Black Power’s Palestine

A Permanent State of War

SNCC’s figuration of permanent war reminded readers that juridical investments in desegregation did not curtail racial violence. In so doing, SNCC evoked an anticolonial through-line in the Black freedom movement that registered the animus of white supremacy as producing populations differentially vulnerable to premature death.4 In the preface to the 1953 edition of The Souls of Black Folk, for instance, the eminent Black philosopher, sociologist, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois revised his famous thesis about the “world problem of the color line.” “Back of the problem of race and color,” writes Du Bois, “lies a greater problem that both obscures and implements it.” This problem was articulated through the register of permanent war, one that violently maintained the material privileges of “so many civilized persons.” “War,” Du Bois continues, “tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”5 More than a decade later, Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, turned to the concept in his famous 1967 essay, “In Defense of Self-Defense”—published in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service just days after the June war. “The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society,” Newton argues. “We do not want war, but war can only be abolished through war. In order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun.”6 And in reflecting on the widespread uprisings across U.S. cities in the summer of 1967, Jack O’Dell, the editor of Freedomways and one of the freedom movement’s key strategists, pinpointed the intensification of state-sanctioned violence across a broad swath of U.S. imperial culture: “Whether expressed in the form of armed Tactical Units occupying the ghettos, a police mobilization to brutalize peace marchers, or a massive military build-up in Southeast Asia, the economic, political and psychological ascendancy of militarism is a primary factor shaping the character of national life in our country today.”7

In framing an article about the origins of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a genealogy of the “documented facts” of permanent war, SNCC revealed the broader obscuring of racialized state and state-sanctioned violence that were racial liberalism’s conditions of possibility. SNCC invites readers to take seriously the historical strategies used by artists, scholars, and activists to articulate substantive forms of freedom, equality, and self-determination beyond the brittle forms of rights-based discourse.8 The disembodied abstractions of rights, order, and the law could be grasped as a mutable set of contextually specific power relations that often did as much to secure as to challenge colonialism and racism. In so doing, SNCC’s engagement with Palestine joined the internationalist tradition of Black freedom struggles, one that emphasized the linkages between antiracist domestic struggles and those decolonizing struggles across the globe.9

It was hardly predetermined, however, whether or how the Black freedom movement in the United States would conceive of Palestinian national liberation as part of a struggle against racism and colonialism. The intellectual tradition that had for over a century confronted the white supremacist kernel of U.S. Empire often self-narrated its contours through the lexicon of Jewish Zionism. For some of the most influential thinkers in this tradition, from Edward Blyden to Marcus Garvey to Ras Makonnen, Du Bois to Paul Robeson to Kwame Nkrumah, Jewish Zionism provided a resonant analogy for a diasporic Black political consciousness rooted in ancient scripture and modern nationalism. For Du Bois and Robeson, as for a young Stokely Carmichael, Zionism offered a set of secular leftist economic and political commitments that could be deployed in a shared Black-Jewish struggle against U.S. capitalist hegemony and white supremacy. In the face of Nazi genocide, the enmeshment of an internationalist Black imaginary and Zionist commitments to a Jewish state became even tighter. Jewish settlement in Palestine became the determinative touchstone for Afro-Zionist responses to World War II, even when it ran counter to the impulses of an anti-imperialist Black radicalism.10

If reckoning with Palestinian national liberation was circumscribed by the historical convergences between Zionism and Black internationalism and the impassioned humanitarian response to Nazi genocide, it was further complicated by an emergent U.S. racial liberalism. As I elaborated in chapter 1, early Cold War anticommunism ensured that internationalist critiques of racial capitalism were bracketed or obscured by juridical investments in civil rights integration.

The scope of racial liberalism’s force in framing Palestine is registered in a striking photograph snapped at the 1948 New Year’s Day gala held at the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem. In the private offices of the Renaissance’s owner, with a college bowl game on the television in the background, Paul Robeson shook hands with Ralph Bunche, one of the lead researchers on Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma and a prominent political scientist who played a key role in framing the Palestine question at the United Nations. Even such a mundane event merited photographic documentation, what with the gala’s festive atmosphere and Robeson and Bunche being two of Harlem’s best-known celebrities—the former as much for his career in drama and musical performance as for his political organizing, the latter for his recent ascent through the corridors of U.S. state power. Just a few weeks earlier, Bunche had been appointed the principal secretary of the UN Palestine Commission, an office tasked with supervising the formation of nascent Israeli and Palestinian governing councils under the UN’s tenuous 1947 Partition Plan. Bunche and Robeson, in the year following the photograph, would find themselves inextricably enmeshed in the regional war in Palestine. Before an audience of Jewish soldiers, Robeson would perform the songs of freedom he had sung earlier in the year in Trinidad’s vaunted Carib Theatre with “a political message of the most radical and profound kind.”11 He would also find himself hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s virulent anticommunism, marginalized by many African American organizations for his perceived embrace of the Soviet Union, and, by 1950, barred from leaving the United States.12 Bunche would travel to the Middle East as a representative of the United Nations and become the head UN mediator in Palestine that September when Count Folk Bernadotte was assassinated by a Jewish splinter group led by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Bunche would go on to secure a fragile peace treaty between the newly founded Jewish state and Egypt in 1949, and in 1950 he would become the first African American to receive a Nobel prize.13

Tellingly, the negative for the 1948 photograph of Bunche and Robeson was never developed, printed, or published. According to Robeson biographer Edwin Hoyt, the editor of the Amsterdam News James Hicks was in the office at the Renaissance Hotel, and “he tore up that negative, before it could be ejected into an alien world that would not understand.”14 The meeting of two towering figures was refused representation in an early Cold War moment where the racial liberal Bunche could not be seen interacting with the race radical Robeson. The negative’s disposal reveals how, as early as 1948, a figure of leftist anticolonial internationalism could embrace the founding of the state of Israel as a struggle for Jewish national liberation; a burgeoning advocate of Cold War racial liberalism bore the challenging task of securing Israel as a hallmark of humanitarian intervention in the Holocaust’s wake; and Robeson and Bunche could not be seen embracing each other.

The 1950s offered glimpses of a reconceptualized relationship between the Black freedom movement, Israel, and Palestine, though these links were largely underelaborated and curtailed, especially given the movement’s Cold War anticommunist domestication.15 Nineteen fifty-five’s Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, and the 1956 Suez Crisis began to reveal the possibility of Afro-Arab culture- and class-based solidarities, with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser playing an instrumental role in shaping a broad understanding of an anticolonial Pan-Arabism. While the Suez War clarified the pressing demands for Afro-Arab solidarity—fracturing the persistent Afro-Zionism of W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking, for instance16—it was rare for intellectuals and activists in the Black freedom movement to articulate an imaginative geography of Israel and Palestine capable of making legible Arab Palestinian subjectivity. Aside from several prominent exceptions—including James Baldwin and Malcolm X—the colonial violence in Palestine prior to the June 1967 War was an image that the Black freedom movement never substantively captured. As the political scientist Michael W. Williams argues, “The harmony of interests between Zionism and world imperialism did not become apparent until the era of decolonization.”17 Such recognition, however, emerged from understanding how the era of decolonization was dramatically marked by the intensified colonization of Palestine and the rapid racial reorganization of U.S. national space.

The American Pattern of Exclusion

One month after Robeson and Bunche’s 1948 interaction, twenty-three-year-old James Baldwin gained widespread fame when his first major essay was published in a national journal, the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary. Commentary would become one of the primary publications where racial liberalism would gain a staunch neoconservative tenor. Yet when it was founded in the mid-1940s, the journal prided itself on publishing a range of left-liberal material germane to its primarily Jewish American intellectual readership.

Baldwin’s “Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948, the Vicious Circle of Frustration and Prejudice” appeared between the pages of a journalistic account of the contemporary “bloodshed in Palestine” and the reprinting of a mid-nineteenth-century poem, “Lament of the Children of Israel in Rome.” Baldwin’s essay depicts the racist conditions of existence in the chilly Harlem winter, though its juxtaposition to these other works implicitly places it in a broader geographic and historical context. The essay opens with a brief analysis of the effects of high rent, costly food, employment insecurity, and a downturn in wages. The tight enclosure of the racialized space of Harlem’s ghettos was “pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows closed.”18 While “Negro identification” with the diasporic narrative of the “wandering Jew” entered routinely into the many church services that structured Black life in Harlem, it could not translate into amicable material relations. “Jews in Harlem are small tradesmen, rent collectors, real estate agents, and pawnbrokers; they operate in accordance with the American business tradition of exploiting Negroes, and they are therefore identified with oppression and are hated for it” (169). Baldwin confronted the discourse of racial liberalism by narrating the spatial forces at work in shaping the racialized antagonism between Jews and Black people in Harlem.

Just as a mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem or prevent Negro boys and girls from growing up and facing, individually and alone, the unendurable frustration of being always, everywhere, inferior—until finally the cancer attacks the mind and warps it—so there seems no hope for better Negro-Jewish relations without a change in the American pattern. (170)

Baldwin did not wait long for such a change to take place, performing his own exodus—to Paris—later that year.

Baldwin returned to these themes two decades later, in a prominent April 1967 essay published in the New York Times Magazine. “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” like “The Harlem Ghetto,” again maps the racialization of space at a time of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tension. “It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home,” Baldwin writes. “Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter.”19 If in 1948 Baldwin saw Jews living in Harlem’s midst, by 1967 Baldwin suggests that anti-Semitism emerged because not only had American Jews become assimilated into a national ideology of exclusion predicated on race—what he calls the “American pattern”—but in doing so they had been drawn into a spatially stratified structure of whiteness. Against the backdrop of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, Baldwin clarifies the differentially racialized practice of imagining social struggle, differentiating heroes and criminals across the color line: “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: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitudes toward the Jews” (138). The Holocaust-era analogy of Jewish resistance, replete with its stark implications of creeping fascism and genocide in the United States, was incommensurable with the differential forms of racialized exclusion that distinguished Jews and Blacks peoples. “If one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem,” Baldwin continues,

and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can’t but look on the American state and the American people as one’s oppressors. For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only life you have. (136–37)

Just as the ability to identify with the Jewish diaspora through scriptural reference was severely curtailed by the material realities of Black existence, the spatial logic of the ghetto as a corral for a criminalized underclass was made illegible in the context of racial liberalism.

