Black Zionists

Plummer agrees with Sundquist’s analysis: “There is no other people other than black Americans and Jews that have hundreds of years of slavery in their history,” he tells me. “And that has drawn us to have some kind of sensitivity to Israel.”

It is a vision that Plummer has been preaching with unrivaled devotion for the past two years. “There are a lot of black leaders who are pro-Israel and known for that,” explains Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, “but none who I would say are as committed to really rallying the African American community as Glenn Plummer.” Because of his standing as one of the most senior institutional figures in Christian broadcasting, Plummer likely stands to have an influence on the way African Americans perceive and understand Israel and the Jewish people. His clout, and the potential of his message, has not been lost on the Israeli government.

In May, Plummer was invited to meet with Ariel Sharon when the Israeli leader was in Washington on a state visit. It was an intimate gathering with about ten to fifteen of the most prominent evangelical leaders in America, including Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and John Hagee. Plummer was the only African American in the room. 

By the time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the civil rights era alliance between blacks and Jews was rapidly disintegrating.

“The center of attention had moved from King to the Black Power movement. King was on the defensive at the time of his death,” argues Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University and the director of The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project. King had already been eclipsed as the unchallenged leader of the black struggle.

If something as amorphous as the emergence of the “Black Power” movement can be traced to a specific date, June 16th, 1966 seems the most viable candidate. Delivering the culminating speech at a Greenwood, Mississippi rally, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) asked the audience what it was they wanted. The response was an undeniable clarion call that the zeitgeist of the civil rights movement was heading in new directions: “Black Power!”

In August, SNCC published a “Position Paper on Black Power” in which the revolutionary tenor of the Greenwood rally was explicitly codified as official policy. Rejecting the biracial struggle for equality that had characterized the civil rights movement since the founding of the NAACP in 1909, the paper’s authors asserted that “if we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people.” SNCC’s youthful activists were impatient with the nonviolent tactics championed by mainstream leaders like King.

“The liberal civil rights movement can’t ultimately deliver what these guys want,” says Cheryl Greenberg. “There is a Civil Rights Act, but people are still getting killed. There is Brown vs. Board of Education, but the schools are still segregated. Young people, both white and black, start to say: ‘This is bullshit, we have to turn radical.’” The politics of identity were sweeping the ranks of the movement. “No one wanted to be identified as an assimilationist in the late ‘60s,” Clayborne Carson says with a slight, reminiscent chuckle.

In 1965, Elijah Muhammad, (who had shed his given surname of Poole), published Message to the Blackman in America. The message promulgated by Muhammad and his disciples -- most notably Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan -- is that blacks are the original chosen people. Whites are the product of a series of genetic experiments geared toward the destruction of blacks. To Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad was a modern Moses, sent to “restore unto his people their own lost culture, their lost identity, their lost racial dignity.” 

At a fractious moment in the civil rights movement, and with the counterculture raging on the fringes, the Nation of Islam’s quasi-martial code of personal discipline and self-reliance earned the respect of many in the black community. In addition, the theology of the Nation was very adaptable to the tenets of Black Power. As Malcolm X was fond of saying, “coffee integrated with white milk” is weak, black is strong. The word “Negro” rapidly disappeared from the American lexicon in favor of “black.”

The Six Day War of 1967 also had a powerful impact on the alliance, changing the way Israel was perceived in the activist black community. To the arbiters of Black Power, the war was an example -- according to Greenberg -- of “Israel as a white, European country oppressing its non-white Palestinian native majority.” As such, in the name of solidarity with other “colonized” people of color around the world, Black Power rhetoric took on a baldly anti-Zionist (and at times anti-Semitic) tone. The discourse was soon dominated by ideologues like Eldridge Cleaver, who made an international pilgrimage to stand beside Yassar Arafat at a 1968 Fatah rally in Algeria and proclaimed that, like America was doing to its black residents, the Israelis were “trying to solve their problems at the expense of another people.” Carmichael upped the ante when he proclaimed that black militants were ready “to take up arms and die if necessary to help the Arabs free Palestine.”