From the Rebellion to the Naksa: Detroit’s “Third World” Coalition and the Politics of US Minority History-Telling (Copy)

Jun 3

Written By Basil Alsubee

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements.......................................................................................iii

Introduction: Between Rage and Despair: Locating 1967 in 2020..............................1

Chapter 1: Two Migrations, Two Political Practices: Mapping Arab Detroit and Black

Detroit....................................................................................................17

Chapter 2: “Cast Away Illusions, and Prepare for Struggle”: Third Worlds

Converge..................................................................................................45

Chapter 3: Revenge of the State: The Stakes of Mutual Struggle.............................69

Conclusion: Towards a Renewed Politics of Mutual Struggle.................................85

Bibliography.............................................................................................92

Acknowledgements

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic threw all my life plans into flux and sent me into a

never-ending scurry for my own mental health, I have been deeply looking forward to writing an

“acknowledgments” section for this thesis. I really did not believe that I would make it to this

point: I completed this thesis during some of the most deeply bizarre and mentally distressing

times of my life, and it simply would never have been remotely possible without the people in

اللهم لك الحمد كما ينبغي لجالل وجهك و عظيم سلطانك .through me pushed who life my

I would be remiss not to begin by thanking my family, from my 88-year-old great grandmother to

my 6-year-old brother Waseem, who sustained me, held me, and inspired me on a journey that

goes far beyond the confines of this thesis. Baba, Mama, Raneem, Ameen, Abood, Waseem,

Tete, Jiddo, Ammeh Lama, and Tigtig: you are the pillars of my existence. I would also like to

thank my closest friends Osama Soukkar, Sarah Khansa, Tahani Almujahid, Amytess Girgis, and

Raya Naamneh, who held me together when pieces of me crumbled apart over the course of the

COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t think I have ever endured so much distress over such a sustained

period of time, and without their loving companionship and presence, making it through the

pandemic having written a whole thesis would have been an utter impossibility. Alongside them,

I would also like to thank my cat Simsom, the most important non-human being in my life,

whose compassion and constant presence reminded me of my own self-worth when the

demanding work ethic of being a student in pandemic times denied it to me. I have to also thank

my intellectual teachers, whose material and intellectual generosity made completing this thesis a

possibility. I am indebted to Sally Howell, Pamela Pennock, Hakem Al-Rustom, Matthew

Spooner, Su’ad Abdulkhabeer, Damani Partridge, Matthew Lassiter, and Heather-Ann

Thompson, whose contributions ranged from providing their own archives and notes, to

proofreading, to inspiring and informing the theoretical framing of this work. Alongside them, I

must also thank my writing workshop peers, in both my seminar writing group, and my time in

the Honors Summer Fellowship, for virtually workshopping my work during the dystopia that

was 2020 and 2021. Anya Satyawadi, Izzie Kenhard, Isabella Buzynski, Amytess Girgis, Nick

Preuth, Katie Beekman and Emily Wang: I can’t believe we survived. Perhaps most fittingly for

this thesis, I must thank my generous peers and comrades, whose work towards a liberated future

inspires me deeply and informs every letter on this thesis. Amytess Girgis, Dim Mang, Logan

Vear, Raya Naamneh, Priya Choezum, Vanessa Cool, Ayah Kutmah, and many other countless

souls I’ve met during my time at UM have fostered an everlasting belief in a better future that

informs everything I will ever do. Some were generous enough to speak with me in the film

addendum to the thesis: I thank Ras Jah-T, Jenin, Khadega Mohammad, Hanan Yahya, Abdeen

Jabara, and Nabeel Abraham, for their deep wisdom and generosity. Finally, I am completely

indebted to my ancestors, whose love envelops me and informs every word on every page.

iii

Introduction

Between Rage and Despair: Locating 1967 in 2020

“My lady, how can the human being be dignified //

When the police state extends its arms everywhere? //

And what’s coming is more dangerous //

We are placed in a juice squeezer so that oil can escape from our bodies”1

-Muthaffar Al-Nawab, In the Old Bar

“I'm everywhere: penthouse, pavement and curb //

Cradle to the grave, tall cathedral or a cell //

Universal ghetto life, holla black you know it well”

-Yasiin Bey, Auditorium

The emotional core behind this thesis cannot be separated from the time in which it was

conceived. The summer of 2020 brought forth the despair of a global pandemic, along with a

swelling, righteous political anger. After the highly publicized murders of Ahmaud Arbery,

Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd at the hands of US police officers, a tide of protests swept

major cities across the US. Detroit, the primary subject of this thesis, became enmeshed in a

national movement to hold police accountable for institutionalized racial violence. Over the

course of the summer, protesters across the city held showdowns with the militarized wing of the

state, chanting “Why are you in riot gear? We don’t see no riot here!” Police responded to these

1 This poem was translated by the author.

chants with an inevitable violence, justified in the name of a city-wide curfew that protestors

adamantly rejected.

The “riot” that Detroit protestors referred to in their chants invoked not only nation-wide

confrontations with the police that summer, but the very complicated social memory around the

1967 Detroit Rebellion. As Detroiters took to the streets to declare their demands for justice way

past its due, the shadow of the “long, hot summer of 1967” lingered on in 2020. For Detroiters of

all spades, the summer of 1967 foregrounded a momentous upheaval unlike any other in the

city’s social memory. The Rebellion, as it was called by Detroit’s Black radical activists,

expressed Black outrage and disaffection with a long history of racial violence. Although it

differed from the 2020 protests in many ways, the emotions behind the Rebellion mirrored the

current moment. Discontentment and rage with institutionalized racism, manifested most

explicitly in the violent actions of police, stayed with Detroit way past the decisive moments of

1967.

For the smaller Arab community not too far from downtown Detroit, another crucial

moment of the same summer in ‘67 inevitably conversed with the Rebellion. The “Naksa,” or

setback, referred to the 1967 June War that resulted in the expansion of Israeli settler-colonialism

and the failure of the promises of Nasserist Pan-Arabism.2 Marked dramatically through its

naming as a moment of rupture, the melancholia surrounding the Naksa reverberated across Arab

social memory, throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa and the diaspora. It is virtually

impossible to speak about the past with any elderly person of Southwest Asian and North

African descent without invoking the Naksa. Moreover, beyond the sphere of Pan-Arab

In invoking settler-colonialism as an analytical framework, I am drawing on Patrick Wolfe, “Settler

Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp.

387–409.

nationalist discourse, the Naksa firmly cemented the Israeli occupation. Israeli

settler-colonialism held a greater geographic scale than ever before, between the 1948 borders,

the newly occupied West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and the Golan Heights in Syria.3

In more subtle ways, the shadow of summer ‘67 lingered not only over Detroit, but the

secondary geographic subject of the thesis: Palestine. In the same summer of 2020, Arab

nation-states signed normalization treaties with the Israeli government. The normalization,

brokered by the Trump administration’s Jared Kushner as a “peace treaty,” violently suffocates

the long history of Palestinian resistance to settler-colonialism. Its premise, strengthening the

hold of global neoliberalism between the US, oil-rich Gulf states, and Israel, pointedly dismisses

the question of Palestine altogether as a matter of the past. Yet the rhetoric of leaving behind a

traumatic past for a victorious neoliberalism only further beckons the past forward into the

present. Memories of Palestinian disenchantment bubble up to the surface once more, where they

clash with institutional triumphalism. From the Nakba in 1948, to the Naksa in 1967, to the Oslo

Accords in 1993 and its accompanying Intifadas, a series of traumatic social memories linked

together to form a narrative of struggle and disenchantment.4

Bringing the specter of 1967 between Detroit and the Middle East, this thesis explores the

connections between two seemingly disparate, ethnically insular histories. Foregrounding

Metro-Detroit, currently home to the largest Black and Arab populations in the US, weaves these

histories together without much difficulty. The summer of 1967 sparked a period of heightened

political instability for both communities, transforming the urban center of Detroit into a

battleground to challenge institutional racism. Black radical activists, most visibly materialized

as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, emerged as a powerful force across both Black

4 Ibid.

3 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance,

1917-2017, (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020), 181-191.

labor union and civic community organization.5 Meanwhile, Detroit’s Arab radicals emerged out

of a convergence between the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) at Wayne State University

and intellectuals at the Arab American University Graduates (AAUG).6 Though Arab radicals

and Black radicals grew in Detroit in the same moment, and understood their struggles as

interconnected, their histories are often told separately from one another. In the literature on

“Arab Detroit” and “Black Detroit,” these communities appear only as narrative footnotes in

otherwise ethnically siphoned off histories.

The vast historiography around “Black Detroit'' follows what reads as a determined

narrative of the city in the 20th century, from the 1910s-20s Great Migration to the 1967 Great

Rebellion. Following the growth of the motor industry in Detroit and Henry Ford’s famous

promise of five dollar work hours, Black migrants traveled in large numbers from the Jim Crow

South to Detroit.7 They settled in racially segregated, overcrowded neighborhoods designated for

them, including the since-destroyed Paradise Valley and Black Bottom neighborhoods. From

there, Black Detroit grew in its cultural, social and political life, becoming the birthplace for the

Nation of Islam, Motown Records, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and the League of

Revolutionary Black Workers. Yet institutional racism, housing discrimination, police brutality

and workplace harassment all followed Detroit’s Black community throughout the 20th century.

After a fateful encounter with the Detroit Police Department at a local speakeasy called “The

Blind Pig” in 1967, the city erupted into Rebellion. Before, during and after that decisive

moment, Detroit’s white residents began to gradually make their way to the suburbs. Soon after

7 Herb Boyd, Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination. (New York: Amistad, 2017).

6 Pamela Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against

Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

5 Dan Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998).

the infamous “white flight,” Detroit elected its first Black mayor, liberal politician Coleman

Young.

“Arab Detroit” follows its own narrative beats, sharing some historical moments in

common with “Black Detroit.” The first Arab migration wave to Detroit arrived from the

Levante in the late 19th century and early 20th century, consisting primarily of Arab Christian

peddlers.8 Slowly, more Muslim Arab migrants moved into Detroit with the growth of the auto

industry. These earlier populations primarily consisted of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian

migrants, which were later supplemented by “dark-skinned” Yemeni, Palestinian and Iraqi

migrants after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.9 Soon after, 1967

became a formative year for the Arab-American community in Detroit. Though commonly

understood as the inception of the broader “Arab-American” identity, the Naksa in 1967 could

more accurately be understood as the politicization and mass mobilization of the radical

generation of Arabs and Arab-Americans growing up in Dearborn and Detroit in the late 60s.10

As the incipient AAUG and OAS grew in size, the efforts of affiliated local activists culminated

in the formation of ACCESS, at the time no more than a small community center. Since then, the

Arab community has held a much larger and increasingly more institutionalized presence, as

ACCESS grew into the largest Arab-American nonprofit and spawned the Arab-American

National Museum, the only such museum of its kind.

10 In his crucial intervention, Hani Bawardi rejects the notion of the “Arab American” being nonexistent

before 1967 by showing Arab American activism prior to the Arab Left generation, which has since

appeared to be disconnected from that history. Hani J. Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From

Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).

9 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and

Racism, 1960s–1980s, 3.

8 Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream, (Detroit: Wayne

State University Press, 2000).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black and Arab radicals in Detroit formed a “Third

World” coalition, bridging the gap between “Arab Detroit” and “Black Detroit” by taking aim at

the structures of capitalism and racism that mutually oppress them. Black radicals came together

to form various RUMs (Revolutionary Union Movements) throughout the city of Detroit to

challenge the politics of the city’s liberal-labor leadership, which neglected altogether racial

discrimination and dire working conditions of Black workers. In developing their political

programme, the RUMs came together to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,

articulating their Marxist-Leninist politics to inextricably bind them to the fate of other “Third

World” groups. Palestine and Vietnam became important touchstones for the League, not only as

distant foreign policy matters, but as key distinctions between their politics and the politics of the

liberal-labor leadership. Arab radicals at the OAS and AAUG, in turn, identified themselves with

anti-war and Black liberation causes as key allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. By

connecting their struggles, Arab radicals and Black radicals took aim at the very structures that

scaffold their communities away from one another.

Although in the present moment, both Arab and Black activists have greater institutional

power than they did in the late 60s and early 70s, they tend to look back on their high ideals of

the time with some degree of melancholia. Reflecting on the demise of the League of

Revolutionary Black Workers, Herb Boyd writes, “While many of the goals and objectives of the

League of Revolutionary Black Workers may have been undeveloped and much too audacious

for the times, many of them are now vital components in groups and organizations far less

radical than the league.”11 Similarly, Arab leftists remember their early organizing years very

fondly. Yet, they either acknowledge that later compromises to their high ideals had to be made,

11 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 219.

or they consider their earlier activism to be naive and immature.12 These memories of revolution

and later disenchantment are spoken of as an inevitable narrative arc. After all, today, Palestine

remains occupied, and US racial violence has hardly disappeared.

However, Arab and Black radical activism could hardly be considered predestined to

failure—Arab and Black radicals both faced the overwhelming scrutiny of state surveillance and

policing apparatuses, ultimately either disrupting or co-opting radical activism. As Heather-Ann

Thompson argues in Whose Detroit?, viewing Detroit by the mid-1980s as “the doomed place

that many whites left and where the economy took a nosedive... would be a tragic mistake.”13

Such a view not only minimizes the transformative and deeply prescient activism of Arab and

Black radicals in Detroit, but it also fails to appreciate the apparatus of power they were

enmeshed in. Many activists from both communities recall facing heavy FBI and police

surveillance, corroborated by FBI records and a lawsuit filed by leftist Arab lawyer Abdeen

Jabara.14 Beyond the realm of surveillance, Arab and Black radical activists routinely faced open

police harassment and beatings aimed at disrupting their activities. By the early to mid 1970s,

Arab and Black radicals alike held sustained conversations on the line between “reformist”

co-optation through receiving state funding, and maintaining a hard line on their radical politics.

Nevertheless, the shared element of state scrutiny and negotiation only further proves the

subversiveness of their critiques, as well as the overwhelming power of the racist institutions

they sought to challenge.

14 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and

Racism, 1960s–1980s, 55.

13 Heather-Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2017), 219.

12 George Khoury, Interviewed by Janice J. Terry, 1994, transcript, Janice J. Terry Papers, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Yet, while Arab and Black communities shared common struggles, it is important not to

conflate their histories with one another for their different, complex relationships to legal

whiteness. The earliest Arab migrants often held contradictory positions with relation to legal

whiteness, mapped across religion and skin-tone. While many Christian, white-passing Arab

migrants successfully argued for whiteness in court in the early half of the 20th century, the same

privilege could not be extended to darker Muslim migrants who were not granted citizenship and

naturalization.15 These contested relationships to whiteness also mapped themselves across the

social geography of Detroit. In a segregated Detroit that maintained the racial insularity of its

neighborhoods, early Arab migrants lived in much closer proximity to white neighborhoods than

to Black ones. This housing pattern only intensified throughout the 20th century, as older

generations of Arab migrants accumulated generational wealth and gradually made their way

further away from the city and into the suburbs, leaving newer migrants behind in the working

class ethnic enclave of the South End of Dearborn.16

Simultaneously, however, Detroit’s white leadership often treated Arab communities as

holding a fraught relationship vis-a-vis legal whiteness. In the early 1970s, Dearborn’s avowedly

racist governor Orville Hubbard openly referred to both Blacks and Arabs with racial epithets,

promising white Dearborners to “make Dearborn cleaner.”17 The Hubbard campaign was fought

viciously by Arab activists, who maintained the importance of protecting the ethnic enclave of

the South End in Dearborn. These Arab community organizers in the 1960s and 1970s

self-consciously identified with communities of color in their struggle against imperialism. Their

efforts aside, there still remained a great degree of colorism and anti-blackness within the

17 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left, 168.

16 Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past, (Oxford, New York:

Oxford University Press, 2014), 285-286.

15 Sarah M.A Gualtieri, Between Arab and White Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American

Diaspora, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 5

community, and the same continues to hold true today.

18 Yet, both Black and Arab leftists sought

to challenge the terms of division to link the Arab anti-colonial struggle with the Black struggle

through their Third World coalition.

The conflicting, ambiguous relationship of the Arab community with legal whiteness can

be problematically reductive when writing interconnected histories becomes misconstrued as a

project of “transcending” identity.

In the quest to create connections between Arab and Black

radical politics, the politics of identity cannot be overlooked altogether. Rather than

understanding identity formation as a merely top-down, wholly artificial process, this thesis

reckons with identity as an embodied, lived site of knowledge production and critique.20 Arab

and Black radicals, while attuned to their mutually oppressed positions in relation to capitalism

and imperialism, never reductively conflated their struggles. Moreover, they understood that

power does not operate in a flat manner, and that their different positions also offer different

means of mutual struggle. For instance, Arab radicals drove to factories to distribute literature for

their comrades, to avoid disciplinary measures from auto company officials. In turn, Black

radicals cautiously navigated involving Yemeni workers, who face the risk of deportation for

participating in wildcat strikes. Taking cues from the political practices of Detroit’s Arab and

Black radicals, From the Rebellion to the Naksa works through the tangled web of identity, rather

20 This treatment of identity is informed by Franz Fanon and the Combahee River Collective, who went

through great pains to elucidate the centrality of identity in their respective political critiques. In its

statement, the Combahee River Collective crucially writes that the “most profound and potentially most

radical politics come directly out of our own identity.” Similarly, Franz Fanon responds to Jean-Paul

Sartre’s insistence on taking Fanon’s critique “beyond” the Negritude movement, by cautioning against

transcendence: “Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white

man.“The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and

Eighties.” (Albany: Women of Color Press, 1986), 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. New ed.