Recent scholarship on the relationship between space and racialized criminality has elaborated the broader trends of the process Baldwin apprehended. Shaped by the residues of racial slavery, quasi-legal Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoized urban space, the late 1960s saw the emergence of what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls a “novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus,” whose “deadly symbiosis” produces a “single carceral continuum.”20 Shifts in U.S. political economy, from an urban industry-based economy to a decentered service-based economy buttressed by a post-1965 boom in laboring-class immigration, made Black workers functionally redundant. Federal civil rights legislation and other juridical reforms did little substantively to alter a social geography built on centuries of institutionalized racism. In response, many ghettoized African Americans took to the streets, often sparking violent contestations with law enforcement and property owners. But “as the walls of the ghetto shook and threatened to crumble,” Wacquant writes, “the walls of the prison were correspondingly extended, enlarged and fortified, and ‘confinement of differentiation,’ aimed at keeping a group apart . . . gained primacy over ‘confinement of safety’ and ‘confinement of authority.’”21 De jure segregation was outlawed, but de facto segregation was entrenched through the symbiotic relationship between ghetto and prison. In this spatial relation, the ghetto becomes more like a prison—enclosing, policing, surveilling, and criminalizing a population—and the prison becomes more like a ghetto, “quarantin[ing] a polluting group from the urban body.”22

By the mid-1960s an emergent U.S. third world Left explained this race-making transformation of space through the “colonial analogy,” a concept contesting the racial liberal attempts to render these processes of enclosure invisible, exceptional, or inevitable.23 “Internal” or “domestic” colonialism became a way to understand the forces of postwar economic underdevelopment, sociospatial control, and racialization that operated in tension with U.S. nationalist formulations of race and space.24 As early as 1962, Harold Cruse argued that “the revolutionary initiative passed to the colonial world and in the United States is passing to the Negro.”25 In much of his work in the mid- to late 1960s, including 1967’s landmark Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse saw in Black cultural politics the potential to translate into the U.S. context the organizational, philosophical, and rhetorical effectivity of anticolonial nationalism gleaned from third world liberation struggles.26 In 1972’s Racial Oppression in America, the sociologist Robert Blauner confronted the facile arguments for pluralism and assimilation by framing his scholarly inquiry into the U.S. racial order through a theory of internal colonialism. Blauner marshaled evidence for his thesis from detailed analysis of the institutional racism reflected in the McCone Commission’s portrayal of the 1965 Watts rebellion and the trial of Huey Newton (in which Blauner was an expert witness for the defense). Jack O’Dell, who later led delegations of Black leaders in solidarity with Palestine to the West Bank, Egypt, and Lebanon, stressed in an early 1967 essay that Black proletarian life was shaped by a “special variety of colonialism.”27

In mid-1968, Black Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver began his discussion of the “land question” by asserting plainly: “The first thing that has to be realized is that it is a reality when people say that there’s a ‘black colony’ and a ‘white mother country.’”28 Cleaver argued that “Black Power must be viewed as a projection of sovereignty, an embryonic sovereignty that black people can focus on and through which they can make distinctions between themselves and others, between themselves and their enemies” (67). In a noteworthy twist, Cleaver then drew on the “parallel situation of the Jews at the time of the coming of Theodore Herzl.”

The Jewish people were prepared psychologically to take desperate and unprecedented action. They saw themselves faced with an immediate disastrous situation. Genocide was staring them in the face and this common threat galvanized them into common action. Psychologically, black people in America have precisely the same outlook as the Jews had then. (67–68)

Herzlian Zionism’s desires for a future autonomously governed land base offered Cleaver special resonance. Here, he revises a rich genealogy of Afro-Zionist narratives of liberation to add an anticolonial twist.

Among the most influential Black theorizations of colonialism was Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.29 The book was published in September 1967, in the midst of Carmichael’s wide-ranging tour of London, Cuba, Moscow, Beijing, Vietnam, Algeria, Cairo, Damascus, and Guinea, during which he met the likes of Shirley and David Graham Du Bois, Sékou Touré, Nkrumah, and the exiled South African singer Miriam Makeba.30 Black Power was one of the first comprehensive U.S. applications of the work of Frantz Fanon for the U.S. context. Drawing on Wretched of the Earth, Carmichael and Hamilton argue that what they call “institutional racism” in the United States “has another name”: colonialism.31 Black people formed an internal colony in the United States, and Black liberation in the United States should emulate the decolonizing struggles under way across the third world. The book’s first chapter, “White Power: The Colonial Situation,” juxtaposes epigraphs from the Black sociologist Kenneth Clark, “The dark ghettos are social political, educational and—above all—economic colonies,” and the Jewish journalist I. F. Stone, “In an age of decolonization, it may be fruitful to regard the problem of the American negro as a unique case of colonialism, an instance of internal imperialism, an underdeveloped people in our very midst” (2–3).32 Carmichael and Hamilton suggest that the overarching mode of rule in the United States exposes Black people to economic, political, and social violence analogous to the treatment of those people living in colonial Africa. Countering Gunnar Myrdal’s thesis, Carmichael and Hamilton “put it another way.” “There is no ‘American dilemma’ because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them” (5).33

Carmichael and Hamilton continue: “Obviously, the analogy is not perfect” (5). There is no geographically distant “Mother Country” from which colonial sovereignty emanated, nor are raw materials produced in the colony and exported to the metropole. What concerns Carmichael and Hamilton, though, and what preoccupied Cruse, Blauner, O’Dell, Cleaver, Clark, and Stone, is “not rhetoric . . . or geography” but the “objective relationship” of Black people to the spatialized axes of racial violence (6). Such analytical qualifications for the colonial analogy appear throughout discussions of the relationship between U.S. race making and the structures of global capitalism, qualifications that rightly focus attention on the contextually specific particularities of dominance and subjection, anticolonial resistance and struggle in “actually existing colonialisms.”34 To elide these determinate specificities is itself to perform an epistemological violence. Crucially, the accession of the internal colonial model as foundationally predicated on the Black–white binary obfuscates both the United States’ enduring settler colonial structure and the territorial claims to indigenous sovereignty, what the Native studies scholar Jodi Byrd calls the “incommensurability of the internal.”35

An analogy can never be “perfect” in any simple sense, to be sure. With an analogy, one cannot escape difference, even as, in the queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar’s words, analogies “appear to compare objects when in actuality they compare relations.”36 As a relational analytic, it carries the potential to keep these limitations in view. The substantive difference captured in an analogical pairing persistently rubs against the investment in comparison as a stable epistemic grid. The “likeness” or “parallel” of Zionism and Pan-Africanism, Warsaw and Watts, the ghetto and the prison, the Holocaust and racial slavery, the wandering Jew and the Black diaspora: these analogies juxtapose unique historical formations, ideological concepts, or geographies—relations, not objects—which are then linked together via the radically unstable “like” or “as.” This is analogy’s risk: at its core is a difference always on the verge of collapse into identity, socially produced under contextually specific conditions that are always on the verge of conflation. These indelible conditions are what hold an analogy together and produce its rhetorical effectivity.37

Read against the grain, Carmichael and Hamilton’s colonial analogy builds on the many relational constructions at work in the post–World War II conjuncture, operating as a geographic figure to reveal the contradictions of racial liberalism’s exceptionalist discourse. It provided Black freedom movement scholars, artists, and activists a relational analytic to perform a contestatory remapping. The internal colonial framework illuminated both the failure of civil rights legislation to ameliorate material inequalities and the increasing permeation of state and state-sanctioned violence. Black Power’s Palestine helped clarify how the uneven development of deindustrializing urban space had its spatial correlates in other colonized sites in the third world including, significantly, Israel and Palestine.

“Shedding Some Light” on the Palestine Problem

SNCC’s “Third World Round-up” deployed an emergent cultural politics that Black power theorists embraced in the wake of the June 1967 War. The article reframed the question of Palestine as germane to Black liberation. This both clarified the divisions in the civil rights movement’s fracturing interracial coalition—exemplified in SNCC’s expulsion of its white (and often Jewish) membership in this moment—and enabled the Black freedom movement to relate Israel’s occupation to the rising “law and order” ghettoization and incarceration of African Americans.

The publication of “Third World Round-up” and its widespread condemnation emerged during the tumultuous spring and summer months of 1967. In a very short period of time, a confluence of events and their discursive residues renewed and revised an imaginative geography first broached in the interwar years—by the likes of Robeson, Bunche, Du Bois, and other Black leftists—that connected struggles for Black freedom in the United States with decolonizing movements around the world. In April Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, for the first time depicting the “very obvious and almost facile connection” between struggles for racial equality at home and struggles against the unjust war being conducted by the United States in Vietnam.38 Several days later, the New York Times Magazine published Baldwin’s “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” On May 2 Bobby Seale and thirty members of the Black Panther Party brandished guns and uniforms to stage a major protest at the California state capitol in Sacramento. The months of June, July, and August saw the widespread mimeographed circulation of Newton’s theorization “In Defense of Self Defense.”39 At the end of August the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago continued the process of disarticulating inter-racial coalitions for social change.40 In September Cruse published Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a wide-ranging, multilayered critique of radicals and liberals.41 Throughout the summer, urban and suburban geographies were transformed by some 164 “civil disorders” in twenty-eight U.S. cities, including Cambridge, Maryland; Tampa, Florida; Buffalo, New York; Washington, D.C.; Muncie, Indiana; Albina, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; and Newark, New Jersey.42 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the Bureau’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to target “black nationalist, hate-type organizations,”43 launching a “secret war against Black Power activists . . . that featured the systematic, illegal harassment, imprisonment, and, at times, death, of black militants.”44

On Sunday, June 11, 1967, what would be the last of the six days of the June war, the New York Times Magazine published “Martin Luther King Defines ‘Black Power.’” Partly responding to SNCC’s recent political shift and the Black Panther Party’s heightened visibility, and partly refuting Baldwin’s argument published in the same venue earlier that spring, King’s essay opens and closes with a succinct critique of the gradualist emphasis of mainstream racial liberalism: “The powerless . . . never experience opportunity—it is always arriving at a later time”; and “Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control.”45 King likewise signals the dangers of anti-Semitism. Unlike Baldwin, King’s narrative of Jewish ascendancy into political power “reveals a useful lesson” that involved drawing from “a tradition of education combined with social and political action.”46 Yet it is unclear from the essay how readers were to understand the relationship between Black people “learning the techniques and arts of politics” and the performance of Israeli military dominance in the Middle East dramatized across U.S. news outlets. Given that the front page of the Times had six articles alone devoted to Israel’s overwhelming victory, including a map of the state’s burst borders and an accompanying headline stating, “Israel Rules Out Return to Frontiers,” it is striking that King’s essay was silent on the Jewish state.

