H L GATES PBS SERIES BLACKS AND JEWS - PART3 & 4 - MY REVIEW

  I have enjoyed listening to 4 great orators: first, when I was about 13, I walked across the Airline Bridge to Pelican (baseball stadium) to attend a Billy Graham rally in New Orleans.(1951?)  Seating was segregated, so as not to violate the race laws in the state.  The then young Graham used his knowledge of the Bible with current analogies, at times interrupted by the choir or the powerful voice of George Beverly Shay.  His magnet of salvation caused many to abandon their seats to join the growing mass on the grass who wanted to join up for the Kingdom.  I came near to joining them.     

     On Sunday nights on tv I watched another such speaker, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.  Because New Orleans was the largest city with only one tv channel, I do not know on which network he appeared.  He was a Roman Catholic bishop, but mixed into his message of religion was politics, especially, oppression of the people in Eastern Europe under Communism.  He was most effective with the use of the pause, which made you think more than him shouting.

     3rd was Ronald Reagan.  In 1960 I had cast my first ballot for President, JFK.  In  1964 I favored LBJ, but not as enthusiastically.  Sen. Goldwater, the Republican candidate, was scheduled to speak at Tulane stadium, and as a TU student, I planned to go, to boo if nothing else.  The crowd was for Goldwater, and Louisiana was one of the few states he would carry in November.  The stadium was enthusiastic for Goldwater.  He spoke.  What a bore!  He might have been giving a report to a Senate committee over trivia.  The crowd waited to erupt; but he never gave them a chance.  Only later in the campaign when I heard the radio address on why vote for Goldwater, delivered by Ronald Reagan, did I appreciate the rhetorric of Reagan.  He did not convince me to vote for Goldwater, but he did get me questioning some of my political assumptions.  Reagan was a great orator.

     4th was unexpected.  I was working in China, and provided a computer, expanding my knowledge of how to use it, etc.  In my exploration, I began to listen to some old speeches of Malcolm X.  I do not mean that I agreed with him.  Malcolm did include some of the bitter contempt for opponents, heard in Elijah Muhammad's or later, Minister Farrakhan's sermons.  But Malcolm's political analyses made one think.  Pause, even without a visual cue to do so.  I am white, and I did not agree, but I could see how others could be readily moved by his speeches.  See Anthony Flood's depiction of the 1961 Black Muslim mass gathering at Uline Arena in Washington. DC, at which the honored guests were George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, he and several members sitting in the audience wearing their uniforms with the red armbands and black swastikas.  From the platform Malcolm spoke friendly words to Rockwell, and Rockwell made a pledge of $20, (perhaps about 7 cartons of cigarettes in those days values).  Malcolm was basically telling the congregants that the good whites were the Nazis.    What could that possibly have to do  with Black-Jewish relations???

     Yet, in the 4-hour program on PBS by Henry Louis Gates, I do not recall seeing Malcolm at all.  What might he have had to do with the topic?  In the early 1960s the Black Muslims held a number of huge gatherings of the faithful for their Founders Day.  A small number of whites were invited guests to these gatherings, and they were not Jews.

http://anthonyflood.com/murraynoifascism.htm

"American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell (center) at a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally, Uline Arena, Washington, DC, June 25, 1961.  During the collection, he shouted: “George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!” (almost $135 in today's money).  Malcolm X, noting the applause, asked him: "George Lincoln Rockwell, you got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you?”        Elijah Muhammad, NOI founder, invited Rockwell to speak at their next Savior's Day Convention, which he did on Sunday, February 25, 1962, before 12,175 people in Chicago’s International Amphitheater.  (Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, p. 3.)  At the podium, in full Nazi regalia, Rockwell opined “that Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler is to the German people.  He is the most powerful black man in the country.  Heil Hitler!” (Black History and the Class Struggle, Spartacist League, August 1994, p. 37.)   Anthony Flood"

