letter expressed Hightower’s “profound opposition and outrage” at each signatory for having signed a statement “of support for Israeli aggression against the Arab peoples of the Middle East,” as well as for the fact that “you have incorrectly attempted to justify your action by relating Israel to the world-wide movement for social justice.” Given that ACOA was created out of support for blacks suffering from official racism in South Africa, Hightower went on to write about Israel’s relationship with the apartheid regime and the degree to which both oppressed people of color: “Apparently, you are ignorant of the fact that Israel is supported by South Africa, that each of these states keep about 5,000 political prisoners in detention, that in the Arab territories occupied by Israel [in 1967], there is not even the pretense of democracy, and that closer political and economic ties are currently being extended between South Africa and Israel.”

He continued by pointing to the racism he saw within Israeli society, the discrimination experienced by what he called “dark-skinned” Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab and other Islamic countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. By contrast, Hightower pointed out that the “Arab Revolution” was seeking to improve the lot of all peoples in the region. Finally, he excoriated the signatories in a personal attack: “Your support for Israel and request to the United States Government to supply that aggressive country with American-made jet aircraft for use against the Arab population is a criminal and reactionary position of policy which calls into question your fitness to serve as a representative of Afro-America.” As if to show temperance after writing those words, Hightower signed the letters, “Yours in continuing struggle, Charles Hightower.” For good measure Hightower also issued a press release with his comments and sent copies of his letter, along with a statement he had signed against American support to Israel, to the staff at various embassies in Washington, including those of Zambia, Tanzania, and the Soviet Union.2

Some of those to whom Hightower sent letters responded angrily. Both Rustin and Representative Charles Diggs (D-MI) complained about Hightower to ACOA’s office in New York. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, who happened to sit on the National Advisory Board of the A. Philip Randolph Institute that Rustin headed, complained as well. One of the main reasons that Rustin was upset was because ACOA was not a radical Black Power group but one more in line with his approach. It was a liberal, within-the-system organization that reached out to many of the same constituencies that the A. Philip Randolph Institute did. What is more, some of the same people worked with both groups. None other than Randolph himself was one of two cochairs of the ACOA, and some of the signers of Rustin’s advertisement sat on the ACOA national committee.

Rustin was also an old colleague-in-struggle with ACOA’s executive director, George M. Houser. Well-known in civil rights circles, Houser had helped found CORE in 1942 and ACOA in 1953, and he had served as ACOA’s executive director since 1955. Rustin held nothing against Houser as a result of Hightower’s actions: Houser had been on leave from his ACOA post since May of 1970 and thus was not involved with the controversy. Still, Rustin believed that Hightower had drawn a line in the sand to which Houser needed to respond.

The ACOA decided to act. Its steering committee met to deal with the issue a few days after Hightower sent his letter. Committee members discussed how ACOA’s ability to work with people in Congress like Representative Diggs depended on Hightower’s contacts with them, which now clearly were called into question by the angry letter he had sent them. Someone from the committee apparently told Jet magazine that the steering committee’s members had voted three to two to ask Hightower to send the follow-up letter—a close vote indicating that Hightower had support within the committee. The magazine also reported that an angry Representative Stokes had said he would not conduct any business with ACOA as long as Hightower remained director of the Washington office.3

The committee delegated ACOA president Peter Weiss to contact Hightower and ask him to send a second letter to all who received his first one, clarifying to them that he had been expressing his own opinion and not that of the ACOA.⁴ Weiss himself was no stranger to issues relating to Israel. He was born in Vienna to a Jewish family and fled with his family in 1938 after the Anschluss united Nazi Germany with Austria, the land of Adolf Hitler’s birth. In 1950 he became a member of Americans for Progressive Israel and later became a member of the governing council of the American Jewish Congress.