Get Political. (London: Pluto-Press, 2008), 106. ”

I am thinking of Asad Haider’s recent work, which while attentive to the mutual oppression of Black

and non-Black people of color, aims to “transcend” identity in a way that minimizes the different

relationships to “whiteness” that they have. Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of

Trump, (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018).

18 Khadega Mohammad, Interviewed by Basil AlSubee, November 12, 2020.

than seeking to transcend or overlook it. As both a work of history and as a project of

coalition-building, this thesis thinks through questions of critical race theory, social geography,

policing and surveillance while remaining attuned to their intersections with identity.

Nevertheless, rethinking Arab and Black American histories as interconnected writes

against the depoliticized, ethnically insular minority histories that appear in liberal discourses,

opening up room to critique white supremacy from multiple sites. Though this narrative owes a

great deal to scholarship that attempts to bring visibility to minority communities, it also

intervenes to recognize that greater visibility alone does not reject the boundaries of the “model

minority” paradigm. These model minority myths perpetuate understandings of “good” and

“bad” minority community members in adherence to hegemonic state politics.21 They also

present minority historiographies in a manner that resembles nationalist imaginaries, where

history begins and ends solely within the imagined community’s boundaries.22 Rather than

adhering to the boundaries of the model minority, From the Rebellion to the Naksa presents an

interconnected history that critiques the representational framework of liberal identity politics.

To put it quite simply: if Black and Arab leftist Detroiters in the 1960s and 1970s understood

their struggles as interconnected, there is no reason why we cannot do the same today.

Besides the sphere of radical coalition-building, one of the most important spaces that

brings together Arab and Black Detroit communities is the deeply contested religious sphere. As

Sally Howell illustrates in her recent work, Old Islam in Detroit, mosques in Detroit maintained

a vibrant and important role in Arab, Black, Albanian and South Asian Detroit communities

22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif erence,

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 100-101. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined

Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 2016).

21 In her exploration of Arab American feminist activism, Naber explores how model minority paradigms

filter themselves through the lens of orientalism in the context of the Arab American community. Nadine

Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, (New York: New York University Press,

2012), 5.

throughout the 20th century. The most prominent of these spaces for the social lives of the Arab

community broadly were the Sunni and Shi’ite Dix and ICA mosques in Dearborn.23 Though

Arab and Black leftists conceived of their critiques as secular, putting them often at odds with

religious leadership, they could not avoid interacting with religious spaces as important centers

for community mobilization. For example, Black leftists often engaged with the Black

nationalism of Reverend Albert Cleage of the Church of Black Madonna, as well as the Nation

of Islam.24

In fact, the NOI’s Muhammad Speaks paper became the first site of public Black

solidarity with Palestine, conceiving of the Palestinian cause as a broader Islamic anti-colonial

cause.25

However, in the context of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit histories, mosques offered

contradictory politics, gesturing towards the Third World radical coalition yet ultimately set apart

from radical activists by adhering to the liberal anticommunism of the city’s leadership. In the

early 20th century, Detroit mosques initially offered a space for a critical “subaltern

consciousness” for Arab nationalists and Pan-Africanists.26 However, Arab migrants ultimately

sidelined this function of the mosque by the 1930s and 1940s, connecting Dearborn’s Sunni and

Shi’ite mosques to citizenship and naturalization aspirations. Tethering the mosque’s politics to

the state, mosque leaders maintained an ambivalence towards the separatist politics of the Nation

of Islam, for instance.27 Additionally, the adoption of liberal anti-communist political analyses

rendered mosque leaders ideologically predisposed against their Arab and Black radical

27 Of course, the NOI also held views considered “heterodox” by the standards of Dearborn’s Sunni and

Shi’ite communities. Yet, in my view, theological questions cannot ultimately be separated from politics

that often deeply inform theology.

26 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 69.

25 Abdeen Jabara, Interviewed by Basil AlSubee, November 12, 2020.

24 Throughout her book, Dillard shows the intersections between Black religious nationalism and militant

activism of the 1960s and 1970s in Detroit. Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical

Social Change in Detroit, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

23 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 103-110.

counterparts in the 1960s, despite their shared critiques of the Israeli occupation (and for some,

but not all mosque leaders, the Vietnam War).

In a post-9/11 landscape, speaking of Arab and Black Muslim communities brings to bear

the ongoing War on Terror policies of racialization and surveillance. Although US state

surveillance against the racialized Muslim “Other” surely did not begin with the September 11

attacks, they have only since intensified. Black Muslims in particular simultaneously bore the

brunt of two racialized figures: “Muslim terrorism” and “Black criminality,” targets of both the

War on Terror and the War on Drugs.28 This state racialization is only further exacerbated by

internal racism and colorism within the American Muslim community.

29 More importantly, Black

Muslim ways of knowing and practicing Islam face a continual marginalization in ethnocentric

Muslim spaces.30 Despite the differences in race, class and gender throughout the Detroit Muslim

community, state logics of “Muslim” racialization had no grasp of intersectionality within the

broader Muslim community.

In an era of state surveillance programs such as Countering

Violent Extremism (CVE) and the anti-immigration raids of ICE (Immigration and Customs

Enforcement), Metro-Detroit continues to be center-stage as a site of unequal policing and

surveillance of Muslims.

Today, young people in Detroit at the intersections of Black Detroit and Arab Detroit are

responding to the War on Drugs and the War on Terror by returning to the Third Worldist

31 Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and

the Carceral State, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 7.

30 Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection, (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 151-152.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States, (New York: New

York University Press, 2016), 77-108.

29 Khalid A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, (Oakland,

California: University of California Press, 2018), 162.

28 Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond

America, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 172.

analyses of the 1960s and 1970s. Organizers in Detroit and Dearborn are confronting the

connections between police brutality, US support for the war in Yemen, US support for the

Israeli occupation, and state surveillance of Arab and Black communities.32

In doing so, they are

returning to the same complex web of identities that confronted their predecessors in the 1960s

and 1970s. They deem a renewed Third World coalition that implicates imperialism, capitalism,

and patriarchy as they pertain to Black and Arab Metro-Detroit communities to be necessary. In

the words of Ras Jah-T, a Detroit organizer I interviewed, “If Third World solidarity can’t work

in Detroit, it can’t work anywhere else.”33

In its analysis of the intertwined Arab and Black histories after 1967, this thesis takes a

similarly urgent approach that organizers and activists in Detroit today are taking. Rather than

treating the political and social decisions of Arab and Black radicals with unhealthy romanticism

or unwarranted cynicism, I hope to present this history of 20th century rage and despair with an

urgent generosity. I do not retrospectively place on the shoulders of organizers and activists the

burden of proving their own oppression. Instead, I choose to take for granted their political

critique as existing in a broader tradition of 20th century resistance, acknowledging the wealth of

scholarship that already historicizes the development of racial capitalism.34 Yet, recognizing the

prescient nature of many of their earliest critiques of imperialism and capitalism should not entail

a wholesale acceptance of their analyses. While attuned to their blind spots, I am not ultimately

interested in making normative judgments about their political practice.

34 Cedric J. Robinson Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. (Chapel Hill, N.C:

University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Only one such example of very many.

33 Ras Jah-T, Interviewed by Basil AlSubee, November 10, 2020.

32 This network extends beyond the geographic confines of Dearborn and Detroit. Nofal, Aziza.

“Palestinian Activists Press Solidarity between Palestinians, Black Lives Matter.” Al Monitor: The Pulse

of the Middle East, June 15, 2020.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/06/palestinian-protests-hallaq-floyd-israel-racism.html.

Instead, I hope to show how the rise and fall of Detroit’s Third World coalition was never

a historical inevitability, but rather a consequence of Arab and Black radicals actively breaking

from institutional approaches that keep Arab and Black Detroiters’ struggles separate from one

another—in much the same way that Arab Detroit and Black Detroit are historiographically and

institutionally narrated separately today. Arab and Black radicals understood that viewing Arab

Detroit and Black Detroit in conversation with one another unlocks the political potential of

their “minority histories” by critiquing the scaffold of “legal whiteness.” Informed by their

political practice, I conduct my research through an exploration of archives housed in the

Bentley Historical Library and the Walter P. Reuther Library, as well as oral history interviews

conducted by the Detroit Historical Society, Pamela Pennock, and myself. Through these

sources, I show how Arab radicals and Black radicals separated themselves from liberal,

conservative and anti-communist institutionalized approaches to their community issues by

connecting their struggles to one another in a “Third Worldist” analysis. I attempt to show the

historical circumstances that not only caused convergences between Arab and Black

communities but also points of divergence and separation. By the mid to late 1970s, the radical

coalition disintegrated as activists gradually adopted more moderate and politically neutral

positions in relation to the state.

The histories of Black and Arab communities in Metro-Detroit bring Africa, America,

and Southwest Asia in dialogue with one another through a complex web of empire and capitalist

expansion. I begin the first chapter of this thesis with a reflection on the two migrations in the

early 20th century that brought Arab and Black immigrants to Detroit from the Ottoman Empire

and the American South, respectively. By tracing their migrations to the city, I show how Arab

and Black migrants’ community institutions and political practices existed simultaneously

throughout the 20th century, separated from one another through racialized housing policies and

legal whiteness. The second chapter zooms in on the earliest efforts of solidarity in the aftermath

of the Rebellion and Naksa in 1967, where Black radicals published the Inner City Voice paper

that later coalesced into the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). In addition to

being an outlet for disenchantment and radical critiques of capitalism, the ICV publicly

connected the Black struggle with the Palestinian struggle at the Wayne State University

newspaper, which brought them under immense pressure from the University administration.

Meanwhile, Arab university students began organizing as the Organization of Arab Students

(OAS) and the Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), which started connections that

would later mature into more meaningful relationships of activism and solidarity that broke with

the historical separations of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit. The third chapter focuses on the

state’s paranoia at the Third World coalition, seeking to disrupt it through surveillance, policing,

and co-optation. Finally, I conclude with a look at the Arab American National Museum and the

Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, two public-facing institutions where

the history-telling of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit takes place. I reflect on the failure of liberal

identity politics, fundamentally celebratory of US democracy and multiculturalism, to account

for intersecting histories that come together at the nexus of capitalist and settler-colonial

violence. Taking the cue from Detroit’s radical Third World coalition, I hope to elaborate a

politics of mutual struggle that goes beyond the structural limitations of Arab Detroit and Black

Detroit.

The political elaboration of mutual struggle does not take place solely within the confines

of this thesis, however; I return to the present-day as a time of new beginnings in a short film I

put together with Detroit organizers called Detroit, the Intersection. Recognizing the passage of

time since the fateful days of the Rebellion and the Naksa, I invite young organizers to reflect on

their lived realities in dialogue with a history of mutual struggle. Instead of treating Detroit’s past

as a “foreign country” entirely unrelated to its present, I aim to consciously locate the summer of

1967, and its politically transformative aftermath, in 2020. Channeling the rage and despair from

critique of the status quo into the imagination of better futures, young Detroiters and Dearborners

reflect on what stands in the way of forging networks of solidarity in the present moment. Their

vibrant efforts balance out the disillusionment of 60s and 70s activists with a healthy dose of

hope. At a time where Detroit’s so-called “rise” is equated with greater corporate investment and

gentrification, I instead point to my generational peers as signs of a different, much-needed kind

of rise: one that seeks to upend institutionalized structures of violence, rather than celebrate

them.35

35 Rebecca J. Kinney, Beautiful Wasteland: the Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier,

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), xvi.

Chapter 1:

Two Migrations, Two Political Practices:

Mapping Arab Detroit and Black Detroit

“The situation of the black American minority connects with the situation of the so-called

“emerging” or Third World nations. These existed, until yesterday, merely as a source of capital

for the developed nations. The “vital” interests of the Western world were the riches extorted

from the colonies: without this worldwide plunder, there would have been no industrial

revolution... The European, a catchall term, referring, really, to the dooms of Capital,

Christianity, and Color—became White, and the African became Black, for commercial

reasons.”

-James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen

It is easy to look at Dearborn and Detroit today and take for granted that Arab and Black

communities have always been present here. Their population sizes and concentrations, as well

as the various social, cultural and religious institutions they have built, give the illusion of an

everlasting, primordial presence. However, “Arab Detroit” and “Black Detroit” did not come into

being until a little less than a century. Late 19th and early 20th century political and economic

transformations, both in Southwest Asia and in the United States, paved the way for these

communities to migrate to the city of Detroit. The earliest Arab migrants arrived during the

twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, as European capitalist expansion placed great economic

burden on the hinterlands in the Levante. On the other hand, most of Detroit’s Black population

arrived during the Great Migration to the North in hopes of escaping the Jim Crow South. In both

of these migrations, Arab and Black migrant numbers grew significantly due to the advent of the

motor industry, particularly motivated by Ford’s famed promise of $5 an hour. In effect, Detroit’s

automobile industry unites the histories of migration that form both Arab Detroit and Black

Detroit.

Yet, in the racial order of space in the city, Arab and Black migrant communities largely

grew in isolation from one another; as a result, their political goals and strategies remained

divergent for most of the earlier half of the 20th century. Arab communities focused on

navigating British and French imperial aims in their hometowns, independence from the

Ottoman Empire, and fighting Zionist excursions into Palestine. Simultaneously, the US Arab

community’s transnational political practice could not be separated from their local aspirations to

citizenship status, enshrined by “legal whiteness” and scientific racism. Meanwhile, Black

communities in Detroit fought to unionize the labor organizations, civil rights struggles, and in

Pan-African aspirations. Their markedly different relationship to “legal whiteness” placed Black

migrants in poor and overcrowded neighborhoods, away from the Dearborn suburb that the Arab

community gradually came to settle into. As such, the divergent struggles, goals and strategies of

Arab and Black migrant activism reflected each communities’ different orientations towards

race, class and citizenship in Detroit, and in the United States more broadly.

Against the urge of narrating the foundational histories of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit

before the 1960s in isolation from one another, I argue that the separation of these histories, and

the communities they represent, is not coincidental or inevitable: rather, it is the result of

institutional racial barriers construed in relation to “whiteness.” Illustrating the stakes of my

point requires a cursory view of the historiography around early Arab migration to the US. Hani

Bawardi argues that the earliest Arab migrants did not maintain a “depoliticized” presence,

participating in nationalist causes back home through diasporic political practices.1 Augmenting

1 Hani J. Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship, (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2014), 1-2.

his approach on the early Arab-Americans, Sarah Gualtiere argues that they also “participated in

white supremacy” in certain instances, “but in others they resisted it and forged alliances with

people of color.”2

I argue that it is impossible to really understand the stakes of participation in

(and resistance to) white supremacy from within Arab Detroit without paying equally close

attention to the formation of Black Detroit. By breaking free from the tradition of narrating Arab

Detroit and Black Detroit in ethnically insular terms, the relationships of power that scaffold both

communities in the city are much more clearly exposed.

In this chapter, I take a broader view of 20th century Black and Arab community-building

and political organizing prior to the 1960s in order to show how Black Detroit and Arab Detroit

formed with different orientations towards legal whiteness, separating their political practices

and community organizations despite sharing a “subaltern consciousness.” After Arab migration

from the Levante, mosque-building and nationalist organizations took center stage in the social

lives of Arab migrants. These projects unfolded in Highland Park, prior to the 1940s, then moved

to the suburb of Dearborn, where Black migrants were not allowed to reside. Meanwhile, Black

migrants partook in labor-civil rights struggles prior to the anticommunist purges of the 1940s

and 1950s. Though Black and Arab migrants briefly overlapped during the 1920s in the

anti-colonial UIS mosque, a center for Syrian nationalism and Pan-Africanist Islam, their

subaltern, I argue that, by the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the 1940s, Black

Detroit and Arab Detroit began to take increasingly distinct form. By the end of the 1950s and

beginning of the 1960s, liberal anti-communism became the dominant ideology of state

leadership and Arab mosques alike—coinciding with the entrenchment of Black Detroit and

Arab Detroit as disparate struggles, spaces, and histories.

2 Sarah M.A. Gualtiere, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American

Diaspora, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 11.

Abdeen Jabara was born in 1940 to a family of third-generation Arab migrants in a little

town in Northern Michigan called Mancelona. During his childhood, Jabara did not have much

use for Arabic in the household, though he recalls his parents using it in conversation with one

another.

3 Despite his distance from the Arabic language, Jabara referred to himself as a “Syrian”

in elementary school, to the confusion of his teachers who assumed he meant “Assyrian.” As a

12-year old, Jabara fell under the influence of his parents and uncles, who often spoke of Arab

Nationalist politics back home. His parents’ beliefs affected him so deeply that he remembers

tears streaming down his cheeks as he listened to the radio broadcast of bodies streaming into

Egyptian hospitals during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Soon after, Jabara wrote a high school paper

about Palestine called “The Divided Land.” Retrospectively, Jabara considers those days to be

full of defining moments, setting the stage for his long career as a radical lawyer dedicated to

Arab and Arab American issues.