It was all the more remarkable when, two months later, SNCC quite publicly took on the Palestine problem. SNCC spokesperson Ralph Featherstone noted how perilous such a practice could be: “Some people might interpret what we say 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.”47 Responses to “Third World Round-up” have consistently avoided the article’s relational analytic. Nor has the article been taken on its merits, to consider either its “documented facts” or the knowledge such facts were meant to communicate and enable. Rather, most commentary has taken up whether or not the text deploys anti-Semitic tropes or how politically ill-advised the publication of such a piece was in the first place. The New York Times devoted an entire front-page article to “Third World Round-up,” titled “S.N.C.C. Charges Israel Atrocities: Black Power Group Attacks Zionism as Conquering Arabs by ‘Massacre.’”48 The article traced SNCC’s activist shift from domestic coalition-building for voting rights to Black Power internationalism inspired by Fanon and Malcolm X, but did not examine whether such “charges” were warranted or accurate. Instead, it chastised SNCC for its “hate-filled” rhetoric and eulogized a prior time of solidarity. “It is a tragedy that the civil rights movement is being degraded by the injection of hatred and racism in reverse,” noted Arnold Forster, the general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League. Another ADL official framed the position in explicitly Cold War terms: “This newsletter follows the pro-Arab, Soviet and racist lines and smacks very heavily of anti-Semitism.” The American Jewish Congress’s Will Maslow agreed: “There is no room for racists in the fight against racism.” The next day, the New York Times printed a follow-up article recounting “angry statements” by “civil rights leaders” against SNCC’s “Israel Stand.”49 These leaders ran the gamut of the fracturing civil rights coalition, including Maslow, Whitney M. Young of the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Rabbi Israel Miller of the American Zionist Council, Malcolm A. Tarlov of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, a spokesperson from the Jewish Labor Committee, Bernard Katzen of the New York State Commission for Human Rights, and Martin Peretz, director of the National Conference for New Politics. King declined to comment specifically on SNCC’s article, saying only that he was “strongly opposed to anti-Semitism and ‘anything that does not signify my concern for humanity for the Jewish people.’”

The secondary literature on “Third World Round-up” typically situates it either in a larger declensionist narrative about the broken promise of Black–Jewish coalition or names it an anxious example of growing Black anti-Semitism. Rarely are its “documented facts” substantively treated. Robert Weisbord and Richard Kazarian perform a “content analysis” on the article, revealing that the “pronouncements suggest anti-Semitic along with anti-Zionist sentiments.”50 SNCC historian Clayborne Carson recalls that taking a stand on Palestine had not been “carefully deliberated” when “a few SNCC members quickly prepared an article that seemed designed to provoke Jewish former supporters.”51 Gary E. Rubin avers that the article was “the most controversial attack by emerging African American groups on Israel,” particularly because “American Jews feared for Israel’s continued existence during the Six Day War.”52 Melani McAlister intimates that the article was researched and produced in a number of weeks.53 Eric Sundquist suggests the newsletter was “ill-conceived.”54 Matthew Quest, writing for the Palestine Solidarity Review in 2003, echoes the critique of the “colonial analogy” as he considers the anticapitalist analysis present in the article’s “anticolonialism” to be “ill-defined, smeared, injured, and could be called into question,” and points out that the article “suggests there are inherent Jewish ethnic characteristics.”55 The Black Power historian Peniel Joseph sees in SNCC’s publication and steadfast defense of the article a “political irreverence . . . consistent with its evolving philosophy” that both “damaged its reputation in the United States” and “impressed Third World partisans.” The identification of “Palestine as a colony and its people as a community of color under siege,” Joseph writes, “produced an uncomfortable stalemate in which representatives of two long-standing minority groups attacked each other as racist and anti-Semitic.”56

In his 2003 autobiography, Kwame Turé, né Stokely Carmichael, tells a different story of the emergence of “the Palestine problem.” According to Turé, who had just been replaced by H. Rap Brown as SNCC chairman when the newsletter appeared, the document originated in a reading group organized by “one courageous activist sister.”57 Turé refuses to name this organizer, though other accounts suggest it was Ethel Minor, an activist involved in Latin American liberationist organizing and a member of the Nation of Islam.58 The reading group was convened first in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 and proceeded to read and discuss one book a month over the next two years. The reading list, according to Turé, included “not just pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist materials” but “Jewish writers who, from the perspective of the moral traditions of Jewish thought, opposed the militaristic expansionism of Zionist policies.”59 They also read writings from “Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Begin, documents from the Stern Gang, etc., etc.” (558). The turning point for the reading group was realizing “the close military, economic, and political alliance between the Israeli government and the racist apartheid regime in South Africa” (558). “I have to say,” Turé declares, “discovering that the government of Israel was maintaining such a long, cozy, and warm relationship with the worst enemies of black people came as a real shock. A kind of betrayal. And, hey, we weren’t supposed to even talk about this? C’mon” (559). Turé claims that drafting “The Palestine Problem” with Minor was his last act as chairman, meant primarily to take the pulse of SNCC’s leadership through “the form of sharp questions against a background of incontestable historical facts” (559).60 The systematic study was cut short, though. The newsletter was prematurely handed over to mainstream journalists. Turé concludes that,

had the process not been short-circuited, I’m sure the overwhelming sentiment would have been to make a statement, a moral statement, on justice for the Palestinian people while trying hard not to offend or alienate our Jewish friends on a personal level. Such a statement, one intended for public distribution, would almost certainly have been more nuanced. In properly diplomatic language, which the talking paper definitely was not. But you crazy if you think the language would have made any difference politically. This was an orchestrated declaration of war, Jack. (561)

Turé’s narrative notwithstanding, scholars have by and large not remarked on the fact that, in structure and substance, the “talking paper” may have originated outside SNCC altogether. The “Third World Round-up” draws directly from the Palestine Research Center’s September 1966 pamphlet “Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem.”61 This pamphlet was the first in the PRC’s “Facts and Figures” series; it was circulated through the Arab League’s New York office, and a version of it appeared in the Middle East Coordinating Committee’s own 1967 pamphlet, “Did You Know? . . . Facts about the Middle East.” Fully fifteen of the Palestine Research Center’s twenty “facts” appear verbatim (or nearly so) in the SNCC article. Near-identical items from an updated PLO-affiliated fact sheet were published in the immediate aftermath of the October 1973 War in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service (under the editorial leadership of David Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois’s stepson).

These textual, rhetorical, and empirical similarities matter. Recognizing the unacknowledged structure and source material for key elements of “Third World Round-up” is a pressing reminder of the substantive, if also fleeting, transnational textual circulation between the anticolonial horizon of Black freedom struggles and Palestinian knowledge production. While the PRC’s incisive historical and political critique of Zionism’s settler colonial racism was presented on the international stage of the United Nations, only to be obfuscated by a U.S. Cold War anticommunism, here it emerges in the guise of an epistemic imperative advanced in the rearticulation of Black freedom struggles.

There are anti-Semitic tropes in “Third World Round-up,” particularly around the specious claims about Jewish dominance in global financial markets—items that do not appear in the Palestine Research Center’s pamphlet. These moribund tropes are not to be gainsaid. At the same time, we miss the translational, conceptual, and representational density of “Third World Round-up” if we allow the presentation of knowledge about Palestine to be crowded out by anti-Semitic rhetoric. Dwelling with the epistemic imperatives structuring the article allows us to see a multigenre spatial imaginary through which to elaborate the historical present of Palestine’s colonial genealogy, informed by and deploying Palestinian knowledge production.

To describe Palestine and Israel, let alone the struggles for Black liberation in the United States, as an element of the “Third World” rearticulates a geography that draws on the discourse of colonialism and occupation. It is clear from the headnote that the article serves as a knowledge project meant to “shed some light” on the conditions of the decolonizing world in ways that “pertain to our struggle here.” The article’s “documented facts” suggest that such knowledge is based in objective historical reality, and when phrased in terms of a “test,” complete with interspersed headers repeating the phrase “Do you know,” these facts do complex rhetorical work. The article’s readership, directly addressed through the second person “you,” is presumptively unaware of these facts because of the “white American press” obfuscating the “true story about world events in which America is involved.” Each fact is phrased in terms of a question, but with the present-tense “do you know,” each fact demands that these “documented facts” are crucial for framing an understanding of the present post–June war conjuncture.

The questions are organized in rough chronological order, each “fact” isolated into its own distinct number. Israel’s post–June war occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem is represented as the culmination of a trajectory begun at the 1897 conference in Basel, Switzerland, where “Zionism, a world-wide nationalistic Jewish movement,” formulated a program to “create for the Jewish People a home in Palestine according to Public law.” This program, according to the article, received “maximum help, support, and encouragement from Great Britain, the United States, and other white Western colonial governments.” With 1917’s Balfour Declaration, Britain subsequently “took control of Palestine,” creating a “world problem.” But, according to the article, there were very few “native” Jews in Palestine, and only fifty-six thousand Jews in total, most of whom had recently immigrated to the British colony. By 1947, when “Britain passed the Palestine problem on to the United Nations . . . Zionists owned no more than 6 per-cent of the total land area in Palestine” and Jews were a population roughly half the size of the Arab Palestinians. The “formal beginning of the Arab-Israeli War” commenced after the “formal end of British rule” on May 15, 1948, when “Arab States had to send in their poorly trained and ill equipped armies against the superior western trained and supported Israeli forces, in a vain effort to protect Arab lives, property and Arab rights to the land of Palestine.”