Weiss wrote to Hightower on August 7, 1970. He was somewhat sympathetic toward Hightower’s attitudes, if not what he wrote and how he had written it. “I think it hardly needs saying that the only matter at issue was the use of the Committee’s letterhead and of your ACOA title, and not the substance of the letter,” Weiss wrote. He also added that he himself was “quite annoyed by the ‘Black Americans’ ad. I thought it was inaccurate, stupid and not helpful either to the cause of Israel or to that of peace in the Middle East.” Weiss made clear that he did not agree with everything Hightower wrote, especially about the “Arab revolution”: “I have serious doubts whether El Fatah, being supported largely by feudal oil money, is really committed to the cause of the ‘Arab revolution.’”⁵

Weiss then dived into the real issue. He was requesting that Hightower write back to everyone who received his July 28, 1970, letter and make it clear to them that he was speaking for himself, not ACOA. He also pointed out to Hightower that some on the steering committee had worried that Hightower’s “rather strong language” might impair his future ability to work with congressional officials on matters relating to Africa.⁶

On August 10, 1970, Hightower wrote back to Stokes and the others to whom he originally had written, as Weiss had suggested. He simply wrote tersely that while he hoped that his first letter had been clear in expressing his own feelings, not those of ACOA, subsequent communications to ACOA’s New York office made it necessary for him to “clarify” the matter. Hightower’s second letter certainly was not good enough for Rustin, who complained in an August 28, 1970, “Dear Friend” letter he sent to all the persons who had signed his advertisement. The letter bemoaned the fact that ACOA did not “apologize” to each of them, although it acknowledged that Hightower himself had subsequently made it clear to them that his letter did not represent ACOA’s views.7

That may have ended the matter for Rustin, but the incident provoked continued conversation and controversy within ACOA. One of the basic premises of the Black Power movement was that blacks should manage their own affairs, run their own organizations, and pursue their own objectives—free from white control and influence, however liberal or well-intentioned. Because of such control, Black Power advocates argued that groups professing to work on behalf of black issues sometimes were not really in touch with what African Americans themselves really wanted and needed. ACOA, in fact, epitomized such a well-meaning liberal group, whose president, executive director, and many of its executive board and national committee members were white. And in this case ACOA’s black staff wanted the group to take a stand against Israel.

On September 14, 1970, ACOA staff member Prexy Nesbitt decided he had had enough. Like Hightower, Nesbitt was a smart, black, relatively new staff person from Chicago who had begun working for ACOA as its Chicago field representative in January of 1970. Nesbitt sent a memorandum to the staff and executive board of ACOA in the wake of the Hightower incident threatening to quit unless certain “central issues” within ACOA were resolved. He lashed out against ACOA for its failure of nerve, not only for not supporting Hightower vigorously in the recent controversy with Rustin but also for not pushing for radical action on African issues that were near and dear to the black community.

In his lengthy memorandum Nesbitt made sure to state that his charges did not constitute a “character assassination” of individuals within ACOA. If anything, they could “be labeled as a character assassination upon the political role and impact of the organization known as the ACOA.” Nesbitt began his statement with a firm condemnation of what the steering committee did to Hightower, a question about what the implications of that act meant for relations between the committee and the paid ACOA staff, and a round denunciation of ACOA for not taking a stand against Israel in light of clear evidence that it enjoyed a cozy relationship with apartheid in South Africa:

As a staff member, I deplore and reject the recent act by the Steering Committee asking Charles Hightower to issue a letter stating that his views on Israel were not those of ACOA. (Such an act raises serious questions about the political rights of an ACOA employee and about the relationship between the Board and the Staff.) I wholly support Charles’ condemnation of those Black Americans who requested U.S.A. support for Israel, and moreover, I hasten to condemn ACOA for the fact that Charles’ views are not the views of ACOA. One must ask at a time when the role of Israeli support for the fascists in South Africa is so clearly established, how can the ACOA (an organization pruporting [sic] to support the struggle of African peoples in Southern Africa) fail to condemn Israel for its imperialist role in Southern Africa as a whole.

