Israel, Palestine, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Legacy Roger Baumann
Roger Baumann
In mid-January each year, many Americans turn their attention to questions about the legacy of the historic civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s in the United States. This annual period of national introspection focuses especially on Martin Luther King Jr. as an icon of the movement. His January 15th birthday has been commemorated as a federal holiday on the third Monday of January since 1986.
Although many American cities and organizations celebrate King’s birthday as a “day of unity,” King’s legacy and the wider legacy of the civil rights movement have long been anything but unifying. On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the bill officially creating a federal holiday in King’s honor. But Reagan was ambivalent, having written in a letter just a month earlier that the proposed holiday was “based on an image, not reality.” That letter was a reply to former New Hampshire governor Meldrim Thomson Jr., who had been urging Reagan to veto any bill commemorating King. Opponents like Thomson argued that King’s alleged “communist sympathies” should preclude the honor of a commemorative federal holiday. Many other members of the Republican Party echoed these criticisms, with 89 Republican House votes in favor of the bill, 77 opposed, and 5 present or abstaining. The final vote among Senate Republicans went 78–22 in favor. With this “veto-proof” support established in Congress, Reagan signed the bill, having recently declared about the persistent charges of communist sympathies, “We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?”—referring to the court-ordered sealing of FBI files on King for 50 years after his death.
Reagan’s tepid support based on his own party’s deep ambivalence about the prospect of honoring King is in line with wider American public opinion numbers on King, his legacy, and the historic civil rights movement in general. In 2023, the Pew Research Center reported that 81% of Americans believe that King had a positive impact on the United States. This number was lower than Gallup survey results from 2011, where 94% of adult Americans held favorable views of King. But it was much higher than Gallup numbers from the 1960s, where favorable views ranged between 33 and 45% and were at only 33% in August 1966, eight months before his assassination.
How should we understand these contrasting images of King and the civil rights struggle he helped lead?
On one hand, we are presented with King as an ostensibly unifying force in American society. On the other hand, we have ample evidence of King and the civil rights movement as deeply divisive with respect to possible lessons for America’s ongoing struggles to collectively address widening racial and economic inequality. Scholars have called attention to how cultural and collective memories of the civil rights movement and of King himself have long been contested, reimagined, and redeployed in American public life.
Beyond the debate over the legacies of King and the civil rights movement in the United States, these questions also resonate on a global level. I have seen this contestation in my own research on African American Christian engagement with the issue of Israel and Palestine over the past decade. King and the civil rights movement have been the subject of various contemporary interpretations and applications that extend beyond the American civil sphere and into global spaces, where other voices stake out claims to civil rights legacies and to the mantle of moral authority.
On the Sunday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2016, I attended an interfaith event at Russell Street Missionary Baptist Church, a 100-year-old Black church in Detroit’s North End neighborhood, on the border with the city of Hamtramck. No doubt countless African American churches around the United States were similarly commemorating Dr. King that day, but this event had the distinction of being cosponsored by a Jewish congregation, Adat Shalom Synagogue. Rabbi Rachel Shere of Adat Shalom, in her introductory remarks, described inequality in America using King’s phrase “a frustrating and bewildering wilderness.” “If we have learned one thing,” she said, “it is that the only way out of it is together—praying, singing, working hand in hand together.” The late Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, had flown in from Israel. In his remarks, he similarly invoked King’s message of equality to describe Jews and Christians as two branches of the same root. “We are one!” he shouted from the stage. Eckstein concluded his remarks, “I’m sure Martin Luther King’s soul is smiling on us today.” When Russell Street’s senior pastor Reverend Deedee Coleman took the pulpit, she announced proudly: “We are the most pro-Israel church in the city of Detroit!” adding, “there is something about this day of Martin Luther King Jr. … because Dr. King was also pro-Israel, and he wasn’t shy about it!”
The interfaith celebration closed with the singing of the civil rights protest anthem “We Shall Overcome.” During the singing, the leaders on the stage—Black and white, Jewish and Christian—linked arms. Following suit, attendees in the pews held hands and swayed to the hopeful music. That day, the prevailing memory of King and the movement he helped lead emphasized him as a model for Black-Jewish solidarity and, in turn, African American Christian religious and political support for the State of Israel and its policies toward Palestinians.
Two years later, I spent ten days in Palestine with a group of young Black college-age activists, led by a clergywoman and campus minister who had designed the trip in partnership with an ecumenical Palestinian Christian organization focused on applying Christian liberation theology in the face of what they describe as their ongoing struggle against occupation, violence, injustice, and discrimination. By and large, the legacy of the civil rights movement recalled on that trip was very different from what I encountered at the Russell Street congregation in Detroit. In the Palestinian city of Hebron, we toured the central part of the old city, where the presence of Jewish settlers and the accompanying Israeli military in the otherwise majority Palestinian city of over 200,000 has forced many local Palestinians to abandon their homes and businesses.