The substance of Question 16 received the most attention from the New York Times. SNCC (accurately) accused “Zionist terror gangs . . . deliberately slaughtered and mutilated women, children and men, thereby causing the unarmed Arabs to panic, flee and leave their homes.” Question 20 illustrates the polarizing vote in the UN for the 1947 Partition Plan, asserting, in all capital letters, that “ISRAEL WAS PLANTED AT THE CROSSROADS OF ASIA AND AFRICA WITHOUT THE FREE APPROVAL OF ANY MIDDLE-EASTERN, ASIAN OR AFRICAN COUNTRY!” Questions 25 and 26 provide evidence of racist practices within the post-1948 state of Israel, where Arabs are “segregate[d] . . . , live in ‘Security Zones,’ under Martial Law, are not allowed to travel freely within Israel, and are the victims of discrimination in education, jobs etc.” Further, “dark skinned Jews from the Middle-East and North Africa are also second-class citizens in Israel, [and] the color line puts them in inferior position to the white, European Jews.” The article’s last two questions bring to the fore the perceived relationship between Israel and African neocolonialism. Question 31 asserts that not only were “the famous European Jews, the Rothschilds” involved “in the original conspiracy with the British” to found Israel, but they “ALSO CONTROL MUCH OF AFRICA’S MINERAL WEALTH.” Question 32 contends that Israel has “gone into African countries, tried to exploit and control their economies, and sabotaged African liberation movements, along with any other African movements or projects opposed by the United States and other white western powers.”

Many of these “documented facts” have been corroborated by scholarly research, often by Israeli scholars.62 Others, like the claims about Israel’s counterrevolutionary incursions into Africa, stretch the historical archive. Still others, like the claim about the Rothschilds, are completely specious. The article is silent on the documents from which these facts were drawn—do they emerge from the systematic reading led by Ethel Minor, as suggested by Turé, were they hastily cobbled together at the last minute, or do they come from the Palestine Research Center’s pamphlet? This ambiguity left open the question of what constitutes “proper” knowledge of the Palestine problem. Given that circulation of such documentation was generally blocked in the United States, what was transformative about the SNCC article is its relentless assertion that what is being depicted is knowable at all, should be known, is required knowledge for apprehending the present. Against two interpretive frames—charting a telos of miraculous millennial return or the resolutely modern brilliance of Israeli military strategy against an inferior adversary—the article presents a counterhistory of permanent war. By constructing a genealogy of the June war in this way, “Third World Round-up” rendered the violence against Arab Palestinians, Arab Israelis, and Mizrahi Jews legible in a context of U.S. civil rights struggles. Doing so not only expedited coalitional fractures born out of the Black Power turn in domestic racial politics; it also fashioned an imaginative geography of occupation, confinement, and resistance across which the Black freedom movement would draw analogies, alliances, and allegiances that were deepened in the years to come.

The article’s visual elements make these relations especially clear. One such relation is registered in the tense juxtaposition between the genocidal Nazi Holocaust and the early decades of the state of Israel. An unsourced archival photograph of a dozen men kneeling with their hands on their heads and guns blazing behind them cautions otherwise. Its caption reads “Gaza Massacres, 1956,” a reference to the carnage at Khan Yunis during the opening moments of Israel’s 1956 incursion into the Sinai Peninsula. “Zionists lined up Arab victims and shot them in the back in cold blood,” the caption continues. “This is the Gaza Strip, Palestine, not Dachau, Germany.” Juxtaposing these two interpretive frames makes legible the continued haunting of the Holocaust, one that sees World War II’s genocidal violence echoed by the Israeli state. Dachau’s metonymic status condenses the systematized racial violence practiced across the Nazi concentration camps and intimates that the conditions under Israeli rule are, at times, some of its most pernicious effects.63

The article’s most complex visual image is the SNCC artist Kofi Bailey’s cartoon suturing three forms of relation, linking a history of U.S. racial violence, imperial militarism in Vietnam and the Arab world, and Afro-Arab liberation. At the top of the image is a disembodied hand with a six-pointed Jewish Star of David overlaying a U.S. dollar sign. The meaning of this part of the image was ambiguous. Was it another anti-Semitic trope of Jewish financial domination, or did it signify U.S. material backing for the Israeli state? Much of the commentary reads it as the former, and, given the overdetermination of such figures, there is certainly cause to do so. However, given the image as a whole, it also points to the international enmeshment of the United States and the Israeli state. The hand grasps the middle of a rope dangling downward on both sides. At one end is the likeness of Egyptian president Nasser drawn from the chest up in a dark suit jacket, white shirt, and tie. During the high point of third world nonalignment, Nasser consistently advocated for Palestinian freedom from imperial rule as part of a larger Pan-Arab nationalism. His likeness condensed what McAlister calls “an emotionally explosive convergence of anticolonial defiance and global racial consciousness.”64 At the rope’s other end, also depicted from the chest up in similar garb, is Muhammad Ali. The U.S. heavyweight boxing champion had recently converted to the Nation of Islam, and his concomitant antiwar stance had brought his professional boxing career under fire. In 1966 Ali had refused induction into the U.S. Army, stating famously, “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.” In June 1967 Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to prison pending numerous appeals (including to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously overruled the conviction), and was barred from boxing for a number of years. This illustration of a double lynching imaginatively links the fates of Nasser and Ali, cast as they are as twinned victims of a common racial violence. In the background of the lynching is a disembodied dark-skinned arm bent at the elbow labeled “THIRD WORLD,” wielding a scimitar—itself commonly perceived as rooted in Persian history—labeled “LIBERATION MOVEMENT.” The force of third world struggle emanates from the Middle East, the image suggests, with transnational repercussions; its horizon sees the liberation of the Arab world, African Americans, and practicing Muslims from the intertwined imperial violence of the United States and Israel.

Taken as a whole, “Third World Round-up” offers a multigenre representation of the material, ideological, and epistemological links between struggles for Black liberation in the United States and the historically embedded colonial conditions in Palestine. It reveals such links on the terrain of a knowledge project confronting the limits of liberal inclusion as the ultimate horizon for freedom. Its “tragic” reception in a broad public sphere reveals how knowledge of Palestine that exceeded the normative confines of American common sense would be disciplined with fierce consequences. At the same time, it prefigured the public persona of Black Power’s Palestine. While the SNCC article left uncited the tangible touchpoints between Black freedom struggles and Palestine liberation struggles—at best, they were registered in the textual residues of the Palestine Research Center pamphlet left for others to reconstruct—other correspondences were much more durable and sustained.

“Culture Is a Weapon”

The contours of Black Power’s Palestine were further elaborated at the National Conference for New Politics, held in September 1967. The convention attempted to organize a New Left coalition that could “bridge the gap” between antiwar, antiracist, and Reform Democratic organizations, with the dual goals of intensifying local organizing efforts and creating a platform from which to engage in electoral politics.65 Ramparts magazine called the convention “the biggest and most representative gathering of America’s Left in decades.”66 In trying to forge such a broad articulation of interests, the conference drew over three thousand delegates and two hundred local and national organizations, from racial justice groups like SNCC, the Congress on Racial Equality, and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Students for a Democratic Society and the Socialist Workers Party. But it was the conference’s “showdown over Zionism” where, as the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson puts it, “identity politics was born.”67

As a rebuttal to what some viewed as “white-dominated, liberal, paternalistic” efforts to include representatives of the Black Power movement, Black organizers formed a caucus. During the conference’s first full day, the caucus, led by SNCC representatives H. Rap Brown and James Forman, presented a list of demands that needed to be agreed on or else the conference’s Black membership would refuse participation and withdraw altogether. “We, as black people,” the list begins, “believe that the United States system is committed to the practice of genocide, social degradation, to the denial of political and social self-determination of black people, and cannot reform itself. There must be revolutionary change.”68 The caucus demanded 50 percent representation on all convention committees and appealed to the broad conference body to support thirteen specific points. These included both domestic and international demands: the return of Harlem representative Adam Clayton Powell to his seat in the U.S. Congress; advocacy for “black control of black political groups in black communities”; the “rebuilding of the ghettos”; support for the Newark Black Power Conference resolutions (which called for, among other things, “the establishment of a national dialogue on the feasibility of establishing a separate homeland in the United States for Black people”);69 widespread reparations for “the historic, physical, sexual, mental, and economic exploitation of black people”; and support for “all wars of national liberation around the world.”