After raising other complaints about how ACOA operated, including charging that overall strategy is determined by the executive director independent of any consultations with the staff, Nesbitt drove his main point home: ACOA had failed its “mandate” and had not moved “into the mainstream of history.” He contended that ACOA had criticized Hightower for doing what it should have done itself. “We have failed the struggling comrades from South Africa who are most immediately the victims of the Israeli–South African Axis,” he charged. ACOA was a group that only “feigns” to support liberation movements in southern Africa, and that was not consistent with the kind of revolutionary change to which he was committed.8

Houser responded to Nesbitt’s allegations in a September 25, 1970, “comment.” But with the gauntlet thrown down, ACOA’s executive board decided to hold a special meeting to discuss the entire Hightower issue and its ramifications for ACOA. Because he could not attend that meeting, one member of the board weighed in on the issues raised by Nesbitt in a memorandum to the staff and his fellow board members. No doubt to Nesbitt’s pleasure, Lincoln University professor Richard P. Stevens not only wrote in defense of the issues Nesbitt had raised but wrote in support of Hightower as well.⁹ Stevens wrote that he agreed with Nesbitt that demanding that Hightower write the second letter to signers of Rustin’s advertisement was “unwarranted.” He doubted that any fair-minded person reading Hightower’s first letter could have come away feeling that he had spoken on behalf of ACOA and not merely himself. What ACOA should have done was to defend Hightower’s right to speak, and use his title with ACOA as an identifier, rather than ask him to write the follow-up letter.¹⁰

Stevens’s letter then turned to Nesbitt’s criticisms. He agreed that Nesbitt had raised an important issue about the consistency with which ACOA approached African issues and how that affected the group’s relations with the black community. Speaking as a white professor teaching at a historically black university, Stevens wrote that there was a growing divide in the black community between establishment “leaders” and younger blacks who we are more attuned to Third World liberation issues. One manifestation of this, he remarked, was a keen sense among younger blacks to take their commitment to black liberation seriously enough to call attention to any forces or individuals standing in its way. He then drove the point home: “This might indeed involve singling out for attack states, person[s], movements which liberal white opinion would not oppose”—like Israel.11

Stevens also expressed his personal incredulity that Rustin and his fellow signers had spoken out as blacks in support not of black Africa but of Israel. Britain had just announced resumption of arms shipments to South Africa, and these black “leaders” (the quotations were his) could not see fit to speak out on that subject but rather on arms for Israel? He also sharply noted that if the Zionist Organization of America had spoken out against British arms for South Africa, “then Black Americans might have adequate reason to support Zionism; if not, should the concern of Blacks move in support of Israel? Young militants are asking these questions.” In conclusion, Stevens said that ACOA must be sensitive to “new questions and approaches” that reflect “new moods.”¹²

With the memoranda of Nesbitt and Stevens in hand, Houser wrote a memorandum to the board in advance of the October 6, 1970, meeting. A longtime white civil rights activist who had helped establish CORE in 1942, Houser’s mainstream vision of ACOA was clear. Noting that “we are essentially non-establishment, interracial, and reformist in our impact,” Houser concluded that “our emphasis should be essentially [what] it has been but even further focused because of financial restraints.” Regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, therefore, he wrote, “I would hope that we would stay out of it to the extent possible.” Passing resolutions on issues tangential to ACOA’s central mission would have “relatively little meaning.”¹³

At the board meeting, Weiss displayed a different attitude, more in tune with the impatience of ACOA’s black staffer members. He conceded that an important question was whether ACOA was “reformist” or “revolutionary.” Weiss also admitted that in the past ACOA had been a “white-liberal organization, paternalistic towards the black community before realizing that black people had to work things out for themselves.” Finally, Weiss said the question of Israel and the Middle East was outside ACOA’s area of concern, but Israel’s relationship with South Africa should be investigated and publicized.14

Other ACOA board and staff members contributed to the discussion of the type of organization ACOA was, or should be, as well as on the topic of what to do, if anything, about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Board member Blydon Jackson said that “the heart of the problem is that ACOA has a radical and black staff working for a white, liberal organization. But the staff has little role in the formation of policy and is cut off from this function.” Another member of the board, Lydia A. Williams, noted that ACOA policy must come to terms and reflect the growing knowledge among blacks about Africa and Israel’s “odd” role in the continent, “something that the black community has been aware of for a long time.”¹⁵ Nesbitt asserted that it was impossible for ACOA to ignore the Middle East. Board member Robert Van Lierop, who had just returned from a dramatic trip to Jordan, stated that Israel was a settler colony.¹⁶ What was worse, he continued, was that some of those who signed Rustin’s advertisement had refused to take public stances on African issues but were happy to do so for Israel. In the end it was decided to establish a mixed staff-board committee to investigate ways to change the decision-making process within ACOA and to discuss policy issue.¹⁷ Once again, the Arab-Israeli conflict proved to be the springboard for presenting wider Black Power issues that confronted established liberal organizations dealing with African and Afro-American issues.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY USA