By the time he was born, Jabara inherited a long-standing, if modest, Arab presence in

the United States, beginning in late Ottoman migration movements. His parents’ and

grandparents’ generations migrated from the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century due to

economic and political instability in the Levante. Between 1839 and 1871, the Ottoman Empire

underwent the drastic Tanzimat reforms in response to its perceived “decline,” a metonym for

European infiltration of Ottoman political and economic power through modernization policies.4

In addition to responding to growing European dominance, the Tanzimat reforms also addressed

Druze-Maronite strife in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, a bloody conflict resulting in French

4 Gualtiere, Between Arab and White, 31.

3 Janice J. Terry, Oral History Interview w/ Abdeen Jabara 1994, from the Bentley Historical Library,

Janice J. Terry Papers Series, Box 1.

tutelage of minority communities.5 These reforms facilitated the infiltration of the capitalist

world economy into Syria, consequently resulting in the 19th century silk industry boom.6 The

highly profitable silk enterprise enriched the French economy, while also placing immense

pressure on Levantine hinterlands. The resulting fragile economy pushed Levantine Arabs to

think of alternative means of sustenance, many of them migrating between Ottoman provinces

or, if they were able to make the trip, abroad. The first Arab migrations to the US consisted

mostly of Maronite and Orthodox Christian migrants, who illegally escaped the Ottoman

Empire’s restrictions on immigration through smuggling middlemen.7

By the 1920s, thousands of Arabs had migrated to the United States—of these migrants,

3,858 settled in the city of Detroit, second in size only to the Greater New York area. Early Arab

migrants to the US worked in various trades, the most popular of which being peddling.

Demographically, single men sojourners made up the majority of the Arab migration size, though

widows and single women also migrated in neglected numbers.8 The prototypical early Arab

migration story emphasizes single men who migrated in search of economic opportunity and

wealth to send back to their homelands. Indeed, many of the earliest migrants did follow the

sojourning trend, and promptly returned home as the 19th century pressed on into the 20th.

However, many others also decided to bring their families to the United States for a longer, more

permanent stay. These would be the founders of the first religious, cultural and political Arab

institutions in the United States.

8 Sarah Gualtiere shows how female migration defies the story of Arab migration to the US as a

stereotypically masculine narrative of “pioneering” and discovering.

7 Gualtiere, Between Arab and White, 53-54.

6 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 43.

5 Hani J. Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship, (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2014), 42-43

To be sure, neither the Arab sojourners or settlers turned their backs away from their

homelands entirely—as Hani Bawardi illustrates, early Arab migrants maintained transnational

activist networks, responding to political situations in their homelands. Throughout the early

20th century, US Arab migrants navigated an increasingly weakening Ottoman Empire and Arab

nationalist aspirations through what they called “the Syria idea.”9 At once, these nationalists

debated the relationship between independence, the Ottoman Empire, and encroaching European

empires. Some, like Maronite Lebanese separatist Na’um Mozarkel, argued for French tutelage

as a path to independence for a Lebanese nation.10 However, Mozarkel’s position did not

constitute a majority among Arab Christian migrants, most of whom favored a Greater Syrian

nationalism independent of European colonialism.11

In the 1920s, Arab migrants in Highland

Park (the north side of Detroit) participated in the New Syria Party (NSP), which was connected

to Arab nationalists throughout the US with a cross-sectarian, modernist political philosophy.

The NSP’s main activities included publishing and distributing a nationalist paper, as well as

sending financial aid to nationalists abroad.13

Though suspicious of European interference, these transnational activists looked

favorably upon US tutelage, particularly invoking Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points speech in hopes

of self-determination. In fact, part of the NSP’s platform suggests, “That the United States

assume guardianship and administration of Syria until such time as the Syrians are able to

perform the functions of full self-government.”14 Evidently, US Arab migrants greatly preferred

Ibid, 115.

Ibid,126.

12 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 122.

11 The question of sectarianism in these communities is addressed by Bawardi, who maintains that

Mozarkel’s voice did not represent the silent majority of Arab migrants who worked on a cross-sectarian

coalition for the “Syria idea.”

Ibid, 64.

9 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 111.

the prospect of national self-determination under the US guardianship than under the “sick”

Ottoman Empire or the imperialist French and British European empires. Similarly, Ameen

Rihani, known as the author of the first Arab-American novel, penned his Letters to Uncle Sam,

in which he entreats the United States to follow through with its Wilsonian promises.15 Arab

migrants premised their positions in regards to US involvement in their homeland’s affairs on

their experiences with citizenship: since their naturalization as citizens, they found property and

community in ways that boosted their belief in the United States’ benevolence. Moreover, this

position sets early Arab activists apart significantly from their more radical counterparts in the

1960s and 1970s, whose experiences in Civil Rights, anti-war, and Palestinian liberation

movements rendered them more hostile to American expansionism.16

More importantly, early Arab activists’ favorable disposition towards the US government

brings to bear the process of Arab naturalization as US citizens—a process of claiming

“Syrianness” as whiteness in various American courts, to mixed results. The early 20th century

saw a rising nativism in the United States, reflected in new immigration and naturalization

restrictions put into place throughout the 1910s and 1920s.17 For Syrians to lay claims to US

citizenship and the ability to procure property, they had to simultaneously claim themselves as

white, and negate their “yellowness” and “blackness.”18 The more successful of these claims

usually established a civilizational link between “Semetic” Arab Christianity and Europe.19

Speaking the language of scientific racism, many Arab migrants constructed “Syrianness” as

exclusionary to “the black race,” “the yellow race,” and “the red race”—African, Asian, and

Ibid, 56-57.

Ibid, 53.

17 Gualtiere, Between Arab and White, 53.

16 Although this position seems to have had a resurgence among some groups of Arab diaspora activists in

recent years.

15 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 169.

Native American peoples.20 While racial hierarchies received greater exposure and popularity

among Arab transnational papers such as Al-Hilal, they did not always succeed in the judicial

system. One such example took place in Detroit: Yemeni immigrant Ahmed Hassan, whose case

was heard in 1942. Hassan’s case failed due to his dark complexion and Muslim faith, which

rendered him decidedly Asiatic in the so-called “common sense” understanding of the word.21 At

a time where the Asiatic Barred Zone excluded Asians from naturalization, this classification

proved disastrous for Hassan’s case. Other cases throughout the early 20th century received

mixed evaluations, though typically, the darker and more Muslim the Arab immigrant, the more

tenuous their claims to “whiteness” were.

At the time that Arab migrants navigated institutional whiteness, their numbers in Detroit

swelled dramatically due to the rise of the Ford Motor Industry and the promise of a $5 an hour

wage. In 1914, a few years after the introduction of Henry Ford’s highly profitable Model T car

unit, Ford promised laborers to offer $5 an hour to work in the assembly line. By the 1920s, Ford

Motor Company had moved its primary assembly line into Highland Park, where Arab migrants

concentrated in high numbers. Though many Arab Christians settled in the Detroit area,

Highland Park also particularly housed large numbers of Sunni and Shi’ite migrants—the Sunni

migrants arriving from the Bekaa Valley, and the Shi’ite migrants from Bint Ijbayl and Tibneen

villages in what is today Southern Lebanon.22 These immigrants prized the comforts of village,

communal, and kinship ties as they navigated a foreign land. Nevertheless, they were not strictly

22 Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past, (Oxford, New York:

Oxford University Press, 2014), 32.

Ibid, 157. Gualtiere also argues that the “science” behind scientific racism did not always prevail in

these racial classifications. Judges often relied on what they deemed “common knowledge,” which

scientific racism either confirmed or denied. If scientific racism did not confirm “common knowledge”

understandings of race, it was usually dismissed or not taken into account as real evidence.

20 Gualtiere, Between Arab and White, 65.

beholden to sectarianism, participating in the Syrian nationalist cause with Sunni, Shi’ite and

Christian immigrants at the New Syria Party.

However, Arabs were surely not the only immigrants answering Ford’s call for

labor—during and after World War I, Southern Black migrants traveled to Detroit in much larger

numbers to escape the Jim Crow South and work in the Motor industry. Between the 1910s and

1920s, Detroit’s population doubled, and the city’s Black population rose from roughly 5,000 to

40,000.24 Like Arab migrants to Detroit, Black migrants escaped a turbulent socioeconomic

situation. However, unlike late Ottoman Arab migration, the Great Migration from the South to

the North can only be understood in the wake of slavery and racial violence. Rampant racism in

both its systemic and individual forms took place throughout the South in the form of

exploitative sharecropping practices, crippling debt-peonage, and Jim Crow segregation laws.25

The trip northwards brought with it the promise of a more dignified life for Black migrants

escaping the degrading conditions in the South. As far as immigration to Detroit went, many of

these hopes and dreams were tethered to the Motor industry.

In a racially segregated city of Detroit, Arab and Black migrants occupied different

spaces in the city’s racialized housing patterns. The majority of the incoming Black population

settled into neighborhoods on the lower East Side of the city, the poorest and most crowded of

which was known as Black Bottom.26 Slightly north of Black Bottom was Paradise Valley, the

most culturally active sector of Black Detroit and home to various social, political and religious

Ibid.

25 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.

(Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996), 34.

24 Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2009) 39.

23 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 126.

institutions.27 Although Paradise Valley and Black Bottom became the most culturally significant

and popular Black neighborhoods in the early 20th century, many Black migrants also settled in

various enclaves on the West side and North side. Meanwhile, Arab migrants largely moved into

the ethnic enclaves in Highland Park and, soon after the construction of the Ford River Rouge

Plant, Dearborn.28 Although Highland Park housed small numbers of Black migrants, Dearborn

notoriously excluded Black migrants from settling in its neighborhoods through a combination of

federal redlining and private housing discrimination.29 On the other hand, Arab migrants’ closer

29 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 44.

28 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 53.

27 The NAACP president at the time stated “Paradise Valley was a misnomer” because of its poor housing

conditions -- although in terms of its vibrancy as a site of culture, Paradise Valley was no misnomer.

legal proximity to whiteness rendered them generally more likely to settle where Black migrants

could not.

It was into this racially segregated Detroit that 1960s Black activists, or their parents,

would move. Mike Hamlin was born in Mississippi in 1935 to a sharecropping family. His father,

whom Hamlin held a strained relationship with due to physical and emotional abuse, escaped the

threat of mob violence due to his inability to pay off his sharecropping loans.30 Hamlin’s family

moved into Ecorse on the lower west side of Detroit, where Hamlin remembers going to school

and being mocked for his Southern accent.31 Unlike Hamlin, “General” Gordon Baker did not

face the same ire for his accent—as he often reminded his audience in speaking engagements,

General Baker was “homegrown” in the city of Detroit.32 Born in 1941 to a family of

sharecroppers escaping Georgia, Baker grew up in Southwest Detroit. Like Baker, Kenneth

Cockrel was also born in the city to migrant parents, although he lived farther north in Royal Oak

Township (a poor Black enclave not to be confused with the city of Royal Oak). In their

childhoods, Hamlin, Baker and Cockrel all experienced the Great Migration directly or indirectly

through their parents, coming of age in the same racially charged Motor city.

By the time the soon-to-be radical activists, or their parents, arrived in the city, they

inherited a complex web of middle class organizations combating issues of racial violence in

Detroit. Many members of Detroit’s Black middle class maintained leadership positions in a web

of organizations, between Black churches, newspapers, the NAACP, and the Detroit Urban

League (DUL).33 The NAACP in Detroit particularly became popular in the 1920s after

successfully handling the case of a Black dentist, Ossian Sweet, who was indicted for murdering

33 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 46.

32 Goldberg, David. “Detroit’s Radical.” Jacobin Mag. May 27, 2014.

Ibid.

30 Mike Hamlin, interviewed by Detroit Historical Society, May 23, 2016.

a member of a white mob attempting to chase him out of a white neighborhood.34 Alongside the

NAACP, the DUL came about as a response to Black migration to Detroit, maintaining

connections between Black religious institutions and newspapers to serve the exponentially

growing Black community. However, this network of middle class organizations frequently faced

criticisms for their more civil, conciliatory positions in response to racial discrimination.35 More

disenchanted Black Detroiters felt that the Black middle class was too keen to “sell their souls”

to the white establishment.36

In 1920s Detroit, the most prominent critic of Black middle class organizations became

the Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey. Garvey’s formative experiences in Jamaican

trade unions and British colleges led him to a political analysis that emphasized the centrality of

material conditions, racial Blackness as an international, diasporic formation, and the need for an

anti-colonial nationalism to create a Black self-governing nation-state.37 These principles became

enshrined in the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), which became prominent in

cities across the United States and in Jamaica. In Detroit, the UNIA chapter was founded by

minister A.D. Williams, who had attended a convention in New York and found the UNIA

applicable to the Detroit context.38 He did not miscalculate the UNIA’s potential in Detroit.

Challenging the NAACP and DUL, the UNIA urged Detroiters “to cease their subservience to

the “modern Uncle Toms seeking the shelter, leadership, protection and patronage of the ‘master’

in their organization and their so-called advancement work.”39 This call proved quite popular in

the city’s poor Black neighborhoods, where elite politics were at their least desirable.

39 Ibid.

38 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 48.

37Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom,

(New York : Cambridge University Press, 2015), 275.

Ibid, 45-46.

Ibid.

34 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 45.

Up until this point, the political practices of Arab Detroiters and Black Detroiters hardly

ever intersected—though the New Syria Party coexisted with the NAACP and the UNIA at the

same time in the same city, their political visions diverged along Black and Arab community

lines. These separations appear natural in the historiography of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit,

despite the fact that separate histories are anything but natural. They are the result of a set of

carefully mapped relationships that Arab and Black Detroiters held towards citizenship and race.

Although some seemingly “natural” factors may have played a role, such as linguistic and

cultural differences, these play second fiddle to race, citizenship, and social geography. Early

20th century Arab diaspora political practices were wed to US citizenship, which was also

intertwined with “whiteness” as a legal category, enshrined in the city’s segregated housing

patterns. As such, there was little reason for Black and Arab political activism in Detroit to

intersect, even as they unfolded at the same time and in the same city. In turn, Arab Detroit and

Black Detroit continue to be narrated in isolation from another as if taking place in entirely

different dimensions, mimicking these institutional, racialized barriers.

Nevertheless, in spite of their divisions in social geography, in the 1920s Black and Arab

Muslim migrants in Detroit converged in a new mosque in Paradise Valley: the Universal Islamic

society (UIS), led by Imam Kalil Bazzy and Dusé Ali, one of Marcus Garvey’s earliest mentors.

Bazzy was a Shi’ite Lebanese migrant and worker at Ford who became the religious leader of the

Shi’ite community in Highland Park in the late 1910s and early 1920s.40 Prior to his participation

in the UIS, Bazzy was a prominent member in the Highland Park New Syria Party and one of the

founders of the ill-fated Moslem Mosque, a brief Sunni-Shi’ite mosque experiment that quickly

broke apart in a tragic accident.41 Dusé Ali was a Nubian-Egyptian Pan-Africanist whose prolific

Ibid, 55-62.

40 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 39.

life sent him on travels across Africa, Europe, and the US.42

In the early 1910s, Ali met Garvey

after Ali had published a series of writings critiquing British colonialism of Egypt, which piqued

Garvey’s interest.43 Garvey and Ali worked together at the UNIA in New York City for a few

years, before Ali traveled to Detroit to found the UIS with Bazzy in 1925. The mosque proved to

be a short-lived project, lasting until 1929.44 By then, Garvey had been deported, Ali had left the

United States for Nigeria, and the Great Depression began to shift the political priorities of

immigrants towards economic sustenance.

Though transitory, the UIS left an indelible mark on the political and social life of both

Arab Detroit and Black Detroit. Bazzy and Ali communicated a language of Pan-Muslim

anti-colonial struggle, bringing together diaspora African and Arab anti-colonial nationalist

projects, if only for a brief time.45 Sally Howell argues that this project represented a deepening

“subaltern consciousness” growing between Arab and Black immigrants. That this subaltern

consciousness takes the form of religious practice comes as no surprise—Islam became

increasingly understood in juxtaposition to whiteness, in Arab and Black communities alike.46

the context of the Black community in Detroit, Islam became the framing religion for the Nation

of Islam (NOI), which grew only blocks away from the UIS.47 The founders of the NOI, Fard

Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, both participated in the local UNIA chapter and were

undoubtedly influenced by the UIS. As for the Arab community, prominent members of the UIS

such as Imam Bazzy would later go on to found and lead mosques in Dearborn. As a point of

convergence, the UIS hints towards the basis of Detroit Arab and Black solidarity that would

Ibid, 82-83.

Ibid, 69.

Ibid, 63.

Ibid, 94-95.

43 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 77.

42 Duse Mohamed, and Abdelwahid, Mustafa A. Duse Mohamed Ali (1866-1945) : The Autobiography of

a Pioneer Pan African and Afro-Asian Activist. (Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2011).

appear more prominently in the late 1960s: zeroing in on the colonial violence that inflicts both

communities.

The demise of the UIS coincided with the Great Depression, which dramatically

transformed the Motor Industry that employed Arab and Black migrants, paving the way for an

emergent working class politics. The Great Depression hit the Motor Industry with a force,

reducing Ford Motor Company’s employee size from 128,000 to 37,000.48 As a result, the

NAACP and DUL significantly declined in numbers—not only did important funding sources

withdraw, these organizations also faced growing disillusionment after the Garveyist challenge.

The emergent “Labor-Civil Rights Community,” as Angela Dillard calls it, brought Communist

Party members and civil rights groups together, enshrined especially in the 1932 Ford Hunger

March.49 When police attacked the marching protesters, killing four of them, disillusionment

with both the city’s main capitalist, Henry Ford, and Detroit’s liberal mayor, Frank Murphy,

escalated. Popular frustration with racism at the workplace began to bubble up at a much more

popular level, bringing together labor organizers and civil rights organizers. The activities of the

increasingly popular UAW (United Auto Workers) union blossomed in this period, vehemently

opposed by Henry Ford, who pursued strategies that ranged from intimidation, to overt

union-busting.50 Unionizing the Ford Motor Company proved to be one of the most important

political victories for Black Detroiters, who participated in large numbers in Dearborn’s UAW

Local 600, one of the largest and most popular unions across the United States.51

During the peak of the Depression labor-civil rights community, the Arab community

maintained an ambivalent relationship with the burgeoning union efforts. There is scant oral

Ibid, 109.