Point 5 of the resolution received the most sustained debate. It condemned the “imperialist Zionist war” while underscoring that such a condemnation was not an expression of anti-Semitism but a dissent from the particular expression of state power. Condemning Israel’s incipient occupation of the Palestinian Territories and praising revolutionary responses to it fashioned a conceptual bridge between the “internal colonies” of Black America and Palestine. At the same time, it caused substantial concern for many delegates. Robert Scheer, one of the NCNP’s lead organizers, proposed an alternative: the conference would recognize the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organization and call for Israel’s unconditional withdrawal to its June 4 borders. In the end, the resolution’s thirteen points were voted on as a package and were resoundingly supported. During the conference’s waning hours, after the resolution had passed, the SCLC convinced the leadership of the Black caucus to revise the language of point 5, shifting from condemning Zionism to condemning “the imperialistic Israeli government.”70

Like SNCC’s leadership and the Black caucus at the NCNP, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense took on the June war, drawing rhetorically powerful links between U.S. internal colonialism and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai. Unlike SNCC, though, which by 1967 had lost much of the popular support it had garnered during its campaign for voting rights in the U.S. South, the Black Panther Party’s geography of struggle was far more vibrant, located as it was at the scale of U.S. cities. Through multiple iterations of its survival programs, the Panthers, according to the historian Nikhil Pal Singh, “skillfully pursued a highly localized, spatial politics addressed directly to the denizens of a myriad of subnational, institutional spaces—the housing project, the school, the community organization, and the prison.”71 In the face of the emergent law and order state, the Panthers “embrac[ed] the prison—already a place of effective anti-citizenship—as the exemplary site and source of counter-nationalist theory and practice.”72 Much of the Panthers’ work was framed by the politics of permanent war. Cleaver, Newton, and others viewed the connections between racialization, internal colonialism, and the aftermath of genocide through a materialist political economic framework.73 In this way, “the Panthers combined an urban-centered critique of U.S. capitalism and racism,” writes the historian Robert O. Self, “with a global perspective on postcolonial nationhood.”74 While this geography was often “tenuous and sometimes hyperbolic,” writes Self, “the mix was powerful and generative . . . arguably one of the Party’s most compelling contributions to American political culture in the 1960s and 1970s.”75 Contests over the “deadly symbiosis” of ghetto and prison radically limiting life chances for poor Black people in Oakland, New Haven, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City drew lines of flight, at times quite literally, to places like North Africa and the Caribbean. With the establishment of the Party’s offices in Algeria in July 1969, this imaginative geography of struggle gained a tangible international outpost, even if the functional duration of the office was relatively brief, and even as it marked the emergence of internal splits in the Party.

“There was a battle in Algiers in late July, with lighter skirmishes both old and new, and emerging signs of struggle which now lurk ready to boomerang around the world in the years (and months) to come.”76 This is how Nathan Hare opened the inaugural issue of the Black Scholar, the first U.S.-based journal of Black studies.77 In the summer of 1969 Algiers hosted the first annual Pan-African Cultural Festival. Held under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity, for twelve days the festival staged the infusion of transnational Black culture with the politics of third world decolonization. The festival featured dance, singing, musical performance, and theater troupes performing for thousands of attendees. Algerian president Houari Boumediene opened the festival by proclaiming, “Culture is a weapon in our struggle for liberation.”78 Algiers provided the context for extensive conversations between Black people in the United States and Africa and Arab Palestinians, featuring, according to Hare, hundreds of delegates from thirty-one independent African countries and “representatives from six movements for African liberation, from Palestine to Angola-Mozambique and the Congo-Brazzaville.”79 Building on Fanon’s critique of the Négritude movement, delegates debated the relationship between decolonizing nationalism and localized forms of cultural production. Among prominent U.S. attendees were the writers Don L. Lee, Maya Angelou, Ed Bullins, and Ted Joans, who as members of the Black Arts movement “defined political struggle as cultural struggle.”80 The jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp gave a stunning performance, as did the pianist Oscar Peterson and the singers Marion Williams, Nina Simone, and Miriam Makeba.81

Even though it was one of the few delegations whose constituents resided outside continental Africa—Palestine’s delegation being another—the Black Panther Party contingent at the festival was substantial, including Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox, David Hilliard, Raymond Hewitt, and Emory Douglas. Eldridge Cleaver, who had gained enormous fame in 1967 and 1968 as a quotable spokesperson for Black Power, not least for the popularity of his collection of essays, Soul on Ice, reemerged as a major public figure during the festival, having fled parole in California for Havana and then Algiers, to join his partner, Kathleen, for the festival and the birth of their first child, Maceo.82 The Panthers, together with an Algerian government representative, arranged for space in a downtown office building to house the Afro-American Information Center. The center was open for the duration of the festival, staffed by French-speaking interpreters brought from Paris by Julia Wright Hervé (the daughter of Richard Wright and one of the primary liaisons between the Panthers and the Algerian public). Stacks of the Black Panther newspapers were made available to the center’s visitors. Along with the Hotel Aletti, where many delegates stayed, the Afro-American Information Center served as a vibrant site for Panthers to communicate in person with representatives from many other delegations.

Emory Douglas, the party’s minister of culture, curated an exhibition at the center of the artwork he had produced for the Black Panther newspaper. Douglas took over the layout of the newspaper soon after the May 1967 Sacramento protest, creating “a visually dominant newspaper” that by 1969 had reached over one hundred thousand in weekly circulation and would peak around four hundred thousand in the early 1970s.83 Like much of the Panthers’ politics, which used visual and performative registers to contest the violently repressive force of state power, Douglas’s work attempted to capture an “insurgent form of visibility” that dramatized the aesthetics of revolution. The Sacramento protest’s “guerrilla theater” found its pictorial echo in Douglas’s broadsides.84 These representations of permanent war infused much of Douglas’s work from 1967 to 1973.85 Using a mixed-media social realist approach that juxtaposed photographs, line drawings, caricature, cartoon, and quotes from the party’s leadership, Douglas’s art not only reveals the cacophony of weapons—guns, bombs, cages—deployed by various arms of the law and order state but also represents the average folk, often women and children, attempting to get by under such conditions via the survival programs that the Panthers were setting up to do so.86 Douglas’s work “helped convert everyday life into art,” writes the historian Davarian L. Baldwin, “by making the black ghetto his ‘museum,’ with pictures plastered on barbershop walls, in alleyways, and on telephone poles.”87

Douglas transported the strategy of displaying visual art to Algiers with remarkable effect. “From the moment he taped the first drawing on the Center’s bare walls,” recalls Kathleen Cleaver,

crowds of Algerians clustered on the sidewalk outside and stared through the windows. Soon large framed posters of Black Panther martyrs and brightly colored drawings showing Afro-Americans holding guns or fighting the police decorated all the walls and windows. The militant spirit the artwork conveyed transcended the language barrier and evoked enthusiastic reactions among the Algerian onlookers.88

Among those onlookers were undoubtedly a number of prominent Palestinian political activists, as the Afro-American Information Center was “not far from the local office of Al Fatah.”89 While Douglas’s visual representations of anticolonial struggle in the United States papered the walls of the Panthers’ office, Fatah’s information center “resound[ed],” in the words of one orientalizing description, “to the hypnotic beat of Arab war songs played over and over as visitors view[ed] paintings and photographs of commando heroes and trainees.”90 The relationship of Palestinian revolutionary visual iconography to that of the Panthers should not be downplayed. Fatah, a reverse acronym standing for Harakat al-Tahrir a-Watani al-Filastini, literally, the Palestine National Liberation Movement, had been founded in 1959 by the Palestinian exiles Yasser Arafat, Salah Khalaf, and Khalil al-Wazir, each living in Kuwait as students. Unlike prior Palestinian political formations, which, according to the historian Rashid Khalidi, were ruled in large measure by “sober men in their fifties and sixties wearing suits and red tarbushes,” Fatah and some of its competing Palestinian nationalist groups were led by younger figures in their twenties and thirties whose origins in the lower middle class and the post-1948 refugee camps inspired a broader mass movement.91 Like the Black Panther Party, Fatah and its allied groups insisted on “direct, armed action.”92 Composed of feda’i, literally, “those who sacrifice themselves,” by the end of the 1960s these groups, like the Panthers, had captured an international audience for their expression of anticolonial struggle. Donning the Palestinian kafiya and the Kalashnikov rifle, the feda’i “dominated the Palestinian symbolic universe.”93 By the summer of 1969 Fatah had become the most important political party in the PLO, whose chairmanship was given to Arafat. Fatah’s “Seven Points”—publicly supported by the Black Panthers—stressed that “the struggle of the Palestinian People, like that of the Vietnamese and other peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is part of the historic process of the liberation of the oppressed peoples from colonialism and imperialism.”94

Popular press coverage of the festival tells us little else of the interaction between Fatah and the Panthers—there apparently was a photo taken at this time of Cleaver and Arafat embracing.95 However, given the shared visual iconographies produced by a younger generation wise to the aesthetics of revolution, it should not be surprising, that, according to Kathleen Cleaver, “a close bond grew between Fatah and the Panthers as soon as their arrival became public.” This “bond” structured how the Panthers provided space for the expression of Palestine’s liberation struggle.96 Under the headline “Fat’h Speaks to Africa,” the Black Panther newspaper published the address by an unnamed PLO representative to the festival. “On the map, there are two kinds of classifications; a geographical one and a political one in which the world is divided into only two major continents. . . . Africa on this map is a cause more than it is a continent. We, therefore, came here as being a part of Africa the cause.” The address elaborated a shared history of European imperialism in Africa and Palestine. “They came to our country, as they came to yours. We tried to live with them in one state, under the banner of law and peace, but they insisted on a pure racist regime, the same as that of the white minority in Africa. They claim that by this they solve the Jewish question. But really they create a problem for our people without solving theirs.” A similar statement from Arafat ran in a December issue of newspaper.97 In its editorial statements, the newspaper echoed Fatah’s anticolonialism: “Behind Israel with her arrogant contempt for the Arab peoples and her dream of establishing a religious Jewish state . . . stands the world’s most powerful and imperialist state, the U.S.A.”98

Things Ain’t What They Used to Be

If Algiers served as a crucial node through which to relate Black and Palestinian anticolonial visions, then Cairo, Egypt, proved to be another, one that was thematized in a novel by someone whose own transnational circulation materialized the diasporic resonances his culture work sought to illuminate. David Graham Du Bois’s . . . And Bid Him Sing shifted the epistemic register of Black Power’s Palestine from the reproduction of “documented facts” about a distant, if inexorably related territory and history, to the narrative texture of lived contradictions.

. . . And Bid Him Sing begins this way. It is the early 1960s. At a corner table at Cristos, a Cairo rendezvous for the city’s young intellectuals and writers, sits Bob Jones, a veteran African American journalist for the English-language daily Egyptian Gazette. Jones spots a vaguely familiar face across the room. It is Suliman Ibn Rashid, a “black American” and a “Moslem,” troubled by bone tuberculosis in his leg. Suliman had recently moved from Philadelphia to Cairo to study Arabic at the historic Al Azhar University, write poetry, support a friend’s small business venture, and do some political organizing.99 Bob and Suliman chat a while, and before long, the conversation turns to Suliman’s frustration at the nontransferability of Pan-Africanism. African American notions of Blackness just do not translate in Cairo. The exchange ends, with Suliman and Bob intent on meeting again, and they bid farewell. Bob, the novel’s primary narrator, describes Suliman’s departure: “Waiting for the traffic light to turn green, I watched him go. He walked at a brisk pace, back straight, shoulders square, head held a little to the right; his short leg forcing a slight bobbing up and down of his body that his erect posture seemed to be trying to conceal” (39).