When Henry M. Winston published an article in November of 1970 titled “Black Americans and the Middle East Conflict,” he was in a good position to write it. A black man born in 1911 in Mississippi, he joined the Young Communist League about 1930. The federal government later prosecuted him for sedition under the Smith Act and imprisoned him in 1956, and by the time he was released in 1961, he had become blind. Five years later he was elected national chair of the Communist Party USA. Winston’s article compared the shared struggle of Palestinians, American blacks, and others suffering from imperialism by noting that “the struggle of the Arab people is an inseparable part of the fight of all peoples for liberation from imperialism. And this is indissolubly linked to the struggle of Black people in the U.S.”¹⁸

Black support for the Palestinians in the 1970s also emerged within left-wing organizations outside the Black Power and civil rights movements. Winston and the rest of the leadership of the largely white Communist Party USA (CPUSA) expended great effort during and after 1967 to articulate the party’s pro-Palestinian stance to the CPUSA rank and file, much of which was Jewish. Yet by the early 1970s it also began reaching out to black audiences.

Three years after Winston’s article appeared, the CPUSA established a front organization to address Arab-Israeli issues in concert with issues of interest to blacks: the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). The alliance grew out of the National Committee to Free Angela Davis, which had been formed in 1971 at the time that CPUSA member Angela Davis was arrested and tried for murder. Davis was an icon for both black and white activists of the 1960s generation. In 1969 California governor Ronald Reagan and the Regents of the University of California fired her from her teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles because she was a communist. She later was reinstated but then terminated again the following year for other reasons. Davis then was arrested in October of 1970 and charged with murder in connection with a shootout outside a courtroom in northern California; she was acquitted in June of 1972.

The first NAARPR conference was held in Chicago less than one year later, in May of 1973. Davis became NAARPR’s cochair, while fellow black party member Charlene Mitchell served as its executive secretary. Beyond its attempts to recruit militant blacks into party activity, the NAARPR was also significant in that its emergence marked the beginning of a new era in which the CPUSA began specifically addressing the issue of the Palestinians and championing their cause—as opposed simply to criticizing Israel and supporting a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which it had been doing since the 1967 war.

Davis remained busy in her work for the NAARPR in the mid-1970s. She traveled to communist East Berlin for the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in July and August of 1973 and while there reportedly met Yasir Arafat. One year later, in August of 1974, she and the NAARPR issued a statement in support of the PLO and against Israeli jailing of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.19 Continuing to support Palestinians both inside and outside Israel and the Occupied Territories, Davis addressed a San Francisco press conference on October 10, 1976, alongside Tawfiq Zayyad, the communist mayor of Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city.20 The NAARPR also sent a delegate to the Emergency International Conference in Solidarity with the People of Palestine and the National Lebanese Forces held in December of 1976 in Athens.²¹ Communist support for the Palestinians offered a clear demonstration of the impact that Black Power stances on the Arab-Israeli conflict were having within the largely white political realm by the mid-1970s.

ARMED BLACK GUERRILLAS

On September 20, 1982, former Black Panther Sekou Odinga made a statement during the initial legal proceedings against him at the Rockland County Courthouse, thirty-four miles north of New York City, in which he denied the very legitimacy of the court to try him. Odinga was one of six militant defendants, three blacks and three whites, accused of the robbery of a Brinks Company armored car in October of 1981 that led to the deaths of two police officers and a Brinks guard in nearby Nyack, New York. He was, Odinga told the judge, a Muslim, a New Afrikan Freedom Fighter, and a prisoner of war.