Ibid, 61-70.

Ibid, 58.

48 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 50.

evidence of Arab participation in union activities, but overwhelmingly, oral histories instead

point to Arab participation in Ford’s union-busting activities.52 Despite the prominence of George

Addes, a Lebanese American socialist leader of the Local 600, Arabs did not participate in UAW

activities in high numbers. The later experiences of Arab unionization efforts suggest that the

ambivalence to unionization may be blamed on fear of deportation or, conversely, keenness on

acquiring naturalized citizenship status.53 However, the thin paper trail on Arab labor

participation in the 20s and 30s renders it difficult to make any decisive conclusions. At any rate,

it is safe to assume that Arab and Black migrants did not create a common cause over improving

working conditions at their mutual employment in the Motor Industry.

By then, during the Great Depression, most Arab migrants moved away from Highland

Park fully into the South End of Dearborn, where they built the city’s longest lasting mosques.

Many families in the still small Detroit Arab community would travel back to their hometowns

during the Great Depression, either returning a few years later, or ending their US sojourn.54

However, the enduring Arab immigrants settled completely into the South End of Dearborn,

away from their former enclave in Highland Park. Since the establishment of the River Rouge

plant, Henry Ford held a historic commitment to keeping Dearborn a white suburb, despite

sharing 40% of its border with Detroit.55 Most Arab migrants occupied the working class

industrial corner of Dearborn, the South End—however, wealthier immigrants could move into

the middle class East Dearborn, or north of Michigan Avenue.56

It was in Dearborn that the Arab

community took greater shape through the establishment of the city’s longest-lasting mosques,

Ibid, 105-106.

Ibid, 105.

54 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 106.

53 Ahmed, Ismael. Organizing An Arab Workers Caucus: The Detroit Experience UAW by Ismael Ahmed.

From the Bentley Historical Library, Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 10, UAW Arab Workers Caucus:

Articles + Papers. Hamlin, Mike. Interviewed by Pamela Pennock. June 16, 2012.

52 Howell, Sally. Email message to Basil AlSubee, December 16, 2020.

the Sunni AMS (conventionally known as Masjid Dix) and the Shi’ite Hashmie Hall, later

known as the ICD (Islamic Center of Detroit).57

Unlike the UIS, these new mosques primarily concerned themselves with an Arab

minority community-building project, rather than global anti-colonial politics. As the Dearborn

Arab community grew in size, the older generation of immigrants feared that their children

would lose “a religious consciousness.”58 Sally Howell suggests that their religious

consciousness was much more intimately connected with a “vernacular, social” Islam than it was

with a “rigorous, textualized” Islam that became more popular later. Indeed, the function of these

early mosques were at once religious and communal: both of their early activities included

prayer, Qur’an schooling, and community events and gatherings that rendered the mosques

functionally unique from mosques “back home.”59

Moreover, unlike the anti-colonial UIS, these mosques defined an emergent bona-fide

“American” Islam by reinscribing the importance of “citizenship” and “patriotism.” The

founding charters of both mosques emphasize Arab immigrant obligations to the US

government, in line with the project of building an Arab minority community. The Shi’ite

Hashmie Hall’s founding charter in 1936 includes the following the goals:

“To inspire respect for the law and establish a definite understanding of civic duties; to

promote patriotism... to encourage and assist members to become naturalized citizens in

the United States and to constantly urge that all members exercise the full franchise of

their citizenship and conscientiously discharge their civic duties.”60

Similarly, the AMS founding charter in 1942 states the goal, “to teach and inculcate American

principles of government and institutions among its members.”61 These stated values of

Ibid, 123.

Ibid, 126.

Ibid, 133.

Ibid, 112.

57 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 97-98.

citizenship defined the aspirations at the heart of early Dearborn Shi’ite and Sunni Arab

institution-building. However, citizenship aspirations did not contradict the strong desire to teach

Arabic and Arab history, ensuring that immigrants maintained a connection to their homelands.

At the mosques, Levantine Sunni and Shi’ite communities would gather and “eat the same

mjaddara (lentils) together,”62 creating a more enduring, coherent community model of

citizenship.

Besides eating the same lentils, Sunni and Shi’ite Dearborn Arabs continued to

participate in political projects oriented towards their distant homelands. As the Great

Depression waned, Arab mosque participants who attended the now-defunct New Syria Party

began attending the newly formed Arab National League (ANL), where they focused their efforts

on combatting the European mandate system, as well as the growing Zionist movement. The

ANL was founded in New York City in 1936 in light of the Palestinian mass peasant revolt

against the British mandate in the same year. It quickly spread to Dearborn, where the AMS and

Hashmie mosque Imams Khalil Bazzy and Hussein Karoub brought their congregations.63 The

same early transnational Arab activist networks continued on after the Depression, with a

renewed emphasis on the question of Palestine. These activists went through great pains to

elucidate their critiques as aimed “not towards Judaism, but the Zionist movement.”64

Nevertheless, their political activities frequently angered Zionist organizations in the US, which

far outnumbered and outsized the ANL. Zionist organizations such as the ADL

(Anti-Discrimination League) frequently levied accusations of anti-Semitism towards Arab

Ibid, 253.

63 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 251.

62 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 119.

anti-Zionist activities, despite Arab migrants’ insistence on critiquing the “imperial aims of

Zionism” and not “Jews,” who “lived with Arabs in peace until the advent of Zionism.”65

However, transnational Arab activists would soon be shocked by the Nakba, or

catastrophe, in 1948. Soon after heightened Arab migrant activities heightened, the situation in

Palestine escalated significantly due to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the establishment of

the Israeli state in 1948, known in Palestinian public memory as the “Nakba.” Throughout the

early 20th century, Zionist theorists such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Theodor Herzl articulated the

contours of the Zionist movement in settler colonial terms that were fully realized in 1948.66

With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 over 78% percent of the territory of Mandate

Palestine, 720,000 Palestinans fled their homes and became globally dispersed stateless

refugees.67 Arab diaspora activists across the US watched the developments in Palestine with

great alarm, increasingly centering anti-Zionist activities in their mobilization throughout the

20th century.

68 Moreover, many of Detroit’s leading radical Arab activists in the 1960s and 1970s

lived and experienced the Nakba themselves. Most notably, activists George Khoury and Hasan

Nawash escaped their homes in different Palestinian villages only to find themselves in Detroit’s

radical Arab activist community after the passing of more lenient immigration legislation in the

1960s.

Nonetheless, in the 1940s, Arab and Black political struggles became even more

entrenched in their geographic separation than they had in the earliest phases of Arab and Black

migration. The labor-civil rights community fought against unfair working conditions, police

brutality, and poor, overcrowded housing. Increasingly throughout the late 1930s, the Communist

68 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 276-277.

Ibid, 58.

66 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance,

1917-2017, (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020), 13.

65 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 273.

Party from which early labor-civil rights activities sprung out fell under scrutiny as an

understanding of “anti-American activities” began to shift.69 Arab communities, whose earliest

institutions and political priorities were deeply invested in “Americanness” and citizenship, were

not willing to take on the same struggles, if those struggles undermined the goal of

naturalization. Furthermore, Arab settling into Dearborn during the Depression still excluded

Black migrants, who continued to crowd in Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods. By the beginning of

WWII, Arab Detroit and Black Detroit began to take such distinct forms that formative

watershed events, such as the race riots in 1942 and the Nakba in 1948, hardly had any bearing

on their separate social and political lives. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the

historiographies of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit unfold as if each community exists in its own

silo.

Throughout the 1940s and leading into the 1950s, Detroit’s WWII and post-war political

developments rendered the city’s leadership particularly hostile to communists and

communist-sympathizers in the labor-civil rights community. Detroit’s turbulent wartime

economy, coupled with president Harry Truman’s post-war containment policies ensured that

communists would be purged and that workers strikes would be deemed “untenable.”70 As a

result, the community of labor-civil rights organizers split across party lines: liberal labor

organizers, such as Walter Reuther, supported the anti-communist purges, and leftists such as

George Addes suffered the consequences of the purge.71 By 1952, Detroit’s UAW had been

almost entirely purged of all of its communist elements.72 The union’s resulting ideological

makeup, in the words of Dan Georgakas, rendered it a “right-of-center union with a left-of-center

72 Ibid, 154.

Ibid,173-175.

Ibid, 172.

69 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 93.

reputation.”73 Particularly when it came to Black Detroiters’ struggles with civil rights, the

unions had a markedly conservative and alienating record on acknowledging racial issues, much

less combatting workplace discrimination.74 As a result of the disappointment that Black

organizers faced with the increasingly conservative politics of the new liberal-labor coalition,

they would make a concerted effort to “return to the ghetto”: rearticulating the Black nationalism

that the Garveyist challenge had asserted in the 1920s and 1930s.75

However, by the 1950s, the politics of “the ghetto” had dramatically changed from what

they had been in the 1930s—the historic Black neighborhoods of Paradise Valley and Black

Bottom had been demolished for a new highway leading to the suburbs, where white residents

increasingly began to move as the city deindustrialized. Bulldozed Black neighborhoods not only

deepened a sense of lost culture at the hand of the state, but they were also not replaced by public

housing options for the overwhelmingly Black poor Detroit residents.76 As a result, the city’s

poor Black population only lived in more overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions than

they had prior to the highway construction.77 Simultaneously, the infamous “white flight” began

in haste during the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Detroit lost about 400,000 white residents,

who took capital, wealth and resources to the suburbs outside the city along with them.78 Under

these conditions, “the return to the ghetto” entailed a renewed Black nationalist political

consciousness, against the state’s neglect and active disenfranchisement of Black migrants.

Among the most rapidly growing Black nationalist organizations in 1950s Detroit was the

Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammd. Though founded in the early 1930s near the UIS

78 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 221.

77 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 47.

76 Ibid, 198.

75 Ibid, 196.

74 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 173.

73 Dan Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998), 40.

mosque, the NOI became increasingly popular with the resonance of Malcolm X’s speeches in

the 1950s and 1960s. In Detroit, the NOI played an important role in building a community that

vehemently opposed systematic racism with a separatist “do-for-self” political and economic

philosophy.

79 As Garrett Felber argues, the Black nationalism of the NOI (as well as other

mirroring Christian Black Nationalist groups across Detroit) did not simply imply that it was “the

janus-faced twin of white nationalism.”80 Such a reductive view that collapses “white

nationalism” into “black nationalism” not only parrots state rhetoric, which became increasingly

suspicious of the NOI and targeted its congregants with surveillance, but also neglects the NOI’s

role in resisting the dehumanizing policies of surveillance, police brutality, housing

discrimination and economic inequality that Southern Black migrants to the North faced

throughout the 20th century.

81 The narrative of redemption provided by the NOI worked

hand-in-hand with the search for an “authentically African” antidote to “the white man’s

religion.”82 New arrivals to the NOI were not only fed and clothed, but received an

all-encompassing theology that rejected the lasting effects of racial dehumanization in the wake

of slavery.

During the 1950s, the NOI maintained a distance from other Muslim mosques in Detroit

and Dearborn, for fear of competing claims to Islamic orthodoxy that would challenge the

premises of Elijah Muhammad’s leadership. In keeping with the Black separatist aspirations of

the NOI, Detroit’s Temple #1 did not interact with the Sunni and Shi’ite AMS and Hashmie

mosques.83 These mosques not only maintained theological differences with one another, but by

83 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 225.

82 Johnson, African American Religions, 258.

Ibid, 1-2.

80 Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and

the Carceral State, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 3-4.

79 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 225.

the 1950s, they had become familiar with the “heterodox” theology followed by the NOI. These

“Brothers from the East” simply did not share any fundamental premises with the NOI—they

brought to Detroit an embodied practice of Islam far removed from the historical experiences of

slavery and racial violence.84 Yet, the NOI also maintained a distance from a new Detroit

mosque: the Sunni Masjid Al-Mu’mineen, whose congregants and leadership came from the

same demographic as the NOI’s, disaffected Black migrants from the South.85 As far as Temple

#1 was concerned, Masjid Al-Mu’mineen’s congregants merely constituted “imitators of the

Brothers from the East” for their adherence to Sunni Islam and their more ambivalent

relationship to Black Nationalist politics and the “Do For Self” model of the NOI.86 Because of

their closer proximity to the orthodoxies arriving from the East, as well as their closer geographic

and demographic proximity to the NOI, Al-Mu’mineen competed more closely for larger

congregation numbers with the NOI in Detroit. The dynamics between the NOI and other Detroit

mosques reveals the deep-seated separation between burgeoning Arab immigrant pious

sensibilities and Black nationalist politics.

Furthermore, throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, the Arab mosques in Detroit would

significantly align their politics with middle class respectability, certainly far from the NOI’s

theology of Black separatism. Case-in-point is the story of Imam Jawad Chirri, Hashmie Hall’s

newest Imam arriving from Dearborn. Imam Chirri first arrived to Detroit in 1949 at the request

of notable Shi’ite families in Dearborn, who hoped that he could redefine Islam in Dearborn in a

more scholarly fashion than the “communal, premodern Islam” of Imam Bazzy.

87 Chirri’s

credentials rendered him a perfect fit for such a mission, boasting a scholarly education from the

Ibid, 138.

86 Ibid, 225.

85 Ibid, 190.

84 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 225.

Islamic Institute of Najaf in Iraq.88 However, Chirri quickly faced the ire of Imam Bazzy and

many in the Dearborn Arab-American community for his intransigence: he hardly spoke any

English, and did not condone the cultural dynamics of the burgeoning Arab-American middle

class.89 After leaving Dearborn for a few years to study English and become more culturally

literate in American cultural dynamics, Chirri returned again in 1955. This time, the Shi’ite Arab

community at Hashmie Hall greeted Chirri with open arms. Sally Howell identifies this

newfound acceptance of Chirri as a result of him “tempering his earlier criticisms of American

values and ways of life,” since the majority of the Hashmie Hall community had become “keen

to identify with Islam, as long as Islam could be made a viable aspect of their middle class

American lives.”90 By the 1950s, most of Detroit’s Arab mosques would follow the same pattern,

identifying more closely with middle class American aspirations than the subversive political

critique articulated earlier in the 20th century.

Simultaneously, Arab diasporic political activism waned significantly: as Arab

nation-states had achieved independence from European mandate colonialism, Arab migrants

began to rely on the political leadership of burgeoning nation-state leaders like Egyptian

President Gamal Abdel Nasser. After the Free Officers Coup in 1952 and the rise of Nasser as

Egyptian president in 1956, Arab migrants in the US viewed his Pan-Arabist challenge with

especially high regard. Imam Jawad Chirri, for instance, often wrote to Nasser on the subject of

“oppressed Muslims in the world,” and eventually met with him later in the 1950s.91 Aliya

Hassen, known affectionately as “the mother of Dearborn,” also described Nasser as “my

91 Chirri, Mohammad Jawad. “Letter to Nasser.” From the Bentley Historical Library, Imam Mohammad

Jawad Chirri Papers, Box 1, Personal/Background, Correspondence, English, 1959-1993.

Ibid, 154.

Ibid, 143.

88 Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 136.

hero.”92 Simultaneously, the earliest political Arab migrant organizations slowly dissipated

between the 1950s and 1967, a time Hani Bawardi refers to as “the fog.”93 Abdeen Jabara

corroborates this view, remembering the 1950s as a time where Arab political organizing was

very “top-down” due to the investment of migrants in the Nasserist challenge.94 Furthermore,

restrictions on Arab migration to the US between 1924 and 1965 ensured that the Dearborn

community maintained a relative distance from grassroots politics at home. Additionally, while

the Dearborn Arab community relied on the political leadership of Nasser “at home,” they

maintained a focus on middle class aspirational politics “here,” which rendered them ambivalent

to Black nationalist causes.

Nevertheless, Black nationalist organizations such as the NOI closely followed the

developments in Palestine, which deeply affected Arab migrants’ political practices throughout

the rest of the 20th century. Abdeen Jabara remembers picking up a copy of the widely

distributed Muhammad Speaks newspaper, where he found the first organized support for

Palestine from a Black community organization in Detroit.95 Malcolm X’s political analysis

reflected the increasingly internationalist perspective found in Muhammad Speaks: Palestinians

were part of a globally oppressed Afro-Asian alliance, struggling against a global white power

structure.96 Although support for Palestine from Black Power organizations would deeply

increase in the late 60s and early 70s, the NOI had publicly expressed their support for Palestine

as early as the 1950s. Paradoxically however, the NOI’s support for Palestine did not translate

96 Fischbach, Michael R. Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color. Stanford

University Press, 2019), 11.

95 Abdeen Jabara, Interviewed by Basil AlSubee. November 12, 2020.

94 Terry, Janice J. Oral History Interview w/ Abdeen Jabara 1994. From the Bentley Historical Library,

Janice J. Terry Papers Series, Box 1.

93 Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans, 299-300.