Thus closes the second chapter of . . . And Bid Him Sing. Part novel, part autobiography, part history, . . . And Bid Him Sing narrates Bob’s and Suliman’s various attempts at forging a durable Afro-Arab diasporic culture in Cairo. In alluding to Countee Cullen’s 1925 sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel,” which grapples with the tension between racial performance and literary form at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Graham Du Bois’s novel sounds out the productive dissonances of Black radicalism as it moves from the Nation of Islam mosques in Philadelphia to Cairo’s streets, cafés, apartments, and music halls. The novel provides narrative texture to Malcolm X’s famous 1964 visit to the city, before closing with the onset of the June 1967 War and its forcible disarticulation of this diasporic culture—a disarticulation, the novel suggests, caused by U.S. material and ideological support for Israel’s post-1967 practices of territorial expansion and occupation.

Published during a five-year stint in Oakland, California, much of the rest of Graham Du Bois’s life was spent splitting time between Cairo and Amherst, Massachusetts. While Shirley Graham Du Bois, who joined her son in Cairo in 1967, had made plain the statement that “Egypt is Africa” in response to Israeli military aggression in the Sinai, David Graham Du Bois’s novel poses this same formulation as problematic for African American exiles.100 While his stepfather, W. E. B. Du Bois, had long theorized robust conceptions of Pan-Africanism as routed through the sub-Saharan continent, in . . . And Bid Him Sing, David Graham Du Bois thematizes various modes of translation practiced in a North African and Arab context. Such modes of translation are linguistic, transnational, and multigeneric, moving between English and Arabic, U.S. and third world grammars of Blackness, jazz and poetry, history, fiction, and autobiography. In this way, the novel dwells on, and extends, the practices of diaspora offered by Graham Du Bois’s closest kin that, through a mix of translation grounded in his own life experiences, brought into focus relationships between African Americans and Arabs in general, and Palestinians specifically.

Graham Du Bois’s contributions to Black Power’s Palestine moved beyond the colonial analogy. They sound out incommensurable links registered in the transnational circulation of U.S. literary culture and the figurations of racial struggle that it forged.101 To analyze the circuitries of Graham Du Bois’s practice of translation, I draw on Brent Hayes Edwards’s compelling theorization of diaspora. The term, Edwards explains, is “first of all a translation. . . . As such, it should serve as a reminder that there is . . . a complex historical overlay of a variety of kinds of population movement, narrated and imbued with value in different ways and to different ends.”102 Contesting the identitarian essentialism that often lurks in diaspora’s shadows, Edwards reveals how the practice of linguistic and cultural translation is constitutive of diaspora, particularly in the context of Black radical cultural production. Edwards continues with a simile particularly resonant with . . . And Bid Him Sing:

Like a table with legs of different lengths, or a tilted bookcase, diaspora can be discursively propped up into an artificially “even” or “balanced” state of racial belonging. But such props, of rhetoric, strategy, or organization, are always articulations of unity or globalism, ones that can be “mobilized” for a variety of purposes but can never be definitive: they are always prosthetic.103

The generic and linguistic modes of translation at work in . . . And Bid Him Sing function as rhetorical props that suture the productive incommensurabilities between a shared sense of cultural affiliation among dispersed communities and an often-traumatic historical as much as geographic break with a shared and perceived point of origin. In its unstable oscillations between fiction, history, and autobiography, the novel’s troubled attempts at capturing what is “authentic” culture work activated a transnational imaginative geography sedimented in the text’s dense weave of historical traces. How fitting, then, that Suliman is perpetually hobbled by bone tuberculosis, leaving one leg significantly shorter than the other, “forcing a slight bobbing up and down of his body that his erect posture seemed to be trying to conceal” (39). By the close of the novel, Suliman has left Cairo for Istanbul and had a “terrible time with his leg,” even as he “wouldn’t stay off it . . . running around with a tough bunch of black GI deserters, antiwar, Black Power crowd” (224). It would not be long before he returns “home,” to the United States.

These historical traces have remained underelaborated. Neither Graham Du Bois nor his novel has received much scholarly attention. While there is a thick historiography linking the Black freedom movement, the African continent, and European metropoles like Paris, and while in recent years the dense weave of connections between Black internationalism and Asia have drawn significant interest, less critical attention has been paid to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Black diaspora.104 What follows is a glimpse into one moment in a rich Afro-Arab diasporic culture, one whose spatial imaginary cuts transversally, if unevenly, across Cairo and Oakland, between U.S. struggles for racial justice and struggles staged in the Middle East for self-determination, independence, and decolonization.

Cairo and Oakland: Resituating an Afro-Arab Diaspora

In 1967 Shirley Graham Du Bois was trying to find a place to live. She and her husband had taken up residence in Accra, Ghana, in 1961, just two years prior to W. E. B. Du Bois’s death, and had developed close ties with Kwame Nkrumah, the prominent anticolonial activist turned president of the newly independent African nation. Working closely with Nkrumah, Shirley Graham Du Bois was a key interlocutor between prominent Black radicals, from Malcolm X to Carmichael to Maya Angelou; she headed up Ghana Television; and she frequently wrote for periodicals in Europe and the United States.105 When, in February 1966, Nkrumah was ousted in a military coup, the seventy-year-old writer, organizer, and political adviser was compelled to leave Accra, spending months traveling to Guinea (Conakry), Tanzania, East Germany, France, Mexico, and Algeria.106

It is in this context that Shirley Graham Du Bois decided on Cairo as her next residence, joining her son in an apartment on Nile Street in the Giza district. She wrote a friend in the fall of 1967:

[E]vents of the past six months in Africa and the USA make it impossible for me to consider establishing a home outside the area of intense struggle in which my people are now engaged. . . . It is clear that the liberation struggle in Africa (and this includes Egypt) has entered a new phase: the era of peoples’ armed struggle; and linked closely with this is the vanguard of revolution already launched in the United States by Afro-Americans.107

Cairo had become a crucial transfer point for articulating forms of third world internationalism and Black liberation. The city hosted the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (attended by Shirley Graham Du Bois), as well as the 1964 convening of the OAU, during which Malcolm X was granted observer status and enunciated his own global framing of antiracist struggle, charting a shift from one of civil rights to one of human rights. By the end of the decade, following Shirley Graham Du Bois’s brief speaking tour of the United States in 1970–71 (including an address to the Association of Arab American University Graduates annual conference), the Du Boises’ Nile Street apartment became a transfer point for U.S. activists.108 From this vantage point, Shirley Graham Du Bois analyzed the forms of racial capitalism limning contestations between the United States, Africa, and the Middle East. In the fall of 1973 she described these relations as “the first massive confrontation foreseen by W. E. B. Du Bois when, at the beginning of this century, he enunciated his warning of ‘the color line.’ . . . Along that long line, stretching for a distance further than that from New York to San Francisco is ‘colored folk’ battling with the ‘white folk’ of Israel!”109

This worldly entanglement of the race question with the question of Palestine animated much of the work of David Graham Du Bois. When he passed away in 2005, obituaries frequently focused on his role as the founder and former president of the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation, an organization responsible for collecting and maintaining the archive supporting the recent renaissance in Du Bois studies. Indeed, the Nile street apartment held scores of boxes of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers before they were acquired by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in the early 1970s. While such remembrances duly honor the important work of maintaining his stepfather’s legacy, a labor that has contributed to the rich transnational turn in Africana studies, David Graham Du Bois’s own engagement with the problem of the color line also had its own pertinent global contours.

After a year’s study at China’s Peking University in 1959, Graham Du Bois stopped in Cairo and ended up staying. “I fell in love with Egypt,” he later recalled. “I got here and discovered that everybody looked like me, and I looked like everybody else. I was accepted as a human being without any reference to the color of my skin. It was an overwhelming experience. I found myself invisible.”110 In 1960 he took up teaching American literature at Cairo University, and in 1961 he began working for the English-language daily the Egyptian Gazette and the Middle East News and Features Service Agency, a position that he held for the next twelve years. As a journalist, he covered such topics as the campaigns for voting rights in the U.S. South, the urban uprisings across U.S. cities, and the rise of the Black Power movement. He also served as an announcer on Radio Cairo’s shortwave transmissions to the United States, Mexico, and Canada. This was precisely the kind of journalism a diasporic movement required, one that intimately and routinely related what he called the “Black Revolution” in the United States to an African context.111

Graham Du Bois’s presence at the Egyptian Gazette ensured that Malcolm X’s visit to Cairo in 1964 received significant local coverage. Malcolm had met Shirley Graham Du Bois in Accra earlier in the year, and she orchestrated a meeting between him and Nkrumah, before connecting him with her son. David Graham Du Bois collaborated closely with Malcolm in ways narrated almost verbatim in . . . And Bid Him Sing. Malcolm’s writings were often reprinted in the Egyptian Gazette. The newspaper printed “Zionist Logic,” an essay about Israel’s “new kind of colonialism” as a form of neo-imperialism, that Malcolm wrote after his visit to Gaza. Malcolm attended the OAU conference in his capacity as chairman of the newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a nonreligious organization modeled on the year-old OAU, and one that marked Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad after the former’s trip to Mecca. Graham Du Bois orchestrated the reproduction of Malcolm’s major OAU speech, distributing it to various conference delegations as well as a range of news outlets. In this “Appeal to African Heads of State,” Malcolm strenuously related racial justice struggles in the United States to liberation struggles in Africa. “Our problem is your problem,” stated Malcolm. “It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem; a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights.”112