Odinga also pointed out that the real issue that should be discussed in court that day was not his impending trial but “the massacre of the Palestinians”—a reference to the slaughter of at least one thousand Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila a few days earlier in Beirut, Lebanon. Odinga also complained that prison guards had not allowed him and his fellow defendants to wear black armbands as a sign of mourning and solidarity with the Palestinian people. His lawyer, Chokwe Lumumba, joined in, asking Judge Robert J. Stolarik if his refusal to allow the defendants to wear armbands was “because you side with the Israelis in the Lebanese massacre?” Odinga and codefendants Judith Clark, David Gilbert, and Kuwasi Balagoon then refused to sit through the remainder of the proceedings of a court whose authority they rejected. The latter three shouted “Long live Palestine!” as they were escorted out of the courtroom.²² Armed black militants and their white allies were still declaring their allegiance to the Palestinian cause even in the early 1980s, when most Black Power revolutionaries had long since stopped carrying out armed attacks on the Establishment. For Odinga and his comrades, support for the Palestinian struggle still constituted an essential part of their identity as revolutionaries at the dawn of the 1980s.

The origins of the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters extend back to a loose-knit armed underground black organization that grew out of the Black Panther Party’s split in 1971: the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The BLA emerged in the open that year although its roots date to the mid-1960s and groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Black Panthers.23 The BLA attracted, among others, former members of the Black Panther Party in New York City who were loyal to Eldridge Cleaver after the February 1971 factional rupture between Cleaver and Huey Newton.

This raises an interesting question: might Cleaver have been inspired to start an underground armed force like the BLA as a result of his contacts with al-Fateh in Algeria? Cleaver and the Black Panthers who lived in exile in Algiers certainly maintained a special affinity with al-Fateh. The day that Cleaver publicly opened his first office in Algiers in July of 1969, he delivered a statement in support of the Palestinians with an al-Fateh representative standing beside him. Cleaver and the BPP’s international section in Algiers eventually were in daily contact with the Palestinians.²⁴ Kathleen Neal Cleaver confirmed that of all the revolutionary groups who maintained a presence in Algiers, the Panthers felt the closest to the Palestinians (along with Zimbabwean and South African groups) because the al-Fateh people spoke English and “had a knowledge of the United States and its devastating politics vis a vis their struggle.”²⁵

Regardless of whether the model of revolutionary warfare offered by al-Fateh is what motivated Eldridge Cleaver, it comes as no surprise that blacks who went on to become noteworthy BLA militants were solidly behind the PLO given their background in the pro-Palestinian world of the BPP. One famous BLA member was former Panther Zayd Malik Shakur (also known as Dedane Olugbala). Born James F. Coston, Shakur was a Muslim convert who spoke out publicly in support of the Palestinians while in the BPP. In May of 1970 he wrote, “It must be pointed out that the only right that the Zionist clique, headed by Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, have to the land that they call Israel is a robber’s right.”²⁶ He later joined the BLA and was killed by the New Jersey state police during a shootout in May of 1973. Afterward, the FBI claimed that Shakur was doing more than just speaking out on behalf of the Palestinian cause. The bureau claimed it found the names and addresses of two Arabs, an Egyptian, and an Algerian, as well as the contact information of the PLO, in the car in which Shakur had been riding when he was killed. An FBI report claimed that “the material is considered particularly significant as it could relate to prior information received that Arab terrorists are training U.S. blacks in guerrilla operations and previous information concerning the BPP-CF’s [Black Panther Party—Cleaver Faction] complicity in a terrorist plot in this country.”27 After a number of BLA militants died in battles with the police, the group largely melted away by the mid-1970s.

In the late 1970s the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters began to coalesce. Their leaders included Sekou Odinga. Odinga had an interesting connection with the Palestinians and the Arab world. Born Nathaniel Burns, he joined Malcolm X’s Organization for Afro-American Unity and, later, both the Black Panthers and an early incarnation of the BLA. He fled the United States for Cuba in mid-1970 and ended up in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver in August of that year. Odinga served as Cleaver’s bodyguard and no doubt was familiar with the Palestinians from al-Fateh. Perhaps this is why, when he left Algeria in 1972, Odinga made his way back to underground life in the United States in order to continue the struggle—but apparently not before spending time in Lebanon, home to the PLO’s headquarters.²⁸ Odinga and other militants like Mutulu Shakur later carried out a series of robberies in the late 1970s and early 1980s with help from white radicals. Their organizations were called various names, including the Revolutionary Armed Task Force of the Black Liberation Army and the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters.