92 “Dearborn’s Aliya Hassen: She has energy to share.” Detroit Free Press. Dec. 23, 1985. From the

Bentley Historical Library, Aliya Hassen Papers, Box 1, Biographical Materials 1983-1990.

into closer Arab-Black Muslim relations the city of Detroit. Despite similar comments about the

importance of a global Afro-Asian alliance from Dearborn’s Imam Chirri in many of his

correspondences, the NOI and Arab mosques maintained a cold distance.97

Still, in a much more roundabout way, Arab Detroit and Black Detroit connected in the

1950s through a friendship between Malcolm X and Aliya Hassen that took place in New York

City. Though known as a matriarch of the Dearborn Arab community, Aliya Hassen spent most

of her adult years in New York City after divorcing her arranged husband.98

In New York City,

Aliya was asked by the Federation of Islamic Associations in New York (FIA) to write a report

on the NOI, who were suspected by the FIA of “misrepresenting Islamic doctrine.”99 Despite

being born out of suspicion of the NOI’s theology of Black nationalism, Aliya’s foray into the

NOI led to a deep and fruitful relationship with Malcolm X, with whom she frequently met and

corresponded.100 Later in Malcolm’s life, Aliya Hassen assisted him in putting together his Hajj

papers, to allow for his pilgrimage to Mecca.101 Though Hassen would not return to the Detroit

area until 1972 to help found ACCESS, her grandson Ismail “Ish” Ahmed became highly

influenced by her friendship with Malcolm in his own organizing work with Black radicals in the

1960s and 1970s.

CONCLUSION

By the 1960s, Arab and Black migrants to Detroit had long settled into the racial

hierarchies of the city of Detroit, rendering their political practices largely separate from one

101 “Aliya Hassen, Arab community leader, dies.” Dearborn: The Herald. May 30, 1990. From the

Bentley Historical Library, Aliya Hassen Papers, Box 1, Biographical Materials 1983-1990.

100

Ibid.

99 Ibid.

98“Dearborn’s Aliya Hassen: She has energy to share.” Detroit Free Press. Dec. 23, 1985. From the

Bentley Historical Library, Aliya Hassen Papers, Box 1, Biographical Materials 1983-1990.

97 Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “Preface.” From the Bentley Historical Library, Imam Mohammad Jawad

Chirri Papers, Box 2.

another. Early Arab diaspora political practice centered the newly naturalized status of Arab US

citizens, making Arab diaspora politics deeply tethered to legal “whiteness.” Although the early

Arab Detroit community occasionally challenged the terms of racial hierarchy through the

anti-colonial UIS mosque, the subsequent growth of Arab Detroit in the Dearborn suburb far

away from Black neighborhoods ensured the decline of a racially subversive Arab political

critique between the 1930s and 1950s. Simultaneously, Black political organizing around Civil

Rights and labor in the 1930s through the 1940s unfolded in isolation from Arab diaspora

practices. Soon afterwards, Black organizers began to “return to the ghetto” through Black

nationalist organizations after the anticommunist crackdowns in the 1950s. By then, however, the

Arab community had institutionalized as far away as possible from “the ghetto.” Sunni and

Shi’ite Arab mosques blossomed throughout the Dearborn and Detroit areas, where they

provided not only a space for worship, but an institutionally “American” representation of the

increasingly middle-class Arab Muslim community.

The institutional separations between Arab diaspora and African diaspora activism in the

US, framed by “legal whiteness,” resulted in the narration of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit as

separate stories, coming together briefly in the 1960s when radical activists from both

communities included Arab and Black struggles in an anti-colonial political analysis. However,

rather than narrating Arab/Black Detroit as unfolding in different universes, viewing Arab

Detroit and Black Detroit in conversation exposes the very relationships of power between and

within these communities that render them as unfolding in separate universes. Remaining

tethered to ethnically insular “minority histories” fails to appreciate not only how these histories

intersect, but important power dynamics that scaffold these communities’ relationships to the US

government. In fact, race and class continue to powerfully inform the dynamics of social

organization and political struggle in both communities to this day, just as they had in the early

20th century.

Aliya Hassen’s story illustrates the many contradictions and connections inherent to the

formation of Arab and Black communities in Detroit after their fateful migrations to the city.

Born out of a primarily Arab Islamic organization’s suspicion of Black Muslim practice,

Hassen’s exploration of the NOI did not result in her reinforcement of the boundary between

Arab and Black Muslims. Rather, Hassen was keen on drawing connections between the impact

of slavery and colonialism on the African Muslim diaspora, and the impact of European mandate

colonialism on the Arab Muslim diaspora.102 Arab and Black radical activists in the 1960s and

1970s would unwittingly follow in her footsteps. Her relationship with Malcolm X can be

understood as the precedent to linking Arab and Black radicals together in the 1960s and 1970s.

In fact, Malcolm’s impact on Black radicals in Detroit cannot be overstated—he would be deeply

studied, along with CLR James, (other names), at UHURU, a student group founded at Wayne

State University in 1963. Arab diaspora activists in the 1960s would also be inspired by Malcolm

and Hassen, as they forged an alliance with Black radicals to challenge both capitalism and

imperialism at once.

102 “Aliya Hassen, Arab community leader, dies.” Dearborn: The Herald. May 30, 1990. From the

Bentley Historical Library, Aliya Hassen Papers, Box 1, Biographical Materials 1983-1990.

Chapter 2: “Cast Away Illusions, and Prepare for Struggle”:

Third Worlds Converge

“I knew I was in a police state, you know, growing up in Ecorse. The police used to mess with

us, you know, used to try to provoke us and things. Plus they was raiding peoples' houses, that

kind of thing. So there was rage and rebellion, in my mind. There were – obviously there were

elements who rioted. But it was an expression of that rage, and it was a fight. It was demand for

change. Change or die.”1

-Mike Hamlin

“So you have to also see that what that meant was that kind of the Left ideas like that --

that we were people of color, that we should be critical of the U.S. government, about some of its

policies -- all of that did not come down well in the established community. And really the

forming of ACCESS was not necessarily greeted with great love and pride by a system where not

only that went on, but you had people whose ring you would kiss to get your ticket fixed.”2

-Ismael Ahmed

Although George Khoury has been living in Detroit since 1965, he remembers first

arriving in the United States as an “accident.” After witnessing mass executions during the

Nakba as a child, Khoury, along with his mother and siblings, was loaded onto trucks by the

Israeli Haganah militia and sent to Birzeit, where he lived off of cracked wheat porridge donated

by the local church for 3 months.3 Afterwards, Khoury and his family lived in a refugee camp in

Amman, Jordan, although he continued to strongly identify with Birzeit as home.4 As Khoury

came of age in the 1960s, his brother sent Khoury’s school grades to an American university at

Ibid.

3 George Khoury, Interviewed by Alice Rothchild, 2014, Transcript, voicesacrossthedivide.com

Ismael Ahmed, interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

1 Mike Hamlin, interviewed by Detroit Historical Society, May 23, 2016.

Cleveland, where he was accepted to study engineering.5 After graduating in Cleveland, Khoury

arrived to Detroit in 1966 to work for the auto industry with his engineering degree. Although his

student visa had technically expired, Khoury was told to “wait until things cleared up” in

Palestine before taking the flight home. Khoury jokingly notes that “things never cleared up,”

resulting in a permanent stay in Detroit. As a result of this “accident,” Khoury later became one

of the presidents of the OAS (Organization of Arab Students) at Wayne State University and a

founder of ACCESS, two of the most important centers for Arab leftist activists in the 1960s and

1970s.

Khoury’s story represents multiple unique changes occurring in the city of Detroit in the

1960s. As the Civil Rights movement raged on throughout the decade, the city’s liberal-labor

leadership entered the decade with a great degree of optimism to enact President Lyndon B.

Johnson’s “Great Society” reforms. Khoury, and many other “dark-skinned” Arab migrants from

Yemen and Palestine, arrived in the US as the “second wave” of Arab migrants around the

passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. The Immigration Act, resulting from Civil Rights pushes

against the racist immigration restrictions, finally allowed “Asiatic” peoples to migrate to the US

by removing the stringent “whiteness” requirements placed on immigration and naturalization

throughout the 19th and 20th century. Simultaneously, the Arab diaspora community placed a

great deal of optimism in the Nasserist Pan-Arab political project, at a time where Algeria had

won its war of Independence from France and the hope of a new anti-colonial political order

became omnipresent. As such, for many in both the Arab and Black communities in Detroit, the

early 1960s seemed to herald a new, exciting and optimistic beginning.

5 George Khoury, Interviewed by Janice J. Terry, 1994, Transcript, Janice J. Terry Papers, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

However, by the end of the 1960s, both liberal-labor and Nasserist optimisms crashed

into militant activism through the fateful events of the summer of 1967: the Naksa and the

Rebellion. From the ashes of 1967 in Palestine and Detroit, new Arab and Black radical

organizations emerged to meet the energies of a disaffected generation. The network of RUMs

(Radical Union Movements), the Inner City Voice newspaper, the OAS (Organization of Arab

Students), and the AAUG (Arab American University Graduates) brought together working class

militant factory organizing, Black nationalist politics, Marxist theory, Arab diaspora politics, and

the Anti-War movement in dialogue with one another through Wayne State University. The Arab

and Black activists who later built the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and ACCESS

forged a common ground of solidarity through an analysis that pits the liberation of “Third World

peoples” against intersecting structures of racism, capitalism, and imperialism.

In this chapter, I argue that, by creating a “Third World” coalition, Arab and Black

radicals in the city set themselves apart from the liberal-labor leadership and other community

establishments that reinforced the separations between their struggles. As DRUM, the OAS, and

the AAUG elaborated on their political analyses, they self-consciously broke with the racial

hierarchies structuring their community organizations throughout the 20th century. In turn, their

approaches proved unpopular within both the Arab mosque leadership and mainstream Civil

Rights groups as well. Instead, liberal anti-communism continued to be the dominant ideology of

Detroit’s city leadership, the UAW, and Arab mosque leaders. In fact, Dearborn’s Imam Jawad

Chirri elaborated a liberal anti-communist Shi’ite Islamic theology in the 1960s, giving lectures

at the pulpit that theorized an Islamic solution to poverty that nevertheless skirted away from

“godless communism.” In turn, most mainstream Civil Rights organizations supported the Israeli

occupation of Palestine. As Michael Fischbach writes, “They [mainstream Black leaders] also

echoed the attitudes held by many Americans that Israel was a kindred bastion of multiethnic

democracy fighting against reactionary, Soviet-backed Arab anti-Semites who also threatened

American Cold War interests.”6 These attitudes to intersecting Arab-Black struggles accentuate

what makes Detroit’s Third World coalition so unique to begin with: an insistence on a political

analysis that implicates racism and imperialism for both Black and Arab liberation, bridging

together Arab Detroit and Black Detroit against all odds.

The 1960s opened up with a triumphant victory for the liberal-labor coalition: the

election of liberal Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh. Cavanagh represented an optimistic

liberalism and a deep commitment to enacting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society”

reforms.7 At the apex of the Civil Rights Movement, Cavanagh warmly welcomed Martin Luther

King Jr. on his 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom, promising a more progressive approach to racial

inequality than his conservative predecessor Louis Miriani.8 While Cavanagh appointed more

Black city administrators than any prior administration, he also made promises to “revamp the

Detroit Police Department” and curb ongoing issues of racial police brutality.

9 From the

perspective of Detroit’s long-standing liberal-labor coalition, the start of the 1960s promised a

new and exciting beginning to quell racial animosities in the city.

However, the liberal-labor coalition continued to breed resentment from poor Black

workers who felt unsatisfied with the coalition’s “thin veneer of progress,” resulting in the

9 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 218.

8 Heather-Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2017), 20.

7 Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2009), 218.

6 Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color, (Stanford

University Press, 2019), 5.

formation of the UHURU student group at Wayne State University in 1963.10 Wayne State

University became a bustling site for Black Detroiters in the 1960s, as it held more Black

students “than all of the Ivy League and Big Ten schools combined.”11 UHURU (meaning

“freedom” in Swahili) primarily consisted of poor and working class Black migrants from the

South who had become disillusioned with the liberal-labor coalition’s unfulfilled promises.

General Baker, John Watson, Kenneth Cockrel and Mike Hamlin all met during this time through

UHURU, introducing one another to Marxist analysis in what Hamlin remembers as “the era of

the angry Black man.”12 Together at UHURU, these Black radicals read and deeply studied

Marx, Lenin, CLR James, James Boggs, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung, and Franz

Fanon.13 Through these intellectual influences, Baker, Watson, Cockrel, Hamlin and others set

themselves clearly apart from the liberal-labor coalition, who complained that the disgruntled

UHURU were simply “bitter about capitalism.”14

At the same time that Black radicals came of age, the Arab radical generation also began

to take form during the 1960s with the easing of immigration restrictions after 1965, resulting in

a meeting between older and newer Arab migrant generations. As Civil Rights demands resulted

in the removal of the precarious immigration and naturalization proscription of “whiteness,” the

largest amounts of Arab immigrants arrived in the city since the late Ottoman migration “wave.”

This “second wave” included what contemporaneous commentator Dan Georgakas called “new

Arabs,” who were more likely to be “dark-skinned, Muslim” and holding “little formal

education.”15 Geogakas juxtaposes the “new Arabs” with the “old Arabs,” who migrated to

15 Dan Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998), 63.

14 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 223.

13 Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, 29.

12 Mike Hamlin, Interviewed by Detroit Historical Society, May 23, 2016.

11 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 221.

10 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 215.

Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, 29.

Detroit in the early 20th century and were more likely to be “white,” “Christian,” and “involved

in small businesses.”16 The distinction between “new” and “old” Arabs holds true insofar as it

implies different cultural dynamics and class relations between the two migration “waves.”

However, the demarcation between new and old Arabs did not preclude alliances built between

the newer immigrants and the more established members of the Dearborn Arab community. In

fact, Detroit’s Arab radical generation emerged through a convergence between first, second and

third generation Arab migrants.

The Naksa, otherwise known as the “June War” of 1967, significantly shocked and

galvanized new and old Arab radical generations in Detroit. Having relied on the bombastic

propaganda of the Egyptian Nasser regime, old and new Arabs in Detroit alike did not expect the

Arab armies to be as thoroughly devastated as they were, in only 6 days no less. Although,

according to US intelligence, nascent Arab nation-state armies did not stand a chance against the

Israeli air force, most Arabs in Detroit could never have expected the devastation arising from

the war’s loss. Younger Arab-Americans like Ish Ahmed and Nabeel Abraham, who by then

were in their high school years, felt a profound sense of embarrassment and alienation towards

their “Arabness.”17 Meanwhile, the more seasoned Abdeen Jabara, who by then had received his

law degree at the University of Michigan and spent a year working in Beirut, immediately sprung

into action in light of the devastation of the Naksa.18 Newer migrants, like George Khoury and

Hasan Nawash, also began to think critically about how to support the emergent post-67

Palestinian resistance groups, such as Fatah and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of

Palestine).19 Though it casted a looming, melancholic shadow, the Naksa foregrounded the

19 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

18 Abdeen Jabara, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, November 12, 2020.

Ismael Ahmed, interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

16 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 63.

convergence of generations of Arab migrants to form Arab Detroit’s most important and

long-lasting institutions.

Like the Black radical generation, Arab radicals connected and formed deep bonds at

Wayne State University through the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), a student

organization deeply invested in militant Palestinian liberation. George Khoury remembers having

“useless” meetings with Arab and Black students at cafés, before deciding to create a “systematic

way to meet and have a home.”20 Khoury remembers finding a run-down building by Wayne

State University, where he laid the foundation for “the most important address in the Arab

Community’s history [in Detroit]”: OAS’s storefront location on 4600 Cass Ave.21 The OAS

became a community center for Arab radicals on and off campus, where useless meetings turned

into a vibrant center for social, cultural, and political Arab student activities. Although OAS in

Detroit constituted but one chapter in a broader group of OAS organizations across American

universities, it became one of the most prominent locations for visible Arab activism in the US

after 1967.

After the Naksa, Wayne State’s OAS chapter became principally devoted to the emergent

Palestinian Liberation groups emerging in Southwest Asia and North Africa in the wake of the

Naksa—specifically, many students at OAS identified with Fatah and the PFLP (Popular Front

for the Liberation of Palestine). Nabeel Abraham, a young Palestinian American graduating from

high school in the late 60s, remembers coming to an OAS meeting on a whim off the

recommendation of Hasan Nawash, an older student at Wayne who grew up in Palestine.22

22 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. August 20, 2020.

21 Ibid.

Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

20 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

Hasan Nawash, interviewed by Janice J. Terry. 1994. Transcript. Janice J. Terry Papers, Bentley Historical

Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Nawash and Abraham’s mother shared a keen interest in involving Abraham in Arab diaspora

activism, because of his disinterest in his “Arabness” after the failures of Nasserism in 1967.23

Abraham remembers his astonishment at the energy he found at the OAS meeting, where he met

Arabs and Arab-Americans of various nationalities and political persuasions who shared mutual

visions for Palestinian Liberation and other Arab struggles.24 George Khoury describes Fatah and

PFLP to be the most prominent of these political persuasions.25 Both factions shared a mutual

disillusionment with elite Arab politics, although the PFLP employed a more Marxist-Leninist

analysis compared to its more popular, “non-ideological” nationalist counterpart in Fatah.26

However, George Khoury maintains that Arab students at OAS were not organically linked to

these groups abroad, but simply “sympathized with” them.27

Another important Arab activist group that emerged in the aftermath of 1967 was the

Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), led by an older generation of Arab American

academics who were only loosely connected with Arab and Black radicals in the city. Abdeen

Jabara, by then a lawyer residing in Detroit, recalls meeting with multiple Arab academics in

Ann Arbor to create a new “Arab-American” organization that became the AAUG.28 As Pamela

Pennock explores in her work on the Arab American Left, the AAUG often spoke on Palestinian

Liberation in dialogue with other global anti-colonial politics, from Vietnam to Black

Liberation.29 However, as many young Arab radicals recall, the AAUG’s scope remained largely

29 Pam Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against

Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 35.