Pausing in the shade of a tree to get out of the hot midday sun, our Palestinian Christian guide suggested a moment of reflection and a “prayer for all people in all sides of all walls.” “Let’s sing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” the guide suggested. None of the Black students knew the words to the song. “You don’t know ‘We Shall Overcome’?!” he replied, surprised. “That’s not the song at the protests we go to!” one female student shot back. “What do you sing?” he asked, genuinely curious. “At Black Lives Matter protests, we sing ‘We’re on the Freedom Side.’” She went on to lead the group in the call and response:
Assata Shakur is a freedom fighter
And she taught us how to fight
We’re gonna fight all day and night
Until we get it right
Which side are you on, my people? Which side are you on?
Assata Shakur was a popular protest figure, alongside Malcolm X, among these student activists. They passed around a dog-eared copy of her autobiography throughout the trip. To the extent that King was relevant to the question of how the Black struggle for civil rights in the United States related to the Palestinian cause, I found that it was as a labor activist, anti-imperialist, and antiwar activist—the same positions that resulted in King’s low public opinion numbers in his own lifetime. This was not a unifying vision of King or the civil rights movement, but rather a polarizing one.
As I continued to pay attention to the ways that Black American experiences and identities are refracted through engagement with the issue of Palestine and Israel, I encountered further stark juxtapositions of interpretations of King and the civil rights movement. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2016—the day following the interfaith event described above—the official Twitter account of the Israeli military tweeted an iconic image of King at the 1963 March on Washington, overlaid with a 1968 quote from King: “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist.” The tweet added the commentary: “On this #MartinLutherKingDay, we salute the power of justice to triumph over evil. Happy MLK!” The quote in the tweet is from an open letter attributed to King, of contested origin and authenticity—a common point of reference for African American Christian Zionists and other supporters of the State of Israel.
In contrast, just a few weeks earlier, political cartoonist Carlos Latuff tweeted a drawing depicting Rosa Parks wearing a Palestinian scarf and sitting on a bus in a seat marked “Settlers Only.” Behind her is a menacing-looking Jewish settler, scowling and carrying a rifle. The image echoes critiques of the State of Israel for operating separate buses for Palestinians and for Jewish Israelis. These two tweets, both invoking the legacy of the historic civil rights movement in the United States, could not be more opposed in their message and intent. Throughout my research on African American Christian engagement with Israel and Palestine, these kinds of polarized interpretations provoked questions like: What political and racial solidarities motivate these divergent perceptions of the civil rights movement? And how are such solidarities built, sustained, defended, and deployed?
In my forthcoming book, Black Visions of the Holy Land, I use six years of fieldwork in the United States and in Palestine and Israel to show what global trajectories are possible when Black religious politics are taken out of more familiar territory and into new political spaces, analyzing what happens when existing Black religious political orientations are applied to new questions about global solidarities across racial and religious lines. Building on the recognition that cultural memories of movements and icons—like the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.—are deeply contested at every turn, I show how “the Black Church” functions in much the same way within Black religious politics. I ask: What is “the Black Church”? And what is its role as a source of collective identity and as a driver of social and political engagement for African American Christians?
In answering these questions, I look at how the contestation over the history, identity, and mission of “the Black Church” involves making choices about where within Black experiences to look for cultural points of reference and touchstones of historical significance. Who or what most appropriately represents the civil rights movement? And which image of that person should be upheld and emphasized? I found divergent and contradictory answers from groups of African American Christians who variously identify as Christian Zionists, Palestinian solidarity activists, or something else.
On the occasion of the 39th official U.S. commemoration of King’s contested legacy, questions persist about how and whether that legacy and historic context of the civil rights movement can offer insights into and moral clarity about Israel and Palestine, with the ongoing and unprecedented Israeli state violence toward Palestinians since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel. New claims to King’s legacy have alternately invoked him on behalf of the Palestinian cause and the State of Israel. In light of these ongoing and deeply polarized applications, Black Visions of the Holy Land suggests that there is much to be gained from looking at global solidarities in Palestine and Israel at the intersection of race, religion, and politics. Does the State of Israel represent an inclusive democracy, or is it culpable for policies of racialized segregation and violence, akin to apartheid South Africa? And who is qualified to make this judgment? It is no longer possible to study movements like #BlackLivesMatter in exclusively American social spaces, as articulations of demands for racial justice in the United States are increasingly happening in global terms. There is also a widening global audience of other marginalized groups coming to see their struggles as parallel to and wrapped up with those of Black Americans. In other words, as new movements for racial justice in the United States receive increased attention, these movements are also appealing to and forging new global solidarities in racial, religious, and political terms.
Roger Baumann is an assistant professor of sociology and director of peace and justice studies at Hope College, and the author of Black Visions of the Holy Land: African American Christian Engagement with Israel and Palestine.