As part of their ongoing commitment to armed revolutionary struggle within the United States, the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters continued the strong Black Power support for the Palestinians first expressed in the 1960s. This came out publicly in a communiqué that was issued in the name of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force of the Black Liberation Army on August 21, 1982, to mark the occasion of New Afrikan Freedom Fighters Day.²⁹ In addition to spelling out what the aims of the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters were and noting the black fighters’ solidarity with the Palestinians, it contained a section on groups and struggles that the fighters considered allies in the fight against “U.S./Zionist/Apartheid brands of imperial domination.” The PLO was one of them:

The P.L.O., F.L.N.C., S.W.A.P.O., and P.A.C. are engaged in life and death struggles to extricate their nations from imperialism’s grip. So too are the fighting forces of New Afrika. We see that objectively there is an alliance between these anti-imperialist/pro-national liberation forces. We must support one another morally, materially and politically and we must learn from one another’s experiences. From the PLO we have learned the lesson of tenacious steadfast struggle. . . . We have learned from them in the final analysis if we want to be free we must do it ourselves. In this period of revolutionary struggle this lesson is invaluable.30

The militants’ supporters outside of prison also hailed the Palestinian struggle. A group called the National Committee to Defend New Afrikan Freedom Fighters took the opportunity of the end of Israel’s long siege of West Beirut and the subsequent Sabra-Shatila Massacre in the late summer of 1982 to make its own statement in support of the Palestinians. The committee may have been prompted to do so by the six persons on trial: in October of 1982 the FBI opened and read a letter that an imprisoned member of the group wrote to someone on the outside—probably in the committee—urging that a statement of support be sent to the PLO. It read: “As to the Palestinian struggle, I think it would be an excellent idea for the committee to send a statement of Solidarity and support, and if possible to fix it so we can establish closer ties with them. I’m sure it will be comforting to them to know that there are people in America who they have never been in official contact with that have been supporting their struggle for a very long time.”³¹

The support committee did in fact issue a statement. “New Afrika and Palestine are linked in a common struggle,” it stated in classic 1960s-style Black Power rhetoric, “against a common enemy—u.s.-led [sic] imperialism.” The committee hailed the strategy of people’s war exemplified by the PLO, and pointed out once again that the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters saw their struggle and that of the PLO as a “manifestation of the common enemy of the Palestinian and the New Afrikan people—imperialism led by the u.s.a. [sic].” The statement ended with “Death to Zionism and White Supremacy! Death to Imperialism! Victory to the PLO! Victory to the New Afrikan struggle for Land, Independence, and Socialism.”³² Fifteen years after SNCC’s newsletter article, revolutionary black anti-imperialism was still alive.

The initial court proceedings against the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters afforded the defendants a public opportunity to assert their support for the Palestinian cause. During those preliminary hearings two other defendants besides Odinga offered statements in court criticizing Israel. One was David Gilbert. Born to a Jewish family, Gilbert joined Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and later was a member of the Weather Underground Organization in the 1970s. After that he was associated with a group of white supporters of the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters and was one of three whites driving getaway vehicles the day of the Brinks robbery. He was put on trial for murder along with Odinga and the rest. In a statement delivered in court, Gilbert censured both America and Israel in the same sentence when he said, “The government that dropped napalm in Vietnam, that provides the cluster bombs used against civilians in Lebanon, and that trains the torturers in El Salvador calls us ‘terrorists.’”33

Codefendant Kuwasi Balagoon’s statement included this: “The United States, Israel, and South Africa stand as expanding imperialist settler states, rotten to their cores, from inception.” Born Donald Weems, Balagoon joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 and stood trial in New York from 1969 to 1971 in the famous Panther 21 case. After his acquittal Balagoon became active in the BLA and the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters until his capture in October of 1981. When his actual trial began the next year, in July of 1983, Balagoon’s opening statement once again criticized the American government for the fact that it “supports and aids the Israeli government in its massacres of Palestinian people and the theft of their homeland—just as the euro-americans [sic] stole this land.”³⁴ Balagoon became an author after his eventual conviction. Among his writings were some about Israel and the Palestinians in which he argued that the Palestinians were in many ways like African Americans and the American Indians: the West Bank was a ghetto, and the refugee camps were reservations. Both American Indians and Palestinians were colonized peoples.³⁵

