King’s Promised Land

By Yiore Ben Yehuda

Monday, January 17, 2005

 

Dear Editor,

It must be told that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the greatest non-Jewish advocates for International Jewish rights.  Despite having lived in a time when association with brown-skinned Arabs was more acceptable, King was quite outspoken in his condemnation of global anti-Semitism and was fervent in advocating the right of the Jewish Homeland to exist.  Alliance between Blacks and Jews was fundamental to civil rights progress.  In March 1968, King declared: “There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned…  I think it is necessary to say that what is basic and what is needed in the Middle East is peace.  Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity.”

For many, the King Holiday is as much a celebration of the ideal of racial, cultural and spiritual unity as it is a commemoration of his birth.  For Jews, the holiday has served as an annual reminder of “tikkun olam,” a national charge to participate in the world’s repair.

In fact, the history of the civil rights movement records the unrivaled Jewish advocacy for the rights of African-Americans.  The Jews represented the first non-Black community in America to embrace King’s vision.  Not only did they join sit-ins and participate in boycotts and marches, but the Jewish Community made sizeable financial contributions to civil rights activities and often put up bail for activists who were arrested.

Abraham Heschel, noted Jewish scholar, social activist, and King advisor joined the civil rights leader and Ralph Bunche on the front line of the 1965 Selma march in an Alabama then known for its hatred, racist violence, lynching, and rampage of the “raging” Bull Connor.  Rabbi Martin Freedman organized the Interfaith Freedom Rides that bused northern whites through southern cities in effort to integrate the south’s many segregated institutions.  Rabbi Israel Dresner was characteristic of the liberal Jewish community of the 1960s.  His participation in the Freedom Rides and his commitment to King and the movement was the focus of the national media as he endured incarceration time and time again in the jails of the southern United States.  Dresner was best known for his arrest at the Tallahassee airport restaurant for refusing to vacate the establishment after his mixed party was denied service.  His case, Dresner v. Tallahassee reached the U.S. Supreme Court.  It was at Rabbi Dresner’s temple that King introduced his outspokenness on the Vietnam War.  Perhaps the most noted of Jewish civil rights activists was one of King’s closest friends and confidants, Stanley Levison.  Personal advisor, speech writer, accountant and legal counsel for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Levison and Martin were comrades in the struggle and shared a bond likened unto that of the Biblical story of Jonathan and David.  Only death could separate them.

During the most intense decade of the African-American struggle for equality, Jews from New York to Los Angeles and Chicago to Birmingham coalesced to mount an historic resistance to oppression, violence, inequality and segregation.  They stood together in the face of the Ku Klux Klan, attack dogs, fire-bombed buses and synagogues, being spit on, hosed, drug, beaten, arrested, social maligning and being economically ostracized for their support of African-Americans.  They faced all manner of evil perpetuated by the racist American establishment King described as “our sick white brothers.”

Today, the inability to secure peace in Jerusalem, the “city of peace”, has created an environment that allows for Israel’s enemies to threaten the right of the Jewish state to exist.  Terror and violence in the Biblical Holy Land have raised alarm amongst the watchers of time and caused religionists the world over to question their own concepts of “God”.  Meanwhile, for Africans in the Diaspora the future likewise is marked with increasing uncertainty.  While African-Caribbean nations are plagued with socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and environmental ills, African-Americans suffer mostly from racial disparities in education and health – they lead in all major causes of death – and the decline in social virtues champions the destruction of the Black family.  Those who look to Africa for hope find further depression as HIV/AIDS, war, instability, and corruption ravage the mother continent and squander her precious resources.

Never before has the African-American/Jewish partnership that was such an integral part of the civil rights movement begged resurgence as it does this day.  In January 2004, during the King Holiday, Rabbi Marc Schneier, author of Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish Community and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, together with hip hop mogul Russell Simmons (the foundation’s chair) penned a joint statement calling for African-Americans and Jews to join arms to defeat the injustices challenging both peoples.

In August 2003, I was blessed to help coordinate the visit to Israel of SCLC president, Senator Charles Steele.  Steele was in the Holy Land to participate in talks in which the Israeli government expressed that African-American tourism was vital to its economic existence.  Today, I am proud to again join Senator Steele and the SCLC in the establishment of Israel’s newest conflict resolution center, the Martin Luther King – Israel Center for New Humanity.  A November 19, 2004, Jerusalem Post article reported that Israel’s African-American community, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, had been petitioned by the Foreign Ministry to conduct its “hasbara” (information) missions throughout the global African community.  The Hebrew Israelites represent the largest organized settlement of Americans living in Israel.  Perhaps King’s dream is more within our grasp than formerly understood.