In June 1972 David Graham Du Bois left Cairo for the United States intent on securing a publisher for the novel that he had drafted during these years. He stopped first in New York, where Toni Morrison, a young editor at Random House, took interest in the manuscript. When nothing materialized, he moved briefly to Chicago before settling in Oakland, California. There, he affiliated with the Black Panther Party, “a community-rooted movement,” he said, “of sound ideology, wide experience and unquestioned devotion that had miraculously weathered the stormy confrontation with units of the armed might of America’s ruling elite.”113 He also took a visiting lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley’s beleaguered School of Criminology, where he taught a course “attempt[ing] to develop new definitions of crime, the criminal and criminal behavior as applied to peoples engaged in the struggle for self-determination and freedom.”114

In the fall of 1973, after publishing a three-part essay on the Black freedom movement in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Graham Du Bois was tapped by Huey Newton to be the newspaper’s editor in chief. He held this position until 1977, a moment when the newspaper had grown to a national circulation of around four hundred thousand.115 As editor, Graham Du Bois brought his journalism’s routine juxtaposition of Afro-Arab political coalitions, Palestinian advocacy, and U.S. racial struggles into conversations about Bay Area–based questions of everyday survival in the face of state repression. The October 1973 War between Egypt and Israel filled the paper’s pages, with coverage focusing on the conditions of Palestinian life under occupation and the forms of exclusion that ensnared Palestinians in vulnerable refugee camps in Jordan. These stories were routinely juxtaposed with coverage of issues like the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, the revelation that COINTELPRO had targeted a wide variety of dissident groups, and the so-called energy crisis brought on by the Arab oil embargo that had driven gasoline prices far higher than everyday working folk could afford. As the last major U.S. military operations were concluding in Vietnam, as crisis-driven domestic “law and order” policies of President Nixon and California governor Ronald Reagan began to expand, the revelation that the U.S. Air Force was airlifting tanks, ammunition, artillery, and other supplies into the Suez to support the Israeli military on African soil was cogently captured in the Black Panther cover story titled “Mid-East War: Nixon’s New Vietnam.”116

In May 1974 the newspaper ran a major position paper on the Middle East that Graham Du Bois drafted with Newton. In a memorandum to Newton, Graham Du Bois called the statement “brilliant,” a document whose “basic humanism devastates arguments against its proposals from both sides.”117 Upon its publication, Graham Du Bois facilitated its circulation to the UN, the OAU, the PLO, and the president of the American Jewish Congress, though how the document was received is unclear. Under the headline “The Issue Isn’t Territory, but Human Rights,” the statement mixed a knowledgeable commitment to the civil rights of Arabs in Israel with a long-term, anticapitalist revolutionary horizon, even as a two-state resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was seen as a necessary stage in such a trajectory. It likewise critiqued the region’s oil-rich leadership, suggesting that imperialism manifested itself in the “governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia, wholesalers of the fabulous oil riches that their people never see, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” The statement boldly suggested that, contrary to the anticolonial engagements with the Middle East after 1967, “the war against Israel is diversionary. The struggle for human dignity and liberation of the Arab peoples must take place within the Arab countries.”118 Such a position was rearticulated as late as one of the Black Panther’s last published issues, in July 1980, describing Newton’s trip to Lebanon and his meetings with Arafat.119

Translation in . . . And Bid Him Sing

During his sojourn in Oakland, Graham Du Bois polished his quasi-autobiographical novel, a project he had all but completed while in Cairo. Published in book form by the Bay Area’s Ramparts Press, the novel was also serialized over seventeen months in sixty-three single-page segments in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. It narrates the relationship between Bob Jones, a journalist whose biographical details mirror Graham Du Bois’s, and Suliman Ibn Rashid.120 Suliman is known in his neighborhood as someone who “was from America, but that he vehemently, angrily, denied that he was an American” (10). For Suliman, local Cairenes’ failure to cultivate a racialized political consciousness posed a roadblock to the broader liberationist force he had found in American Islam. Much of the novel thus charts Suliman’s attempts at coming to terms with this disjuncture.

The novel’s first chapters grapple with the racial and linguistic disjunctures that Suliman experiences in his interactions in Cairo:

He was a black American, that curious thing most had come to know about almost exclusively through the antics and achievements of Mohammed Ali Clay, as they insisted on calling him. . . . When he spoke of them as Africans he was made painfully aware that the idea that they were Africans had apparently never occurred to most of them; that they only thought of themselves as Egyptians. His annoyance would rapidly turn into anger, so that often what had begun as leisurely, polite conversation ended with him fighting to control an outburst which he could not have pulled off in his limited Arabic anyway. (10–11)

“Black Americanness” is figured in the widely circulated media images of Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion. Ali’s performance, Suliman concedes, became a lens through which to read a U.S. racial landscape whose conditions were untranslatable in the context of Egyptian nationalism and Nasser’s version of Pan-Arabism. Suliman’s contained outbursts, restricted as much by his lack of familiarity with spoken Arabic as by his concern over his interlocutors’ circumscribed notion of Blackness, find an outlet in Suliman’s English-language poetry. The Arabic language fails him, so Suliman switches forms.

A politics of racial performance animate a critical scene at the heart of the novel, one that exemplifies the larger strategies at play in the text. Here Graham Du Bois stages a contingent Afro-Arab cultural politics formed in, and through, modes of linguistic and generic translation that unstably oscillate between fiction, poetry, and history, with all their attendant limits on display. Bob arranges for Suliman to recite his poetry at a Cairo cabaret, a reading meant to “provid[e] a source of authentic Afro-American culture for the people of Egypt” (95). This claim to “authenticity” links cultural performance to an embrace of diasporic verisimilitude articulated through aesthetic practice. Suliman’s performance goes one step further, as Graham Du Bois embeds traces of “authentic” historical figures into the narrative itself. The fictional poet is backed by the Cairo Jazz Combo, featuring the Chicago-born Mohammed X-3, an African American member of the Nation of Islam, on saxophone, and is translated and recited by Salah Jahin.

Mohammed X-3 is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Malik Osman Karim Yaqoub, sometimes known as Mac X Spears or Osman Kerim, who, according to a profile written by Graham Du Bois for the Egyptian Gazette in 1965, “aimed to make Cairo jazz-conscious.”121 A contemporaneous article about the Kansas City–born Kerim in the U.S.-based Variety magazine (also penned by Graham Du Bois), described how a “1-man U.S. progressive jazz wave hits Cairo and flips those Arab cats.”122 In both essays, Kerim emphasized the cross-border interactivity of his music, stressing how “progressive jazz[,] which is spontaneous improvisation on simple themes, is not strange to Egyptian ears. . . . Oriental and Western modes in music are quite compatible.”123 Kerim had a nightly gig at Cairo’s club “The Shagara,” had written and recorded a song titled “Yayeesh Nasser” (Long Live Nasser), and, according to Graham Du Bois, had twice appeared on a popular televised variety show. In addition, Kerim had hoped to institutionalize this form of compatibility in a Cairo-based jazz conservatory staffed by “the many black jazz geniuses who are either unemployed or underemployed in the States—especially of the Moslem religion.”124 While Kerim’s stay in Cairo was relatively brief—no conservatory of this type was founded, and Kerim returned to the United States soon thereafter—the poet Salah Jahin’s presence was far more profound. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Jahin emerged as a major conduit of modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic art, fusing contemporary poetic forms with colloquial/vernacular spoken rhythms while founding the modern Egyptian cartoon school. Jahin became known as much for his nationalist lyrics as for his popularized cartoon strips published in Al-Ahram. These strips became immensely popular for their caricatured representations of everyday life.

The novel’s blend of performance and history moves quickly between genres (jazz, poetry, narrative) and language (Arabic and English), revealing the novel’s attempt at imagining a vernacular Afro-Arab aesthetic interface. The night’s opening numbers clarify the relations Suliman is intent on staging. Suliman gives his reading to a mixed audience attuned to the anticolonial struggles across Africa, South Asia, and Palestine. Those who could understand English include “young black students from West and East Africa, young African diplomats from Southern Africa, some Pakistanis and Indian students from South Africa. They included some Palestinian students and several Egyptians” (103). Also present is a group of “white Americans” from the “embassy of Babylon” sitting in the front row (92). Their presence serves as the bridge across which Suliman articulates an internationalist anticolonial affiliation. The jazz combo begins by playing a quick-paced version of Duke Ellington’s popularized blues song, “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Then Suliman comes to the stage and links the colloquial space of the Cairo nightclub to the struggles against U.S. state repression. He “look[s] steadily into the faces of the cluster of white Americans” as he dedicates the evening “to the martyrs of the black people of the United States of America who have been shot down by police, national guard and army bullets . . . while expressing their righteous indignation in rebellion against the white man’s hate and racism in America” (97). The spectators are largely quiet, but when Jahin translates the dedication into Arabic, the “entire audience joined in producing a warm, full-blooded and sustained sound of assent” (98).

Suliman’s first poem depicts Abdin, a “popular district in the center of Cairo,” and expresses “the poet’s surprise, delight and wonder at repeatedly running into faces and figures that might have been friends, relatives, brothers and sisters he’d known ‘over there’” (99). The Afro-Arab kinship felt in Abdin is mirrored in an evocative relational musical accompaniment: “The three Egyptian members of the combo . . . [ran] through a medley of snatches of popular jazz classics over which Mohammed was improvising on the Arabic musical scale the haunting melody of a popular Egyptian love song” (99). When Suliman finishes, “the applause was hesitant”; only the English speakers in the audience “clapped warmly” (99). Jahin’s Arabic translation, however, again garners widespread enthusiasm, accompanied as it is by the jazz combo “revers[ing] itself,” with Mohammed riffing on a familiar blues melody and the others taking up the Egyptian love song at a swinging pace: “People smiled at one another and the excited chatter that followed seemed to indicate that at last the audience knew what the evening was all about” (99–100). This pattern of translation follows throughout the evening, with the predominantly Arabic-speaking audience drawn to the “music of [Suliman’s] voice, its rhythm accentuated by uncontrollable movements of his body, the changing expressions of his face, the burning intensity in his eyes” (100).