28 Abdeen Jabara, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, November 12, 2020.

27 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

26 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance,

1917-2017, (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020), 114-115

25 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

24 One of the more fascinating meetings Abraham had in these meetings was with Thoraya Obeid, a Saudi

woman who later became the executive director of the UNFPA. Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil

AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

23 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. August 20, 2020.

limited to the academic scale—indeed, the AAUG boasted membership from prominent

Palestinian academics Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. To the frustration of Abdeen

Jabara, who felt more intimately connected to Detroit politics and US politics more broadly, the

AAUG did not focus much on local politics, dedicating far more resources to academic

conferences and organizing Arab American studies. 30 Nevertheless, Arab radicals still celebrated

the AAUG as an achievement for the US Arab community, providing a more organized

intellectual and political organization for Arabs.

In a bizarre coincidence, the same summer of 1967 did not only galvanize Palestinian

Liberation activists in Detroit, but another crucial event a month later jolted Detroit’s Black

radicals from UHURU as well: the Great Rebellion of 1967. When policemen raided a Black

speakeasy called the Blind Pig in the city on the night of July 23, 1967, an “ordinary” act of

police brutality quickly inflamed a Rebellion on a scale the city had never seen before or since.

Detroit’s Black radicals remember the events as an inevitable eruption, an attack on private

property motivated by righteous outrage at the systematic valuation of property over Black life.31

The Rebellion stunned Cavanagh and the rest of the city’s liberal-labor leadership, who had been

under the impression that liberal reforms left the city’s Black population more quiescent about

stagnant racial violence and inequality.

32 At Cavanagh’s request, President Lyndon B. Johnson

ordered the National Guard into the city, who “shot up the city”—as General Baker powerfully

recollects, “anyone who didn’t already hate the police, had to hate them when the Rebellion was

over.”33 The Rebellion and its resulting state-sponsored violence did not differ dramatically from

33 Gordon Baker, “General Baker Speaks! Rebellion! Detroit 1967,” United States Social Forum in

Detroit, 2010.

32 Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, 287.

31 Gordon Baker, “General Baker Speaks! Rebellion! Detroit 1967,” United States Social Forum in

Detroit, 2010.

30 Abdeen Jabara, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, November 12, 2020.

other similar rebellions erupting across most major cities in the US throughout the late 1960s.

However, rather than “spelling the death knell of the inner-city” as common knowledge on the

Detroit Rebellion often implies, the trauma of the Rebellion opened up a range of political

possibilities for the city’s future, especially from Detroit’s Black radicals.34

The Rebellion directly led to the founding of the Inner City Voice newspaper (ICV), led

by John Watson and other Black radicals that met at UHURU earlier in the decade. In the wake

of the Rebellion, Watson, Hamlin, Cockrel, Baker and others put together the Inner City

Voice—self-described on the paper’s masthead as “The Voice of the Revolution” and “Detroit's

Black Community Newspaper.”35 The ICV’s first issue, dated October 1967, theorizes an

ongoing revolution far after the ashes of the Rebellion, reading:

“In the July Rebellion we administered a beating to the behind of the white power

structure, but apparently our message didn't get over. ... We are still working, still

working too hard, getting paid too little, living in bad housing, sending our kids to

substandard schools, paying too much for groceries, and treated like dogs by the police.

We still don't own anything and don't control anything .... In other words, we are still

being systematically exploited by the system and still have the responsibility to break the

back of that system. Only a people who are strong, unified, armed, and know the enemy

can carry on the struggles which lay ahead of us. Think about it brother, things ain't

hardly getting better. The Revolution must continue.”36

Writing in the name of an ongoing liberation struggle against capitalism and racism, the ICV’s

Black radicals published articles that ranged from local, national, and international news on

Black Power and anti-imperialist struggles.37 Foregoing a language of “respectability,” ICV staff

and writers employed the Rebellion as a stepping stone towards a broader movement against “the

White Power Structure” and its “Uncle Tom” accomplices on a global scale through a

“tell-it-how-it-is” strategy.

37 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 13-21.

36 John Watson, ICV volume 1 no.1, in Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying,

35 Inner-City Voice volume 1 no. 3, 1967.

34 Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, 47.

In addition to the ICV, Black radicals from UHURU coalesced into the formation of the

Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in the aftermath of the Rebellion, soon to

become the largest militant labor organization in the name of Black Power in the city of Detroit.

General Baker recalls that, during the Rebellion, Black city residents were unable to go to the

hospital or buy groceries beyond police and National Guard lines due to the instated curfew—the

only mobility allotted to Black Detroiters during the Rebellion was contingent on their work

badges from Chrystler and Ford, so they could “get their butts to work.”38As a result, Baker and

his comrades came to the realization that “the only value that Black people had in the society

was at the point of production,” directly leading to organizing at the factories, where “DRUM

was born.”39 General Baker, along with Mike Hamlin and Ron March, held regular meetings with

coworkers at the Chrysler Dodge Main Plant through the ICV office, where they started a wildcat

strike on May 2nd, 1968. That first wildcat became the genesis of DRUM, where many more

wildcat strikes and organizational activities would follow.

At the most basic level, the radicals at DRUM saw their political imperatives to be aimed

primarily at organizing a revolutionary Black workers union to challenge the liberal-labor

leadership at the UAW, whom they deemed complicit in the discriminatory workplace practices

and appalling workplace conditions that Black workers faced in the auto industry. By the 1960s,

the UAW had set up union-company agreements with GM, Ford, and Chrysler that rendered their

activities predictable to auto companies.41 As a consequence of these agreements, the UAW

turned a blind eye towards the issues facing Black workers, who often received the most

Ibid 32.

40 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 24.

39 Ibid.

38 Gordon Baker, “General Baker Speaks! Rebellion! Detroit 1967,” United States Social Forum in

Detroit, 2010.

arduous, lowest paying and most visibly exploitative jobs in the auto industry.

42 DRUM emerged

as a response to the defanged UAW, demanding higher wages, a safer and healthier workplace,

the elimination of harassment from racist foremen, fairer grievance procedures for Black

workers, higher Black representation in the union, and an end to other forms of workplace

discrimination.43 Since Black workers lost faith in the UAW’s ability to represent their demands,

DRUM’s militant style and effective wildcat striking strategies proved immensely popular,

spreading across multiple factories in Detroit between 1968 and 1971.

However, beyond the demands aimed at the UAW, DRUM’s political analysis took aim at

the auto industry at the center of a broader capitalist, imperialist United States, which stood in

the way of a program for Black Liberation. Along with its organizing activities, DRUM planned

seminars on internationalism and imperialism, demanding attendance from Black workers at

political education classes on “establishing a working relationship with the Third World.”44 By

organizing in the factories, the endgame of revolutionary struggle fell no short of full-blown

liberation for all people of color “from the yoke of oppression that holds all of us in the chains of

slavery to this country’s racist exploitative system.”45 Factory organizing fell at the very center of

this ambitious vision of liberation. As a DRUM booklet reads, “To seize control of the political

economy of the Midwest is to seize control over the political economy of imperialist America.”46

Therefore, DRUM’s demands cannot be understood solely in a local Detroit context. The Black

46 Political Education Booklet, “DRUM Handbills and Booklets,” Detroit Revolutionary Union Records

Box 1 Folder 6, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

45 League of Revolutionary Black Workers Constitution, Detroit Revolutionary Union Records Box 1

Folder 18, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

44 DRUM Program, “DRUM Program Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement,” Detroit Revolutionary

Union Records Box 1 Folder 1, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

43 DRUM Program, “DRUM Program Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement,” Detroit Revolutionary

Union Records Box 1 Folder 1, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

42 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 33-35.

radicals at the center of DRUM employed a much wider political analysis that centered factory

organizing in a global anti-capitalist struggle.

In their critiques of global capitalism, Black and Arab radicals connected their struggles

through their mutual participation in the anti-war movement, understanding the Vietnamese as

fellow oppressed people of color. In Arab oral history from the time, Vietnam often featured as

an important bridge between the destruction young Arabs heard about in Palestine in 1967, and

the destruction they witnessed with their own eyes in Detroit during the same summer.

47 A young

Nabeel Abraham remembers being extremely moved by a speech he heard given by Black

radical lawyer Ken Cockrel, who argued that he was “more than just opposing the war,” but

wanting “the Vietnamese to win and defeat US imperialism.”48 True to Nabeel’s recollection,

Vietnam featured prominently in DRUM’s demands and its political analysis, pushing the

liberal-labor UAW to call a general strike in favor of complete withdrawal from Vietnam.49

addition, many of the youngest members of OAS like Nabeel Abraham and Ish Ahmed

remember joining Civil Rights and anti-war movements far before they had learned about

struggles in Palestine.50 Even a newer Palestinian migrant to Detroit like Hasan Nawash, who

was far less versed in US politics than more established Arab-Americans, remembers feeling a

deep kinship and solidarity with the suffering Vietnamese.51

In many ways, participating in the

anti-war movement served as a connecting thread in the seemingly fractured struggles that Arab

and Black radicals waged in the 1960s.

51 Hasan Nawash, interviewed by Janice J. Terry. 1994. Transcript. Janice J. Terry Papers, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ismael Ahmed, interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

49 DRUM Program, “DRUM Program Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement,” Detroit Revolutionary

Union Records Box 1 Folder 1, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

48 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

47 Alia Malek, A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories, (New York: Free Press, 2009),

54-60.

True to their convergent political analyses, Arab radicals from the OAS and Black

radicals at DRUM crossed paths most visibly in 1969 after the ICV team published an explosive

article in favor of Palestinian Liberation, theorizing the basis of Arab-Black mutual struggle as a

Third World struggle against imperialism. By then, the ICV had taken over the editorial board of

Wayne State University’s newspaper The South End, where John Watson became the new

editor-in-chief.52 Turning the newspaper’s masthead to announce “One Class Conscious Worker

is Worth 100 Students,” Watson and his comrades continued with the same vision they had for

the ICV, publishing radical critiques of capitalism within the auto plants and more globally.

the issue of the South End dated January 1969, John Watson and co-editor Nick Medvecky Jr.

published a front-page article in favor of Palestinian liberation militants at Fatah.54 The article

demonstrated solidarity with Fatah, whom Medvecky and Watson admired for their

organizational efficiency and militant anti-colonial struggle.55 Behind the scenes of this article,

Arab students from OAS had connected with Watson and Medvecky, “vying to win them over”

as Nabeel Abraham recalls.56 The article was a triumph for Arab students, who felt that other

news sources often portrayed Arabs and Palestininan Liberation struggles in a negative light,

especially in light of the war in 1967.57

However, the article caused a huge uproar within major news sources and the University

administration, revealing the sheer unpopularity of Arab-Black mutual struggle with liberal-labor

57 Karen Amen, “Letters to the Editor,” The South End, February 1969, Vol. 27 No. 81.

56 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

55 Nick Medvecky, “Revolution Until Victory: Palestine Al-Fatah,” The Inner City Voice, November 1969,

Vol. 2 No. 2.

54 Though the article is available on the South End, it was not accessible to me digitally from the archives

available to me during the COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the article itself is extensively written about

and spoken about in Georgakas’ book and in my conversations with activists, and its points are further

elaborated in another article published by Medvecky and Watson in the ICV a few months later that was

accessible to me during the pandemic.

53 Eldgridge Cleaver, “Community Problems,” The South End, 20 January 1969, Vol. 27 No. 59.

52 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 44.

leaderships. Prior to the article, Wayne State University’s liberal president and member of New

Detroit William Keast already faced a great deal of pressure from auto companies and the UAW

to force Watson out of his position for his incendiary Marxist views.58 The Fatah article gave

Keast much firmer backing to pushback against Watson and Medvecky, whom he claimed

represented “Hitler-like elements” of anti-semitism in the paper.

59 The pushback against Watson

and Medvecky was so strong that they even faced an arson attempt at the paper’s headquarters.60

Nevertheless, Watson and Medvecky firmly held their ground, publishing a second article in the

Inner City Voice titled “Revolution Until Victory,” reiterating their support for Palestine. In

response to detractors, Medvecky wrote that “We were the ONLY paper that fully printed all

sides of the issue [of Palestine], even our opponent's.”61

Indeed, various opinions were hosted on

the South End in response to the controversy, some of which echoed the accusation of

anti-Semitism against Watson and Medvecky.

62 However, as a letter to the editor by Dearborn

community member Karen Amin read:

“The South End does print a biased viewpoint, but your readers should be reminded that

they have been hearing the Zionist side exclusively for the past twenty years. Anyone

interested in the Zionist position need only to pick up the Detroit News... At least the

South End has the courtesy to publish an opposing opinion.”63

Noting the power imbalance between a Palestinian and a Zionist perspective, Karen Amin

defended the article as a necessary counterpoint to prominent liberal and Zionist narratives.

Watson, Medvecky, and the rest of the South End staff used similar justifications to establish the

63 Karen Amen, “Letters to the Editor,” The South End, February 1969, Vol. 27 No. 81.

62 Rose Ash, “Letters to the Editor,” The South End, 4 March 1969, Vol. 27. No. 90.

61 Nick Medvecky, “Revolution Until Victory: Palestine Al-Fatah,” The Inner City Voice, November 1969,

Vol. 2 No. 2.

60 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 64.

59 Nick Medvecky, “Revolution Until Victory: Palestine Al-Fatah,” The Inner City Voice, November 1969,

Vol. 2 No. 2.

58 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 63.

link between revolution in Detroit and revolution in Palestine, in spite of the immense pressure

they faced from the liberal-labor establishment.

In addition to the article, Arab and Black radicals in the late 60s took their mutual

struggles beyond the theoretical realm—Arab volunteers from the OAS played crucial roles in

distributing literature for DRUM and promoting Arab worker participation in union elections in

favor of the emergent RUMs. Nabeel Abraham remembers driving to the factories to distribute

booklets and other RUM literature among workers, keeping them in the know about the latest

RUM activities.64 Surely enough, Arab radicals at the OAS were cued into DRUM’s major

activities. During crucial union elections in 1968, DRUM ran Ron March as a candidate in Local

3, in order to bring Black workers' grievances to the forefront of an otherwise willfully ignorant

UAW. Arab radicals at the OAS distributed literature written in Arabic amongst the primarily

working class Yemeni workers at the Dodge Main Plant. The flyer read:

“Dear Arab Workers in the Chrysler factory of Hamtramck, the Revolutionary Black

Workers at DRUM have nominated someone for local elections. We ask that you vote for

Mr. Ron March as a president of the branch [Local 3], and the rest of DRUM’s election

ticket. Mr. March supports Arab workers and insists on the maintenance of their jobs. In

addition, we have discovered that their opposing faction, the UAW, supports and

purchases bonds from Israel. The nominees at DRUM are honored to call you to vote for

Ron March because they oppose any work that goes against revolutionary Arab struggle.

Voting for Ron March is a vote against Zionism and colonialism.”65

By focusing on the UAW’s investment in Israeli bonds, Arab radicals at OAS connected the

material conditions of Black workers to the struggles for Palestinian Liberation. This effort

would be the first of many efforts that occurred later in the 1970s to oppose the UAW’s

65 A Call to Arab Workers, “Local 3 Elections,” Detroit Revolutionary Union Records, Box 1 Folder 8,

Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan. Translated by author.

64 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

investment in Israeli bonds by organizing a greater class consciousness among Arab workers,

directly inspired by the example of the RUMs.66

However, in spite of the best efforts of Arab and Black radicals, there were also many

limitations to the potential of Arab-Black workers solidarity: namely, differences in language,

and the precarious legal conditions of sojourning Yemeni workers. Mike Hamlin remembers the

sensitivity that RUMs displayed in relation to the legal status of Yemeni immigrant workers, who

could face deportation for participating in high-risk militant activism or wildcat strikes.67 Hamlin

and other Black radical organizers preferred to limit their engagements to Black workers instead,

occasionally involving Arab workers in less risky activities through language interpreters.

Simultaneously, most Arab workers in the factories by the 1960s were low-income working-class

immigrants who thought of themselves largely as sojourners, sending their money back home to

their families with the intention of returning to them at some point.68 For sojourning workers,

there was very little incentive to participate in building greater class solidarity and partaking in

activities that could harm their employment status, let alone investing their lives for the cause of

Black Liberation.

More importantly than the legal status of immigrant workers however, the broader

historical legacy of separating Arab Detroit from Black Detroit continued to foreground the

efforts at solidarity, in spite of the best efforts of Arab and Black radicals. George Khoury

remembers OAS’s efforts at Arab-Black solidarity to have been rather unpopular, because many

members of OAS did not want to be targeted by surveillance due to associating with Black

68 Nabeel Abraham characterizes most Yemeni workers in the late 60s and early 70s as such in his thesis

on Yemeni politics in Detroit. Nabeel Abraham, “National and Local Politics: A Study of Political

Conflict in the Yemeni Immigrant Community in Detroit, Michigan,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of

Michigan, 1976).