Another famous group of armed, underground revolutionaries in the 1970s who waged war against the establishment, who supported the Palestinian cause, and who were well versed in the history of the Palestinian struggle were the militants of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The SLA emerged in late 1973 in the San Francisco Bay area and was not, strictly speaking, a black militant group like the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters. Although its leader was a black former prisoner, Donald DeFreeze, the rest of the small group were whites. One of them, Nancy Ling Perry, even adopted an Arabic nom de guerre—Fahizah (also Fayiza: the winner, the victor)—much like black nationalists sometimes had taken Arabic names. The SLA went on to commit several high-profile acts, including the famous February 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst. A number of the group subsequently died in a gun battle with Los Angeles police in May of 1974.

The SLA was another group waging armed guerrilla warfare in the United States in the 1970s that clearly was familiar with the Palestinian armed struggle. The first action that the group apparently planned sometime in the fall of 1973, but never carried out, was going to be an attack on a local office of the Avis car rental company in retaliation for the fact that the company allegedly supported several “fascist governments,” including Israel.36 Russell Little, one of the SLA’s founders, commented on the group’s familiarity with the Palestinian armed struggle: “We also read everything we would [sic] on the Tupamaros in Uruguay and urban guerrilla warfare in general as well as studying the actions of the Palestinians and Japanese Red Army guerrillas.”³⁷ Gary Atwood, the divorced spouse of SLA member Angela Atwood, used to talk about Palestinian guerrillas with his friends and perhaps influenced his wife.³⁸ An SLA support group called the New World Liberation Front later wrote in 1975 about the “heroic Palestinian people”: “US imperialist policy dictates that the Palestinians must be dealt with to create a ‘suitable climate’ for Amerikan [sic] capitalist Investment. Daring revolutionary tactics by Palestinian guerrillas have drawn world-wide support for their Just struggle against the US death order’s oil barons that strangle poor people world-wide—Angola-Gulf, Vietnam-Shell, Middle East, etc.”³⁹

As the 1960s faded away, one dimension of that turbulent time remained vital for African Americans’ understanding of their identity and political agendas in the United States: the Arab-Israeli conflict and its role as a vehicle for expressing black political stances and black visions of identity. By the 1970s even mainstream black voices were expressing support, or at least understanding, for the Palestinian cause, including those in the halls of power in Washington.

THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS

When she spoke, people listened, and when people listened to Shirley Chisholm as she was running for president of the United States in 1972, they may have been surprised to hear her address the problem of the 1948 Palestinian refugees in a sympathetic way that directly compared them to the ghetto experience of black American life, with all its poverty, injustice, and explosions of violent anger: “A generation has grown up in the Palestinian ghetto, and, like the young who have survived their early years in our ghettos, these Palestinians have made clear that they will no longer tolerate the injustice of their condition. . . . Their acts of desperation in recent years have shocked us, perhaps unnecessarily, for we should have learned from our problems here at home the inevitable result of social injustice and poverty.”40

These were strong words, but then Chisholm was not just any presidential candidate. In 1968 she became the first black woman ever elected to the United States House of Representatives. Three years later she helped form the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The CBC’s origins extended back to 1969 and a group of black congressional officials from the Democratic Party called the Democratic Select Committee, which then changed its name to the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 in order to become the official grouping of all black members of Congress. Black Power’s belief that African Americans needed to have and maintain political power to advance their people’s agenda had spread to the halls of power in Washington.

When Chisholm announced on January 25, 1972, that she was running for president on the Democratic Party ticket, she became the first black person ever to run for president from a major political party. Her voice mattered, and her voice indicated that the sympathy and support for the Palestinians had begun to take root among more mainstream blacks by the early 1970s—not just any mainstream blacks, but those running for president of the United States. The fact that Chisholm clearly felt that the situation in the Middle East was an important one can be seen in the fact that the second policy paper her campaign ever issued dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it she berated the Nixon administration for failing to address the Palestinian refugee problem: “Is it merely a coincidence that the Administration has done virtually nothing to help the Vietnamese refugees, the Pakistani refugees, and the Palestinian refugees while it is also eliminating aid to our poor in America?”⁴¹