These stereotyped nonlinguistic attributes point toward Suliman’s performance as the inarticulate but fiercely committed Black male, even as they are contrasted with Jahin’s translation of “clear pictures and emotions” (101). When Jahin leaves the stage during the second half of the show, Suliman directly addresses the group of white American embassy representatives sitting in the front row with a diatribe against the long history of racist practices in the United States. An “angry, passionate, sometimes crude denunciation of racism in America” leaves the wider audience in “uncomprehending fascination” (102). A poem on the “agony and spiritual death of slavery” is followed by several poems “each more violent in its language, more condemnatory than the last” (103). “It was almost as if no one was in this packed hall but Suliman and his oppressors, represented by this small group seated directly in front of him” (103). At the performance’s conclusion, the audience erupts in applause, many “unmindful that it had missed some of the words, desirous only of expressing its solidarity with Suliman” (104).

Through a sexualized Black male cast as an “authentic” figure of race radicalism, this performance captures a durable Afro-Arab political solidarity that garners Suliman significant publicity in Cairo. He becomes a “minor celebrity” when he publishes a poem inspired by Malcolm’s assassination, and represents the public face of Afro-American Promotions, Inc. and the Cairo branch of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (179). His “open allegiance to Egypt and the Arab cause” brings him respect among younger Egyptian intellectuals as they “were growing conscious of their debt to those blacks in America who were beginning to cause havoc for the U.S. power structure” (179–80).

But just as Suliman’s first book of poetry is published and the Cairo chapter of the OAAU starts to get off the ground, the first inkling of war between Egypt and Israel begins to disarticulate the community that had formed around such diasporic culture work. Suliman’s increasing difficulty with his injured leg registers the demise of this community on his own body. On behalf of OAAU Cairo, Suliman and Bob send a telegram to Nasser expressing the sense of allegiance to the Arab cause of “black Americans in Cairo in the name of the twenty-two million blacks in America whom Washington does not and cannot represent” (186). During the first day of the June war, a crowd of international students studying at Al-Azhar, “mostly black, mostly from Moslem countries of the continent . . . some Indian students from South Africa . . . and a group of Pakistanis and Indonesians,” stage a widely attended pro-Egypt demonstration in which Suliman becomes a leading figure (190). Under the pressures of war making with Israel, however, whose growing support by the United States was cannily perceived in Egypt, U.S. citizenship became a marker of enemy alien status, and the Egyptian government, like those in Jordan, Syria, and other Arab countries, ordered all Americans to evacuate. Bob receives an exemption for his journalistic work with the Egyptian Gazette (as had David Graham Du Bois), but Suliman is taken into custody because, as he says, his name was “on the list they got from the fuckin’ American Embassy” (206). Before long, those carrying U.S. passports are corralled into a downtown hotel to await their departure.125

“The only innocent Americans are black Americans,” Suliman argues in vain as he awaits deportation. “But these fools are listening to whitey, who tells ’em all Americans are the same. They don’t know that all whitey wants is to get us back inside Babylon to shut us up so he can keep on fuckin’ with us!” (220). Since Suliman’s arrival in Egypt, he had refused identification with the United States and instead embraced a diasporic Black consciousness that had finally begun to reach a broader Arab public. Yet before long, Suliman and other members of his circle are bussed to Alexandria and shipped off to Greece. The novel ends with a letter from Suliman’s confidante, Mika, sent from Istanbul in October that concentrates on Suliman’s demise. He had returned to the United States, Mika reports, “because of his leg,” having spent several months “deliberately trying to run himself into his grave” (223). Mika includes in a postscript that he “didn’t do any writing while he was here. I guess there were too many Americans around, or something” (224). The uneven circulation of Blackness problematized throughout reverberates in the novel’s closing gesture, only now the problem is whiteness: “Besides,” writes Mika, “he kept saying the Turks looked just like white folks!” (224).

This marks the tragic end of the novel, and of David Graham Du Bois’s own fictional output. As history or autobiography, there is much that exceeds the frame of the story of Suliman’s demise. Absent here is the Afro-Arab solidarity that, according to contemporaneous writings by Shirley and David Graham Du Bois, was strengthened in Cairo after the June war. In the late 1960s both wrote extensively about this cultural shift, a shift that by 1973 had solidified into a transnational repudiation of Israel’s presence in the Sinai. In about 1977 David Graham Du Bois returned to Cairo to care for his ailing mother, and in the late 1970s he cultivated an important relationship with the Association of Arab American University Graduates. Then, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he shuttled between Cairo and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught courses on journalism and African American studies, cultivated his parents’ papers, and worked on a memoir that has yet to be published.126

Broken Taboos

In the arc of Black freedom struggles, Black Power’s Palestine explicitly critiqued the racial liberal consensus, counterposing the dominant nationalist logics of inclusion with an anticolonialism routed through the Palestine question. Anticolonial affiliations with Palestinian national liberation offered grounds from which to critique the normative violence that marked lacerating civil rights contradictions. All the more remarkable was how, by the end of the 1970s, the coordinates of Black Power’s Palestine were overlaid by a new politics of relation.

In a wide-ranging interview published in the New York Times in July 1979, President Jimmy Carter likened what he called the “Palestinian issue” to the “civil rights movement here in the United States.”127 While Carter did not elaborate on the substance of this comparison—noting only that a Palestinian right of return to the West Bank was a reasonable rights-based issue to consider, especially given, in his words, that “relatively limited numbers” of Palestinians would exercise that right—the comparison itself was resoundingly attacked. Much of the anguish over the comparison equated the “Palestinian issue” with the PLO and the PLO with terrorism, in contrast to the civil rights movement as a morally righteous and resolutely nonviolent movement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a junior senator from New York, entered a statement into the Congressional Record, asserting that “any comparison—no matter how oblique—between Dr. Martin Luther King and Yasir Arafat affronts our own history.”128

Soon thereafter, Andrew Young, the highest-ranked African American federal appointee as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was forced to step down when it was revealed he had been in conversations with the PLO’s UN representative, Zehdi Terzi. Young had deep roots in the Black freedom movement, having worked closely with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. He joined the Congressional Black Caucus as a congressional representative from Atlanta in the mid-1970s, before accepting President Carter’s 1977 appointment to be UN representative. In the summer of 1979 Young met with representatives from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait to discuss the findings of the most recent report of the UN Committee on Palestinian Rights, to be submitted when Young began his term as chair of the UN Security Council later in the year. While the resolution that was to come from the report would have recognized the right of Israel to exist—a position Young readily supported—it also called for the creation of a Palestinian state, which Young knew he would have to veto. Because of this, Young asked Terzi to postpone the report’s submission, and Terzi agreed. When the new session started in August, the report was tabled indefinitely.

However, after a series of highly publicized leaks about the meeting, Young submitted his letter of resignation because of pressure from the State Department and, eventually, from Carter himself. Political engagement with the PLO, regardless of the substance of that engagement, was inadmissible.129 To James Baldwin, Young’s forced resignation was a travesty. In a brief open letter published in the Nation, Baldwin excoriates those who refuse to see the intertwined relationships between Jews and Palestinians in the context of a long legacy of racial genocide, from 1492’s Reconquista in Andalusia and the conquest in the Americas, through the slave trade, up through the Holocaust and Anglophone imperialism. “There is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. . . . My friend, Mr. Andrew Young, out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable nobility, has attempted to ward off a holocaust, and I proclaim him a hero, betrayed by cowards.”130 Prominent leaders from organizations that in 1967 had distanced themselves from SNCC’s “Third World Round-up,” including the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the SCLC, all made efforts to open dialogues with Terzi, other members of the PLO, as well as with Arab American groups like the Association of Arab American University Graduates. A statement signed by over two hundred Black politicians laid out the central importance of independent Black American voices in U.S. foreign policy: “Neither Jews, Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, British, French or any other ethnically or nationally identifiable group has any more right to be involved in the development and conduct of U.S. foreign policy than Americans of African descent.”131 In the weeks that followed, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Walter Fauntroy, Jack O’Dell, Huey P. Newton, and other prominent Black leaders traveled to Lebanon to meet with Arafat and tour the network of long-standing Palestinian refugee camps.

While in the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 War, SNCC and the Black Panther Party were castigated by civil rights leaders for offering public analysis of Zionism’s relationship to racism and imperialism and for relating such an analysis to the internal colonial conditions for Black people in the United States, in 1979, in the wake of the Young affair, such a structural critique was muted. Black leaders offered instead a framework of racial inclusion in which Black foreign policy was seen as incorporable by the state as the expression of another ethno-racial interest group in a pluralist society. At the same time, U.S. and Israeli linkages to the apartheid regime in South Africa mattered in ways unforeseen in 1967. By 1979 those linkages had both developed significantly and become increasingly evident in public discourse. The Congressional Black Caucus was among the key groups researching this, and Young played an important role in circulating this knowledge. Much of the rhetoric circulating in the news coverage of Young’s resignation included allusions to his work on racial conflicts in southern Africa as well as Israel’s sustained military alliance with Pretoria.

Given the contemporary framing of “prolonged conflict and permanent war,” Black Power’s Palestine leaves us with a series of critical questions about historiography, representation, and racial justice movements in the present. Its various iterations opened up these questions in the United States, but they are hardly answered definitively. As exemplified by the Young affair, the coordinates shift. The notion of “tragedy” used in 1967 to describe SNCC’s article is apt, but in a sense more proper to David Graham Du Bois’s novel. Perhaps the narrative logic of tragedy, as explored by the anthropologist David Scott in conceiving the global terrain and broad historical sweep of movements for Black freedom, helps us reorient “our understanding of the politics and ethics of the postcolonial present.” The tragic narrative of colonial enlightenment is “a permanent legacy that has set the conditions in which we make of ourselves what we make and which therefore demands constant renegotiation and readjustment.”132 The translational practices of Black Power’s Palestine have clearly made such historic demands, ones whose significant repercussions resonate into the present.