67 Mike Hamlin, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock. June 16, 2012.

Ismail “Ish” Ahmed led many of these later efforts, more deeply documented in the third chapter of the

thesis.

radicals.69 Many activists from both communities also connect that hesitation to racist attitudes

that permeated the Arab community in the 1960s.70

Indeed, while many activist oral histories

point to parallels drawn between the Rebellion, the Naksa, and the war in Vietnam, it would be a

mistake to generalize this sense of solidarity across the majority of the Arab community. The

community institutions built at the separation of Arab Detroit from Black Detroit, structured by

“legal whiteness,” continued to hold these struggles at arm’s length from one another. Racist

attitudes arising within the Arab community from US institutional racism, as well as racist

attitudes carried with them from their home countries, certainly did not help in bridging the

divide between Arab Detroit and Black Detroit.71

Beyond the OAS, many older and more “professional” Arab Americans argued for a less

pronounced politically radical approach to Palestinian politics, letting go of the terms of the

Third World coalition. Within the AAUG, a small number of Arab graduates took issue with the

Marxist political orientation of the leadership, wishing instead that the AAUG focus on

“professional development needs” of Arab university graduates.72 Their wishes would be met by

another organization: the short-lived NAAA (National Arab American Association), a

Washington DC based Arab-American organization focused on building stronger business ties in

the Middle East.73 Abdeen Jabara recalls the NAAA’s relative unpopularity at the time, due to its

more conciliatory approach to Palestine, compromising on full-scale Palestinian Liberation at a

time where the struggle was gaining momentum.74 The NAAA was far removed from radical

74 Abdeen Jabara, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock, July 23, 2012.

73 NAAA Letter, “Correspondence 1973-1974,” Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 12, Bentley Historical

Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

72Barbara Aswad and Adnan Aswad, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock, August 24, 2012.

71 Abdeen Jabara argued that the capitalist system put Arab and Black communities into conflict with one

another in a monograph he wrote in 1980, after a Chaldean Iraqi store owner murdered a Black man.

70 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

69 George Khoury, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

Arab organizers in Detroit, let alone from Black radicals. The less militant approach advocated

by a more “professional” class of Arab Americans treated the Third World coalition as a

foregone conclusion altogether.

Moreover, the largest and most important community centers for Arab Detroit in the

1960s, the Dearborn mosques, did not share Arab radicals’ identification with Black Liberation

struggles at an institutional level. By the 1960s, the Sunni AMS mosque and the Shi’ite Hashmie

Hall (by then, the Islamic Cultural Association) blossomed into much larger institutions, boasting

leading Imams with scholarly religious credentials and significantly larger congregations.75 The

mosques continued to hold central importance in the Dearborn Arab community, offering a place

of gathering and worship at a community institution recognized by the state.76 From the

perspective of Arab radicals at the OAS, engagement with the community at the mosque was

necessary, even inevitable.77 However, Arab radicals and Palestinian Liberation activists did not

always see eye-to-eye with the politics of the mosque leaders—some preferred to stay away from

the mosque entirely, echoing the Enlightenment separation of “religious” worship and “secular”

politics.78 However, while a great deal of literature exists on how Black radicals opposed the

liberal-labor leadership, there is hardly any scholarship that juxtaposes the politics of Arab

Detroit’s activists in the 1960s with the liberal, sometimes even conservative, approaches of the

mosque leaderships.79 To be sure, there were not as many overt confrontations between mosque

79 Pamela Pennock’s The Rise of the Arab American Left appreciates the historical significance of this

generation of Arab Americans, but although most of them come from the Detroit area, she largely frames

this history in the US Arab diaspora and in New Left movements more broadly, rather than in the context

of the Detroit’s history. Therefore, the relationships they had to the mosque leadership are not closely

documented in her book.

78 Ali Baleed, Interviewed by Janice J. Terry, 1994, Transcript, Janice J. Terry Papers, Bentley Historical

Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

77 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

76 As argued in chapter 1, the mosques are not only important for their religious purpose, but also insofar

as they offer a model for “American” Islam.

75 Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past, (Oxford, New York:

Oxford University Press, 2014), 150-171.

leaders and the activists at OAS as there were between the RUMs and liberal organizations such

as the UAW and TULC, since mosque leadership largely tolerated the activities of Arab radicals

without always completely condoning them. Nevertheless, the stakes of Arab radicals’

connection of Arab Detroit to Black Detroit can be most clearly illustrated by understanding the

distinction between the politics of the mosque leadership and Arab radicals.

At the surface, it would appear that the mosque Imams share much in common with

Detroit’s Arab radicals—namely, a vaguely Third Worldist political orientation and support for

Palestinian Liberation. Imam Mike Karoub, the son of the Sunni AMS Imam Hussein Karoub,

often wrote on the question of Palestine and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, in The Muslim Star, a

publication organized by a collective of mosques in the Midwest and Canada.80 Likewise, the

ICA’s Imam Chirri closely followed the Bandung Conference, the war in Algeria, and Palestine.

Chirri frequently raised the issue of “oppressed Afro-Asian” Muslims throughout the world—at

the time, he fell under the influence of Nasserism, and speculatively, Shi’ite Third Worldist

theologian Ali Shari’ati.81 Chirri and Karoub surely cared deeply about Palestine, though they

differed on the war in Vietnam, and Karoub took on a much more proactive attitude with relation

to the Black Muslim community.

However, despite sharing the vaguely Third Worldist orientation with Detroit’s Arab and

Black radicals, the Shi’ite Imam Jawad Chirri articulated an Islamic political theology of liberal

82 Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, 175-195.

81 There is no record, to my knowledge, that proves that Chirri read or engaged with Shari’ati’s politics,

but given Chirri’s enthusiastic support for the Revolution in Iran in 1979, it is not unlikely. Chirri does

share Shari’ati’s critiques of Marxist thought, though Chirri is far more positively disposed towards

Western liberal democracy than Shari’ati was. Nevertheless, given the breadth of Chirri’s knowledge of

intellectual and religious thought in the 1960s, it would be surprising if he did not come across Shari’ati’s

politics. Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “Preface,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers: 1959-2005, Box 2,

Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

80 Muslim Star, “Publications,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers: 1959-2005, Box 8, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

anti-communism deeply at odds with the Marxist orientations of DRUM and the OAS. Far from

the modernist ideal of separating religion and politics, many of Imam Chirri’s religious sermons

weighed on issues of global poverty, community organizing, and international politics. Speaking

on the topic of “Muslims as a Political Minority,” Imam Chirri argues that the American Muslim

community ought to be “internally and externally organized,” “learning from the American

example.”83 He laments the fact that “the US decided to give Israel weapons,” necessitating

“protest, or sending letters” from the community.

Indeed, Chirri wrote such letters to Michigan

Governor George Romney, arguing that support for Israel “represents an encouragement to

Communism in that area,” because “no alternative will be left for them [Palestinians] but to join

the Soviet Bloc.”85 Chirri’s rhetoric mirrors earlier letters he sent to fundraise for the mosque,

appealing to the benevolence of “religious liberty” in “the free world.”86 From Chirri’s vantage

point, US liberal democracy and welfare systems served as a shining example of social justice, a

compromise between “godless communism” and limitless free market capitalism.87

Indeed,

Chirri’s strong faith in US consumer capitalism even permeated his take on the classic “free will

vs. divine predestination” dilemma, alluding to “man as free agent,” capable of “choosing our

food, our cars, our roads.”88 Although he would later temper his positive disposition towards “the

land of the free” in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, in the 1960s and early 1970s Chirri’s

politics swayed heavily in favor of US liberal democracy, particularly in opposition to

88 Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “Man is a Free Agent,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers: 1959-2005,

Box 2, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

87 Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “The Meaning of Islam,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers: 1959-2005,

Box 2, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

86 Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “Fundraising Correspondence,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers:

1959-2005, Box 1, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

85 Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “Letter To George Romney,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers:

1959-2005, Box 2, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ibid.

83 Mohammad Jawad Chirri, “Muslims as a Political Minority,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers:

1959-2005, Box 2, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

communism. Black and Arab radicals in the wake of the Rebellion and the Naksa could hardly

share Chirri’s optimistic view of capitalism.

Beyond Chirri’s theological sermons, mosque leaderships remained institutionally

far-removed from the grassroots factory organizing of Black radicals, focusing instead on

building stronger connections to political leaders to push their policies on Israel. Charles

“Chuck” Alawan, a former board member at the ICA, took the opposite approach of Arab

radicals in the wake of 1967, joining the Executive Committee of the Republican State Central

Committee.89

In his time as an “ethnic mobilizer” for the Republican Party, Alawan vehemently

opposed US support for Israel as articulated by Michigan Governor Romney.

90 Writing to both

Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson, he says, “We cannot be pro-Israeli or pro-Arab. We

must do what is best for the preservation of the free world and the interests of the United States

of America.”91 To be sure, Alawan’s conciliatory tone in his letters to state officials did not carry

on into his activities in The Muslim Star, where he expressed more unreserved opinions in favor

of Palestinian Liberation.92 Although records from the AMS mosque leadership are much more

scant, it is unlikely that they partook in grassroots Black Liberation organizing at an institutional

level, given the legacy of siphoning off Arab Detroit from Black Detroit at an institutional level.

CONCLUSION

92 Muslim Star, “Publications,” Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri papers: 1959-2005, Box 8, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Unfortunately, many FIA records are not themselves archived

and readily available for research, but a glimpse is available in the Imam Chirri collection.

91 Charles Alawan, “1967 Correspondence”, Charles Khalil Alawan papers 1940-2001, Box 1, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

90Charles Alawan, “Middle East War Correspondence”, Charles Khalil Alawan papers 1940-2001, Box 1,

Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

89 Charles Alawan, “1967 Correspondence”, Charles Khalil Alawan papers 1940-2001, Box 1, Bentley

Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In many ways, the Dearborn mosques’ institutional removal towards the activities of

Black radicals comes as no surprise. By the 1960s, the Arab community continued to primarily

reside in Dearborn, still jealously guarded from Black migration by its racist mayor Orville

Hubbard. Although the 1965 Immigration Act allowed for Arab migration to Detroit to occur

without the precarious requirement of “whiteness,” racial hierarchies continued to structure the

city’s housing patterns, as well as its state-recognized institutions. As such, support for Palestine

within the mosque leadership took the form of direct engagement with state officials, rather than

coalitional approaches that incorporate the demands of Black workers. Further exacerbating the

divide is the Cold War anti-communist attitude permeating mosque leadership, which only

further alienated the Arab radicals at Wayne State University’s OAS chapter, let alone allowing

for a coalition with Black Marxist-Leninist activists to take place. As such, although mosque

leadership did particularly aim criticism at Black Liberation activists, DRUM and ICV activities

remained largely invisible to the Dearborn mosques.

Similarly, mainstream Civil Rights and liberal-labor organizations did not hold a positive

disposation towards Palestinian liberation, fiercely opposing the Palestinian Liberation articles

posted on The South End and the Inner-City Voice by Black radicals. Michael Fischback aptly

observes that, for Black activists in the 1960s, “How to approach the Arab-Israeli conflict

became much more than just a tertiary sideshow to more important matters facing black

Americans,” differing approaches to Palestine also helped articulate the internal differences

within different Black activist groups in the 1960s.93 Fischback adds that “Mainstream black

leaders saw themselves as prying open the door to civic equality in America, not as trying to

overthrow the system.”94

Indeed, the ICV and DRUM’s broader political analysis that implicates

Ibid, 5.

93 Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color, 3.

capitalism in the oppression of Arab, Black and Vietnamese people of color separated them from

their liberal counterparts, who either resoundingly condemned, or remained silent on, Palestinian

Liberation.

If the long durée history of Arab and Black migration to Detroit illustrates the artificiality

of narrating their histories in separation, the activities of Arab and Black activists after 1967

demonstrate the radical possibility of resisting the separation of these histories. With the

coincidental concurrence of the Naksa, the Rebellion, and the War in Vietnam, attentive Arab

and Black radicals could easily draw connections between their struggles. Besides putting their

Third World coalition into theoretical terms, they also formed bonds between their movements in

practice. Arab volunteers from the OAS went out to the factories to distribute DRUM literature

and engage with Arab workers to support Black Liberation. In turn, Black radicals spoke out in

support of Palestinian Liberation despite the threats and accusations they received from the

liberal-labor establishment. This relationship of reciprocity between Arab and Black radicals

directly challenges the neat historical partition of Arab Detroit from Black Detroit. By prying

open these structurally separate narrations, Arab and Black activists radically challenged the

presumptions of separation articulated by the city’s liberal leadership—presumptions that

continue to underlie the discourse of identity politics as they pertain to “minority histories” in the

United States.

Chapter 3: Revenge of the State:

The Stakes of Mutual Struggle

“A lot of us in leadership were revolutionary Marxists. These workers were nationalists to a

certain extent, but they were basically following leadership and their anger – what had happened

in the civil rights movement and discrimination in this country – so we taught them that they

were allies, solidarity, with the Arabs... But they seemed kind of insular, and I can understand

why. It’s a hostile country. Wherever there is the basis for forming racial and ethnic or any kind

of national hatred is to the advantage of the rulers in this country. So they try to keep people

separated. There was a great possibility for a really serious coalition in this country. But of

course they fought it to the bitter end.”1

-Mike Hamlin

“When a struggle for reform helps preserve and maintain the ability of revolutionary people to

function, and when the struggle advances revolutionary consciousness, then such an agenda is

positive and worth pursuing. On the other hand, when the content, tone, and direction of reform

does not serve such ends; when a ‘reformist agenda’ is obsessed with a ‘save the system’

syndrome, then it should be combatted. Combat should be done in an educative, persuasive and

political manner. It should not take the form of simply dismissing people or a program after

labelling them lowly ‘reformists.’”2

-Kenneth Cockrel

As the 1960s drew on into the 1970s, Detroit’s Arab and Black radical “Third World”

coalition continued to forcefully assert its political goals, elaborating new strategies of struggle.

For Arab radicals, the 1970s mark the time where organizing “matured,” resulting in successful

campaigns against the UAW and the city of Dearborn, as well as the organization of ACCESS,

arguably the most prominent Arab-American organization in the city today. Though the 1970s

brought upon a fateful factional split between the leadership of the RUMs, by then organized into

a singular entity called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Black radicals continued to

lead various campaigns at the factories, as well as prominent anti-policing fights waged against

2 Kenneth Cockrel, “Repression and the Police State,” Detroit Revolutionary Union Records Box 17

Folder 5, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

1 Mike Hamlin, interviewed by Detroit Historical Society, May 23, 2016.

the city’s liberal-labor leadership. Although Arab and Black radicals continued to collaborate in

the early 70s, their struggles became increasingly fractured throughout the decade, reiterating the

terms of separation between Arab Detroit and Black Detroit.

In order to better understand the reinscription of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit, the

elephant in the room must be addressed: state repression and co-optation sought to neuter Arab

and Black radicals’ political agendas through policing and surveillance. Black radicals often bore

the brunt of police harassment and beatings at the factories, with the express intention of

breaking up their activities. Like their coalitional peers, Arab radicals also faced the ire of the

state, often receiving threats and intimidation from police officers at their OAS storefront

location. More importantly however, both groups faced heavy surveillance, especially

intensifying during the late 60s and early 70s. The Detroit Police Department’s “Red Squad”

intensified surveillance on Black radicals in the 1960s, emboldened by liberal approaches to

“cracking down on crime.” Arab radicals also became heavily surveilled by the FBI, especially

through the Nixon administration’s “Operation Boulder.” Beyond the challenges of organizing

and building mutual struggle networks, Arab and Black radicals had to contend with overlapping

state technologies of policing and surveillance between the DPD and the FBI, principally

designed to neutralize their political agendas.

In this chapter, I argue that the state decidedly broke apart coalitional Arab-Black radical

“Third World” solidarity, either through overt tactics of repression or through co-optation.

Despite the fact that Arab and Black Detroit community organizing networks continued to grow

in the 1970s and 1980s, they largely found their expressions in more politically moderate, less

overtly subversive terms. This development cannot be separated from the state’s paranoia at

overlapping Arab-Black radical politics, exposed through oral histories and documents from

Arab and Black radicals’ personal archives. As radical Arab lawyer Abdeen Jabara’s papers

illustrate, state security apparatuses feared direct, organic links between Arab-Americans and

Palestinian Liberation groups abroad. Moreover, they especially feared that such networks would

extend to Black militant organizations in the US, from the (by then defunct) League of

Revolutionary Black Workers to the Black Panther Party. Despite state repression, Arab and

Black radicals maintained important connections throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the

1980s, having learned from one another’s struggles and strategies. The result, however, reified

the lines of separation between Arab Detroit and Black Detroit as articulated throughout the early

20th century.

The Detroit Police Department began its “Red Squad” program in the 1940s, connecting

the anti-communist purges of the earlier generation of labor activists to the surveillance that

Black radicals faced in the 1960s. The Red Squad was an undercover unit of the DPD dedicated

to closely monitoring the activities of activists of various political persuasions, insofar as they

opposed the city’s liberal and/or conservative establishments.3

In the 1940s, Red Squad activities

were primarily aimed at members of the Communist Party and other socialist or Pan-African

leaning individuals and organizations. However, by the 1960s, the Red Squad worked in tandem

with the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance initiative to specifically target anti-war activists,

Black Power activists, and other various groups under the contentious umbrella of “the New

Left.”4 Although the Red Squad disbanded in 1974 after its exposure in a civil liberties suit,

many of its files remain sealed due to a court order “requiring their preservation for privacy

concerns.”5

Ibid.

3 “Red Squad: Political Surveillance,” Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics and the

Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era. Website. 2021.

https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/page/red-squad.