The paper also underlined Chisholm’s remarkably keen and sympathetic understanding of the Palestinians’ plight. She noted that many people had “failed to see and understand the personal implications of that development [creation of Israel] on those human beings who had lived in Palestine prior to 1948, those people still referred to as the ‘Palestinian refugees.’ . . . While we must protect Israel’s very existence against outside threat by giving her whatever assistance she truly needs, we must also finally launch a new effort to resolve the root cause of the Middle East conflict, the Palestine dispute.” Part of any resolution of that dispute, she maintained, included “full representation for the Palestinians in all negotiations concerning the return or compensation for Palestinian Arab property; and immediate consideration of the problem of the lack of status of the several hundred thousand people who left Israeli held territory in 1948 and 1967.”42

This was a powerful affirmation about the rights of the refugees, although her obvious human compassion did not extend to calling for some kind of political solution for the Palestinians such as establishment of an independent state. As a nationally recognized black congresswoman, Chisholm was also careful to distance herself from some of the more radical views on Israel emerging from the Black Power movement. Expressing support for the plight of Palestinian refugees was one thing; attacking Israel was quite another.

This was highlighted when the National Black Political Convention (NBPC) convened in Gary, Indiana, in March of 1972—just two months after she declared her candidacy for the presidency. The NBPC ended up adopting a plank on Israel that, even though it later was toned down, rankled members of the CBC. Chisholm was one of them. Both as a member of the CBC and as a presidential candidate, Chisholm could not afford to be seen as supportive of the NBPC plank. Nor, for that matter, did she actually believe what she thought it was saying. The month after the convention, Chisholm wrote, “While the Gary Convention resolution called for the dismantling of Israel, I have not and will not ever take such a radical and absurd position. I have always and will continue to stand firmly in favor of the right of existence for the State of Israel, and wish to be fully disassociated from the Gary position.”⁴³ This was overkill: Chisholm either did not read the resolution carefully or purposely misstated it for political purposes, because nowhere in either the original or the final version of the statement on the Middle East did the NBPC call for what she described as “the dismantling of Israel.”

As the group that brought together all the black members of the House of Representatives, the CBC epitomized the growth of mainstream black political power on the national level by the early 1970s. The experience of Chisholm and the NBPC showed that almost from the moment it was established, the CBC was thrust into taking stands on Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, much as other mainstream black groups had been forced to do prior to that.

What had started out as solidly pro-Israeli CBC positions began to become more nuanced, to the point that the CBC, too, began to embrace Palestinian rights, if not Palestinian aims and objectives. In 1972 the entire CBC disassociated itself from the NBPC’s plank on Israel.44 Representative Louis Stokes, chair of the caucus, 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.”⁴⁵ During the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, thirteen of the then fifteen members of the CBC—two shy of consensus—cosponsored a resolution in the House of Representatives urging President Nixon to rearm Israel as the fighting was still under way.⁴⁶

Only two years after that, just ten of the seventeen members of the CBC wrote a letter objecting to UN efforts to expel Israel.⁴⁷ The following year, on April 14, 1976, the CBC issued the “Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Agenda.” As part of that agenda, the CBC noted the following about the Middle East:

—It supported a new peace initiative “based on mutual recognition of Israeli and Palestinian rights”;

—“. . . The Caucus believes that Israel must recognize that the Palestinian question is essentially a political one. The avoidance of the question of providing for a homeland for displaced Palestinians can only lead to another war . . .”;

—“We believe that on the Palestinian side, the notion of replacing Israel with a secular state must be completely abandoned.”⁴⁸

The CBC had embraced the concept of Palestinian political rights wholeheartedly while still remaining fully supportive of Israel. Much had changed in just four years.

The CBC’s eventual embrace of Palestinian national rights (although it still eschewed criticisms of Israel) by the mid-1970s was another indication of the degree to which Black Power’s embrace of the Palestinian people in the 1960s had spread to become acceptable even to many mainstream blacks eleven years after SNCC’s famous newsletter story. It seemed that African Americans working within the system now viewed mainstream black identity and political activity as fully compatible with acceptance of Palestinian human rights. The irony was that by that time, Black Power was largely a spent force. The fact that the drama of the Arab-Israeli conflict had reached into the black mainstream and even congressional black politics offers testimony to the extent to which Black Power stances on Palestine had transformed the politics of black identity in America starting in the 1960s.