     MORE TO COME

A Personal Aside - What do Malcolm X, Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey), and I have in common?  By the way, Bernadette Devlin was the leader of the Northern Irland Civil Rights Assn., which in the late 1960s had become militant in demanding equal rights for Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland.  I had gone to Edinburgh to work on my controversial thesis and hopefully receive a doctorate there.  Upon arrival, I was confused by the grafitti on buildings, "Kick the Pope," and "Kick Billy."  I asked.  Billy was King William of Orange, the Protestant Leader who replaced a James II Stuart, after defeating him at the Battle of the Boyne in N. Ireland in 1690.  England remained Anglican, Scotland Puritanical with a RC minority; and Ireland, Protestant with a large RC majority.  It was not until the late 1960s, when I was there that the ABC Cinema became the first movie theater permitted to show films on the Lord's Day.  Pub's were closed on Sundays too, and even closed at 10pm Saturday nights (be up early on the Sabbath to get to the Kirk on time).  A friend, a young man smaller than I, was scouted by a major football team (soccer).  All went well till the final question.  "Do you attend mass on Sunday?"  With yes, he was told they could not have a Roman Catholic on the Ranger's squad.  QUESTION - What do I have in common with Malcolm X and Bernadette Devlin?  Answer - We all were featued speakers at Trotskyist forums in NYC.  Malcolm X sponsored by Militant Labor Forum in Jan. 1965; I was sponsored also by the MLF in Aug. 1966, and Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey) by International Socialist, I think around 1980.  What do I not have in common with Malcolm and Bernadette?  I was not shot.  Malcolm was shot and killed in Feb. 1965.  Bernadette was shot by 3 Ulster Freedom Fighters who invaded her home and she received between 7 and 9 bullets, and lived.  I was not shot or killed.  I had had supper with Bernadette and 4 other university folks at Edinburgh 1969?

    For the record, I was never a member of a Trot political party or of the CP.

 I think it fair to say that Malcolm was NOT in the middle on the Blacks/Jews issues.  He sided with the Nazis as his fave whites.  But Malcolm X is not the only important figure omitted from the PBS series.  Nowhere did I see mention of Harold Cruse.  Cruse wrote a large volume, which in part complains about the dominant influence of Jewish intellectuals inside the Communist Party, USA, which prevented Blacks from establishing their own analysis of their role as a racial minority in the US.  Cruse concedes the importance of the CP, especially in the 1930s, but also the 40s and beyond.  But he sees the CP winning over middle-class Blacks, who are generally interracialists, pushing for integration.  However, by the 1940s Cruse contends, Harlem Blacks not in the middle class, were overwhelmingly segregationists, nationalists.  This was no new division, as in the 1920s the divide between Garvey (and his UNIA) vs. Du Bois and his NAACP.  Cruse implies it is a major lasting divide.  The Communists with their emphasis on the international scene, integration, and following approved moves for minorities, they have abandoned their on analysis, and the essential development of their own culture.  Jewish Communists are responsible for this failing.

     Needless to say, I over simplify, Cruse's view in his 565 page book.  In many ways, I do not aggre with it, but I urge you to read at least one chapter to decide for yourself.  I was teaching at a university, when one morning students pulled down the American flag and replace it at the main entrance with the black, red, and green black liberation flag.  Thence began a student boycott of classes, the Governor, McKeithern, coming to the campus for the first time, and confronting this challenge for the first itme.  I was scheduled to teach that summer, but due to my support of the strike, I was told I was blacklisted.  Have no idea if that was true, just that I never taught in the US again.  Another supporter of the strike, a Lebanese, would be arrested and deported.  But that summer, Black cultural groups began to form in New Orleans.  Before I leave the issue of Black Nationalism, should it be restricted to the US?  What about black support for independence for Black African nations (colonies)?  When Robeson was making films in Britain in the 1930s, he met and befriended some of the extras,  who were students attending British universities.  One was Johnstone Kenyatta, who with Robeson led the British Scottsboro Defence Committee, trying to save the lives of young Blacks accused in Alabama of raping 2 white young women.  A few decades later Johnstone, now known as Jomo, led a Black rebellion against Britain.  Should American Blacks have supported Jomo?  My point - Gates should have mentioned and discussed the important Cruse book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.