So, what of King’s Promised Land?  Was the mention in King’s final speech that God had allowed him to see the “Promised Land” mere allegory?  Rabbi Schneier’s book explains that in 1959 the famed African-American leader did in fact see the Biblical Promised Land.  As a matter of fact, that very speech the night before his assassination was begun with a recounting of his visit to Jerusalem and the ancient city of Jericho, where in 1959 he no doubt encountered men and women of his ethnicity.  Also detailed in Rabbi Schneier’s book is the fact that in 1966-1967, King dispatched to Israel the now former Atlanta Mayor and U.S. U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young.  Young flew to Tel Aviv to make preparations for a pilgrimage of 5,000 African-Americans to the Holy Land where Martin, like the Messiah of 2,000 years ago, would preach to them from the water at the Sea of Galilee.  As profound an individual as King was, and as impacting as his humanitarian contributions have been to modern-day society, it would be remiss of any historian to dismiss as metaphorical King’s 1968 assertion that “we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

In 1881, Oscar Goldberg, renowned German-born Jewish philosopher, proclaimed that “the coming of the Black people from America to Jerusalem, the Promised Land, will signify the vanguard of the Messianic Age.”  Near the turn of the 20^th century when newly freed African-Americans seized the power to define their own spirituality, we find the emergence of William S. Crowdy, Bishop C.H. Mason and others preaching the identity and sanctification of Israel at the same time Theodor Herzl’s vision of Zionism was gaining prominence.  The first Black Hebrew group was founded by Crowdy and was known as the Church of God and Saints of Christ.  According to Crowdy, so-called “Negroes” were in reality Jews, descending from the “lost tribes of Israel.”

Truth be told, African-Americans have always played a significant role in the affairs of Israel’s existence.  In 1950, the debonair diplomat Ralph Bunche was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the United Nations Palestine Commission which laid the foundation for the creation of a Jewish homeland.  Bunche was the first African-American to be a recipient of the award.  Liberia, an African nation, cast the final and deciding vote amidst the family of nations allowing for the UN charter that established the modern state of Israel.  Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed African-American slaves repatriated from the U.S. to Africa by the American Colonization Society.

What of the unending documentation of Israelite traditions in the culture of the Ashanti of Ghana, the Fulani, Ewe, Yoruba and Bantu nations?  What of Joseph J. Williams’ 1928 writing, Hebrewisms of West Africa?  If we know nothing at all of Africans in the Diaspora, we know that they were brought to these lands from west and central Africa.  What of the fact that King’s philosophy found its origin in the Hebrew Scriptures?  Mere coincidence?  Then what think you of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who in 1967 launched COINTELPRO (short for counter intelligence program) whose documented mission statement to prevent the rise of a messiah targeted Dr. King and other African-American leaders?  The term “messiah” used by the FBI, it should be noted, is Hebrew in etymology, concept and origin and is directly derived from the Semitic word “masheahk”.  Perhaps the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a bit more “Jewish” than previously considered.

Whatever your position, there are those who were inspired by Dr. King’s Promised Land vision.  In his book Black Judaism, Professor James E. Landing of the University of Illinois at Chicago, in 2002 writes: “The predictions of the Hebrew Israelites that they must return to the Holy Land before the coming of the millennium, according to scripture, has now been fulfilled.  Their ability to take a more meaningful role in their own future has been enhanced considerably.  Because of this steadfastness in Israel, ill-gained or not, there will be a community of Hebrew Israelites in that country for a long time.  The Hebrew Israelites believed that blacks had no meaningful future in that country and left it.  The story of the Hebrew Israelites is the type that lends itself to legends.”  The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have succeeded in establishing an environment free from hatred, abuse, corruption, drugs, crime and the immorality plaguing societies around the world.  They are known in Israel as the “Village of Peace.”  The Israeli media coined them “An Island of Sanity,” and in 1994, the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus recognized the African-American presence in Israel as “A Miracle in the Desert”.

At a time when the Jewish community is confronted with unprecedented global anti-Semitism, and at a time when Africans in the Diaspora are faced with the uncertainty of their very existence, perhaps the two peoples might once again muster the courage to defy the boundaries of race, religion and culture to, in epic brotherhood, overcome our final struggles.

What of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Promised Land you ask?  We as a people have made it to the Promised Land!