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Chapter Two tracks how Black Power organizers and activists performed solidarity with Palestine by drawing on the knowledge produced by the PRC. Black Power’s Palestine fashioned an anti-colonial imagined geography driven by race-conscious critiques of the incorporative modalities of U.S. imperialism.

Chapter Three interrogates how the suture between Zionism and American Jewishness was fashioned amid racial justice struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A range of Jewish writers and activists connected their orientations towards Cold War liberalism both to the intensification of U.S. state violence and to the military supremacy and existential vulnerability of the Israel after 1967.

In this chapter the events at the Mexico City Games of 1968 are the main focus. Having failed to galvanise support for a black boycott of the event, activist athletes made their own individual statements of protest. The iconic image of Smith and Carlos stretching their black gloved fists into the air on the winner’s podium, displays the complexity of the links between the black athletic revolt and the wider freedom struggle. This chapter explores the meaning of their stand and the reaction to it both at the time and in the years since. The outraged response of Avery Brundage and the sporting establishment is one example of a white backlash that damaged the ability of sport to advance the black freedom struggle.

This chapter examines North Carolina’s and the federal government’s harassment and disruption of the Black Freedom Struggle in Wilmington culminating in the frame-up and trial of the Wilmington Ten. The particulars of the authorities’ harassment of Ben Chavis, such as ensnaring him in serial and baseless arrests and legal proceedings; the actions of the prosecution in soliciting perjured testimony and illegally excluding blacks from the jury; and the active assistance of the North Carolina judiciary in all aspects of the legal charade are discussed and placed in the context of COINTELPRO and the strategy of repression through the legal system. Despite the outstanding lawyering of Wilmington Ten attorney James Ferguson II, who exposed the lies under oath told by the main prosecution witness Allen Hall, the Wilmington Ten were convicted and sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison.

This chapter provides an overview of racial politics in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. It traces how African Americans and black South Africans have historically configured their struggles as being interconnected, while documenting how anticommunism limited opportunities for transnational black activism between both countries during the early Cold War.

Chapter One provides a broad historical overview of African American community formation in Cairo, illuminating how the region’s economic instability and distinct blend of northern and southern racial practices combined to solidify the Black church’s emergence as the leading institution in local community-building and protest traditions. This chapter argues that the Black church’s preeminence was not inevitable. It was instead a creative and necessary response to broader patterns of Black political marginalization and an absence of alternative institutions due to the precarious economic position of Cairo’s Black working-class. The chapter also contends that the ability of Cairo’s Black churches to fill this organizational vacuum was made possible by the distinctive religious tradition harbored by African American communities across the borderland.

In “Convenient Partnerships? African American Civil Rights Leaders and the East German Dictatorship,” Anja Werner discusses another unlikely ideological alliance, this time between Civil Rights and Black Power activists in the US on the one hand and East German political leaders on the other. Since the 1980s, there has been a vivid scholarly interest in the subject of Black Germany and connecting points between Civil Rights activism of African Americans and both West and East Germans. However since the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been renewed interest in African American activists interaction with the communist East German dictatorship. This paper traces W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr. during visits in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) mainly between 1959 and 1981. It juxtaposes a close reading of the Black leaders’ motives with the goals and expectations of the East German dictatorship, revealing that both sides used the media attention that their contacts garnered to further their respective agendas. For African Americans—rather than allowing themselves to be used by the communist cause—it meant to draw international attention to the American race problem and thus to pressure the US government during the Cold War. For the East German communists, it was meant to boost their standing in the Western world at a time when the GDR was striving for international recognition beyond the Eastern Bloc. However, while the GDR dictatorship attempted to control African Americans’ perception among the East German population, they ultimately failed on account of the force of the Black freedom fight, revealing deeply rooted underlying racism, and thus, belying the claim that the communist bloc had been more successful in uprooting it.

This chapter uses specific case studies to explore the impact of the black athletic revolt on the campus in the lead up to the 1968 Olympics. Focussing mainly on events at Berkeley, Kansas and Marquette, the difficulties facing athletes and athletics departments touched by the black athletic revolt are explained. Links are made between these examples and the wider narrative of student protest and racial politics. To varying degrees these case studies show the problems associated with using the sporting arena to try and advance the aims of the black freedom struggle.

This concluding chapter argues that African Americans were part of a broad and multifaceted effort to isolate South Africa in the global political arena. By repeatedly attempting to offer direct support to African liberation movements and calling for America to renounce its political and economic ties with the National Party, their actions made life difficult for white politicians in ways that that would continue to inform the global anti-apartheid movement beyond the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. This argument is not meant to downplay the disruptive influence that anticommunism had on black protest. Rather, it is designed to shift the focus onto the ways in which black activists, with different political visions, responded to state power. Finally, given the broad response of African Americans to the anti-apartheid movement, this concluding chapter suggests that we might need to move towards a more expansive definition of black internationalism – one that accounts for the anticolonial political agenda and transnational solidarities forges by both African American leftists and liberals.

The Introduction outlines the book’s theoretical framework and historical scope. It introduces the concepts racial relationality, imperial culture, permanent war, and the politics of comparison, and identifies the locus of the U.S., Israel, Palestine entanglement in a nascent neoliberalism.

Chapter One situates this entanglement in competing post-Holocaust discourses of racial expertise and Cold War geopolitics. It provides a genealogy of the 1975 United Nations resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a form of racism. Key are the scholar-activists of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center (PRC) and U.S. state agents like Daniel Patrick Moynihan articulating Cold War American exceptions.

The conclusion of the book starts by linking the problems that athletes in the 1960s faced when trying to use their position as sportsmen to engage with the black freedom struggle and some of the difficulties faced by modern student athletes. Parallels are drawn between restrictions on freedom of speech and the perceived role of athletes in relation to social activism. The way in which the New Right sought to minimise the achievements and scope of the Civil Rights Movement is connected to the backlash against the Black Athletic Revolt. Finally, there is a call to further explore the links between sport and the black freedom struggle in a critical and detailed way.

Chapter Four situates the emergence of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism within the growing knowledge production of a community of scholars of Arab descent. It illuminates a contrapuntal analytic attentive to the incommensurable connections between U.S. settler conquest, the Holocaust, and the dispossession and dehumanization of Arab communities.

Against the backdrop of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Chapter Five locates Black poet-activist June Jordan’s “Moving Towards Home” amid intensive disputes amongst U.S. feminists about the differentiated lived experiences of racism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism. In doing so, it tracks the absent presence of Palestine in Women of Color feminisms.