     The Gates series rightly stresses the importance of Freedom Summer in Mississippi in the mid-1960s.  The appearance of West Indian Stokely Carmichael and his push for new leadership summarized with the slogan: Black Power.  This electrified the movement.  The phrase was all over the major tv networks and newspapers.  I was then in NYC and bought the Militant (Trot) and the Daily World (CP, heir to the Daily Worker).  Both were small papers. only 6-8 pages.  The Militant coverage was actually similar to the major media's, stress on Black Power, and possible shake-up of the movement.  The DW coverage was also extensive, but I could not find once in the paper the phrase Black Power.  The CP was not on board with this rejection of interracialism at that time.  On board or not, soon whites were expelled from SNCC.  Even the dedicated Dottie Zellner and her husband were about the last whites to be evicted from SNCC, but evicted they were.

     Though it received little fan-fare, New Orleans CORE had basically gone all Black much earlier.  Founded in 1960 and defied the NAACP to stage the first sit-in in the modern era, it remained quite integrated for the first university year.  When some Black young men were giving unwanted attention to some Newcomb gals, they complained, and the Black male CORE leaders told the guys to lay off.  And they did.  Next year, white guys in CORE  were dating Black gals.  The gals did NOT complain, but went out with the white guys.  Oretha Castle, the Black woman then leading NO CORE objected, as did a Black minister.  When election time in CORE came, Oretha managed to disqualify all white males, and only a few white women were allowed to remain as members.  They soon dropped out.  There was no sloganeering of Black Power, but NO CORE was essentially a Black organization by 1962.  LSUNO, unlike the main school in Baton Rouge, had some Black students, and a British socialist professor provided some interracial meetings.  I brought a Black student from Dillard to a meeting of Young Liberals at Tulane, addressed by Rev. Shuttlesworth.  After a few of us went to a pizza place in the Tulane neighborhood, Maple St., and we were denied service.  So began many picketings and protests.  But these were localized, not at all under the old CORE or NAACP umbrellas.

    By the late 1960s, dashikis, Afros, and the biggest thing on tv by Jan. 1977, Alex Haley's Roots, even if it was fiction.

In Part 4 the question of Jews involvement in the slave trade becomes an issue, as the publication of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews stressed the Jews role in the slave trade and slavery.  The Nation of Islam (NOI) was not the first to make such claims.  Henri Pirenne argued that with the fall of the Roman Empire and expansion of Islam into former Christian Africa there rose new merchants - the Jews.  They were particularly involved in the slave trade, and the slaves were Slavs, from whence we derive the word slave.  Arabs would be involved in the African slave trade, and African male slaves to guard harems would of course be castrated.  Indeed, in parts of Asia, to prevent thieving family values, castration might be a qualification for government employment.  Noteworthy, Admiral He, the most important Chinese Admiral who probably gave the PRC its claims to the South China Sea, and who headed a fleet with 30,000 sailors (while Columbus  had about a total of 90 on all 3 ships, sailing 50 years after the Chinese.

     On the role of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade.  I do not know.  But when the Brits attempted to end it, I know of no rioting in the synagogues.  But there was rioting on the slave coasts of West Africa by the African slave traders!  They wanted the lucrative trade to continue.

     Yes, there were Jews in the American South and some owned slaves.  But as conservative politician Leander Perez used to remind the Roman Catholic hierarchy in New Orleans when it began to speak against segregation, the Jesuits had been slave owners too.  The vast majority of Southerners 

were Christians, and many of them were slaveholders.

     Hatred of Jews is often a version of hatred of integration, of mixing races.  Sometimes it is hatred of the other race; sometimes just feeling more relaxed around your own; like being with family.  Can we be friends beyond?  Can they?  Probably sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Hugh Murray