In spite of the lack of recoverable surveillance files, some documents have been

reproduced that prove the DPD’s intense surveillance of Black radicals, who became

increasingly organized by the end of the 1960s. In tandem with COINTELPRO, the Red Squad

trailed General Baker’s every move starting in the mid-1960s, especially intensifying after the

Rebellion and the formation of DRUM.6 Black radical lawyer Kenneth Cockrel also faced

DPD-FBI surveillance for his participation in DRUM, although surveillance documents cannot

legally be quoted or reproduced.7 Evidently, the state feared the activities of Black radicals, who

became increasingly organized by the late 1960s and early 1970s. By then, not only did they

espouse views that threatened the liberal-labor establishment, but they became increasingly

successful at organizing various other RUMs across the state of Michigan and leading highly

disruptive wildcat strikes.8 By 1969, the RUMs coalesced to form the League of Revolutionary

Black Workers, the umbrella organization most responsible for opposing and disrupting the

UAW and the city’s liberal leadership.

However, in addition to facing the invisible hand of the surveillance state, Detroit’s Black

radicals also directly faced police harassment and brutality aimed at disrupting their activities.

During the 1968 Local 3 union election that Arab radicals promoted among Arab workers, Black

radicals pointed out “tampering from police,” removing posters, and the harassment of Black

union workers by police officers.9

In addition, after the announcement of DRUM candidate Ron

March’s initial victory, police “beat over black brothers with double edged ax handles and

9 “Local 3 Election Results,” Detroit Revolutionary Union Records Box 1 Folder 8, Walter P. Reuther

Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

8 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 69-89.

7 “Red Squad: Political Surveillance,” Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics and the

Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era. Website. 2021.

https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/page/red-squad.

Intelligence Bureau File: General Gordon Baker Jr., Detroit Police Files, 1963-1975, FOLDER:

100388-002-0409, The Black Power Movement: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers,

1965-1976, ProQuest History Vault.

spraying [sic] them with the deadly mace.”10 Police intervention into the Local 3 election was but

one episode of many in which police routinely beat and harassed Black workers and Black

organizers. Black radicals frequently pointed out the state’s overt intervention at disrupting their

activities, requiring them to go through great lengths to justify their activities legally and

ideologically.

11 Nevertheless, Black radicals also considered state repression to be an inevitable

response to their militant activism. As such, they often leveraged state repression in impassioned

pleas that point the urgency of their organizing to Black workers.12

Additionally, Arab radicals at the OAS in the 1960s faced similar state repression tactics

aimed at dissolving their activities. Nabeel Abraham and George Khoury both remember facing

threats and intimidation from police officers at the OAS storefront location.13 Additionally,

Ismail “Ish” Ahmed recalls witnessing routine police beatings of working class youth in the

South End of Dearborn.14 As a result, it is no surprise that Arab radicals felt reluctant to join

forces with Black radicals at Wayne State—already facing the scrutinizing eye of the state, many

Arab students did not want to invite further harassment by associating with Black radicals if such

an association was not mutually beneficial.15 Nevertheless, Arab and Black radicals continued to

connect together, despite their mutually vulnerable positions with relation to overlapping

surveillance apparatuses.

Recorded instances of surveillance against Arab radicals in Detroit began as early as

1967, with an FBI-led operation against Abdeen Jabara in the aftermath of the foundation of the

15 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

Ismael Ahmed, interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

13 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Basil AlSubee, October 6, 2020.

12 “Local 3 Election Results,” Detroit Revolutionary Union Records Box 1 Folder 8, Walter P. Reuther

Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

11 Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, 109-112.

10 Ibid.

AAUG. The FBI and NSA began gathering surveilling Jabara after the formation of the AAUG,

collecting his “organizational affiliations, reports of his travels across the country and overseas,

transcripts of at least 40 wire-tapped conversations (including his overseas phone calls),

interviews with over 100 people, and summaries of his speeches and activities at scores of public

and private meetings.”16 Jabara found out about the operation in 1972 and sued the FBI in

earnest, winning the lawsuit.17 According to court records, the FBI and NSA shared Jabara’s

information with the Israeli government, as well as American Zionist organization the ADL

(Anti-Defamation League).18 Although Jabara’s lawsuit and victory proved to be a landmark

success for Arab radicals, Jabara was only one of many Arab radical activists who were formally

and informally surveilled by the FBI and the DPD. Almost anyone affiliated with the AAUG in

the late 60s was investigated by the FBI in some capacity or another for their “subversive

activities.”19

Additionally, surveillance of Detroit Arab radicals particularly intensified after President

Richard Nixon’s authorized “Operation Boulder” of 1972. Unlike other surveillance operations

against Arab radicals, Operation Boulder differed through its publicity. On September 18, 1972,

just a few weeks before Richard Nixon’s impeachment resolution, Nixon announced “Operation

Boulder” in response to the Munich Olympic Games massacre by the Black September militia.20

The state took advantage of the tragedy, still fresh in American public opinion, to publicly

announce the surveillance program after it had been under wraps.21

In his announcement, Nixon

Ibid, 44.

Ibid, 41.

Ibid, 43.

18 Pennock, “From 1967 to Operation Boulder: The Erosion of Arab Americans’ Civil Liberties in the

1970s,” 42-43.

17Ann Arbor, MI, Bentley Historical Library, Abdeen Jabara Papers, Jabara vs. Federal Bureau of

Investigations (FBI), Box 3.

16 Pamela E. Pennock, “From 1967 to Operation Boulder: The Erosion of Arab Americans’ Civil Liberties

in the 1970s,” Arab Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2018): 41–52, 42

implicated any individual of Arab descent in “terrorist activities,” furthering the racialized link

between Arabness, Islam, and “terrorism.”22

In an open letter announcement to the AAUG

membership, then-president Abdeen Jabara called Operation Boulder “a program of harassment

and intimidation of Arabs living in the US.”23

Indeed, the aftermath of the Munich massacre

proved particularly expedient for the state to crack down on the subversive activities of Arab

radicals. Jabara added that

“the campaign [Operation Boulder] had created a pall of fear in the Arab-American

community and cannot but have the natural if not intended result of having a chilling

effect on association and the expression of critical views on American Foreign policy in

the Middle East...”24

From the perspective of Arab radicals, Operation Boulder particularly served as a means of

crushing dissent on US foreign policy in Palestine.

Indeed, through Operation Boulder, the FBI and DPD particularly took aim at Arab

radicals’ potential organic connections to militant Palestinian Liberation groups in the Middle

East by questioning college students affiliated with the OAS. Jabara collected information from

Arab students after they were questioned or intimidated by the FBI or NSA. For example, the

FBI questioned one student about how he feels about PFLP plane hijackings.25 Afterwards, they

asked him whether or not he was seeking US citizenship, and when he answered in the

affirmative, they told him that an American passport was “not compatible” with “Palestine

feelings.”26 Another student received a far more accusatory tone: the FBI overtly accused him of

Ibid.

25 Abdeen Jabara, “File on Boullatta,” Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 10, Folder: Harassment of

Arab-Americans (1972-1973), Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

24Abdeen Jabara, “Letter to the ACLU,” Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 13, Folder: Operation Boulder

Correspondence and Miscellaneous (1972-1976), Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

23 Abdeen Jabara, “Letter to Arab Students from AAUG,” Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 10, Folder:

Harassment of Arab-Americans (1972-1973), Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

22 Khalid Beydoun explores the ways in which the US Empire particularly racializes Muslims in greater

detail in his book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, (Oakland,

California: University of California Press, 2018).

belonging to Fatah and Black September, to which he denied and asked for a lawyer to be

present.27 Jabara claims that this student, Elias Shoufani, was targeted for political reasons:

“He [Shoufani] has spoken publicly against the Vietnam War and has participated in

marches, he has lectured about the Palestinian situation in the Middle East and has

organized in favor of reinstatement, he has made strong statements in public regarding

American imperialism.”28

As such, the claim of organic linkage to groups in the Middle East also served as a means of

censoring the politics of Arab radicals, which often ran anathema to the Nixon administration’s

foreign policy.

However, besides attempting to prove organic linkage to activists abroad, the state

security apparatus particularly feared connections fostered between Arab radicals and Black

radicals. Besides being accused of belonging to Fatah and Black September, Shoufani also

received an accusation from the FBI of “linking Black September with the Black Panthers.”29

Another student, Arris Kassem, was questioned by the FBI about Arab states funding the OAS,

and the OAS inviting Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael for a lecture.30

Indeed, the

linkage between Arab radicals and Black radicals at the level of state surveillance and

intimidation aligns with public rhetoric in favor of surveilling Arabs in the US. The

Anti-Defamation League general counsel Arnold Forster previously accused the OAS of

“connections to ‘extremist revolutionary’ groups in the United States, such as the Socialist

Workers Party and the Black Panther Party, as well as with revolutionaries in China, Algeria,

Cuba, and Vietnam” in order to call for surveillance against the OAS.31 Therefore, it comes as no

31 Pennock, “From 1967 to Operation Boulder: The Erosion of Arab Americans’ Civil Liberties in the

1970s,” 43.

30 Abdeen Jabara, “File on Arris Kassem,” Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 10, Folder: Harassment of

Arab-Americans (1972-1973), Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

Ibid.

27 Abdeen Jabara, “File on Elias Shoufani,” Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box 10, Folder: Harassment of

Arab-Americans (1972-1973), Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

surprise that the state particularly felt paranoid about a shared Arab-Black radical agenda in the

US.

The state’s paranoia at Arab-Black radical coalitional solidarity illustrates the context of

their transforming radical politics as the 1970s drew on: the state, desperate to destroy the fragile

coalition, did everything in its power to nudge activists in different directions. As both Black and

Arab radicals often reminded their constituents, the state’s reaction only further illustrated the

stakes of their critiques. Therefore, instead of understanding the political transformations and

moderations of the 1970s as inevitable, it is much more accurate to recognize how the weight of

the state pushed activists into different strategic and political directions. Many insider and

outsider commentators on the League, as well as the early formation of ACCESS, often proclaim

their ideals in the late 60s as “too ambitious” or even “immature.”32 For activists, this

melancholic outlook understandably emerges in the aftermath of disillusionment, despite their

deep pride in their success and accomplishments. However, rather than subscribing to a

deterministic view on the Arab-Black radical coalition, it is best to recognize the immense

pressure imposed by the state against these activists that rendered their ideals “too ambitious” to

begin with.

An unfortunate consequence of the many pressures against Black radicals in the late

1960s and early 1970s was the factional split leading to the disbandment of the League of

Revolutionary Black Workers. In 1970, two factions slowly began developing within the League:

one more dedicated to in-plant organizing, and the other more invested in growing the

organization on a larger scale through a national Black Workers Congress, filmmaking, and book

clubs. The first faction, led by General Baker, Chuck Wooten, Marianne Kramer, John Williams

32 This analysis checks out across interviews with George Khoury, Abdeen Jabara, and within Herbert

Boyd’s reflections on the League at the end of Georgakas’ “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying.”

and Luke Tripp, accused the latter faction of spreading the League’s resources too thin and losing

sight of the importance of the shopfloor to “bourgeois aspirations.”33 The second faction,

consisting of John Watson, Mike Hamlin, Kenneth Cockrel and former SNCC leader James

Forman accused the first faction of being “reactionaries” and “full of nationalists,” with a “thug

mentality.”34 These disagreements evolved from strategic to deeply personal, resulting in the end

of many of the relationships sustaining the organization to begin with.35 By 1971, the League

announced its formal dissolution, as both factions went their separate ways in keeping with their

strategic and political differences.36

The League’s split cannot be understood in a vacuum simply as a battle of egos, however:

precipitating the split, the League already faced immense pressure from the UAW and the state

that slowly thinned out the organization and its constituents. As Kenneth Cockrel argues in a

speech he gave in December 1970, the split in the League resulting from “barriers” in

communication about common goals from its various constituencies, arises from “reasons [that

are] fostering division.”37 The reasons are named by Ken Cockrel to be “the tripartite enemy” of

the League: “of course, racism, capitalism, and imperialism.”38 To Cockrel in 1970, just before

the formal disintegration of the League, the split between members of the League only benefited

the capitalist power structure they sought to bring down. Indeed, the UAW and the city had

coordinated efforts to spread the League’s energies thin by disrupting their activities. Members

of the League began getting fired from their jobs at factories and receiving disciplinary

Ibid.

37 Kenneth Cockrel, “Repression and the Police State,” Detroit Revolutionary Union Records Box 17

Folder 5, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Detroit, Michigan.

36 Marianne Kramer, “On the Split and Critical Thinking,” League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

General Baker Institute, 2016, https://www.revolutionaryblackworkers.org/.

Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 164.

Ibid, 163.

Ibid, 162.

33 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 161-162.

measures, leading to the disintegration of individual important RUM units such as ELRUM.39

Given the immense pressure against Black radicals by state and union leadership, the split could

only have been a byproduct of the immense state-sanctioned barriers placed on Black organizers.

Nevertheless, in spite of the disbandment of the League, Arab radicals followed in the

footsteps of Black radicals by briefly organizing an Arab Workers Caucus with the express aim

of divesting the UAW from Israeli bonds. Ismael “Ish” Ahmed, grandson of the “Mother of

Dearborn” Aliya Hassen, organized the Arab Workers Caucus following the example of the

League of Revolutionary Black Workers.40 For Ahmed, who had been deeply steeped in Black

Power and anti-war circles before he even learned about the struggle in Palestine, the blueprint

set by Black radicals could easily be applied to the Arab community.

41 Specifically, Ahmed

worked to organize Arab workers in the River Rouge plant in the South End of Dearborn. By the

1970s, the demographic makeup of the South End rapidly shifted from a historic Lebanese

working class community to a primarily Yemeni working class community, as older generations

of Lebanese migrants acquired enough wealth to move out of the South End.42 Yemeni workers

came together in the Arab Workers Caucus after the explosion of Arab activism resulting from

the 1973 October War in Palestine.43 Specifically, Arab radicals and auto workers took issue with

the UAW’s investments in Israeli bonds.

The Arab Workers Caucus campaign against the UAW drew on support from Black

workers by highlighting the mutually vulnerable positions of Black and Arab workers, as well as

Ismael Ahmed, “Organizing An Arab Workers Caucus: The Detroit Experience UAW,” Abdeen Jabara

Papers, Box 13, Folder: UAW Arab Workers Caucus -- Articles + Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann

Arbor, MI.

42 Nabeel Abraham, “National and Local Politics: A Study of Political Conflict in the Yemeni Immigrant

Community in Detroit, Michigan,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1976)

Ibid.

Ismael Ahmed, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

39 Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 161.

connections between Palestine and South Africa. Ish Ahmed and Dan Georgakas both keenly

noted in their contemporaneous writings about Arab workers in the Southend that they faced

similar dire working conditions as Black workers.44 Drawing on the connections between the

Arab and Black “exploited proletariat,” Arab Workers Caucus organizers portrayed the UAW’s

investments into Israel as an affront to Arab and Black workers alike. According to the literature,

investments into Israel from a union supposedly representing Arab workers are tantamount to

“investment in racist South Africa” from the perspective of Black workers.45 Going even further,

the Arab Workers Caucus argued that “Israel has also used these funds in its well known aid to

racist regimes in South Africa and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) where they are used to finance and

slaughter our Black brothers and sisters.”46 As such, despite the disintegration of the League,

Arab workers still drew on the League’s broad base as well as the League’s strategies to unite

Arab and Black workers alike.

Arab radicals’ divestment campaign succeeded at disrupting a major UAW fundraiser,

resulting in an optimistic current of energy in Arab activist circles. The UAW had put together a

fundraising event, where UAW president Leonard Woodcock would receive a “Humanitarian of

the Year” award by Jewish organization B’nai B’rith.47 Coming off the energy galvanized in the

community by the October War, Ish Ahmed and other organizers found the event to be the

perfect opportunity for a disruptive action against the UAW’s investments in Israel. The resulting

47 Alia Malek, A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories, (New York: Free Press, 2009),

Ismael Ahmed, “Organizing An Arab Workers Caucus: The Detroit Experience UAW,” Abdeen Jabara

Papers, Box 13, Folder: UAW Arab Workers Caucus -- Articles + Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann

Arbor, MI

45 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left, 185.

44 Dan Georgakas, “Black and Arab Workers in the Detroit Auto Factories,”Abdeen Jabara Papers, Box

13, Folder: UAW Arab Workers Caucus -- Articles + Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

Ismael Ahmed, “Organizing An Arab Workers Caucus: The Detroit Experience UAW,” Abdeen Jabara

Papers, Box 13, Folder: UAW Arab Workers Caucus -- Articles + Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann

Arbor, MI

picketing action galvanized the largest Arab collective movement in the community yet, with the

attendance of over a thousand workers and activists in solidarity.

48 The action completely

blindsided the UAW leadership, who had never expected mass mobilization on behalf of Arab

workers.49 The Arab Workers Caucus later presented their demands, which were accepted by the

UAW leadership at the time. Although Arab workers successfully mobilized for

divestment—one of the first of many future divestment campaigns targeting the Israeli state—the

union accepted their demands begrudgingly. As one activist remembers, UAW leadership issued

the threat: "Don't you ever fuck with the union again." True to their word, the UAW followed up

on the threat, as a few Arab workers were laid off their jobs after the picket.50

In addition to the Arab Workers Caucus, Arab activists of various political persuasions

had organized ACCESS, or the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, with

the goal of serving “the community here” in order to affect the political circumstance “there,” in

Palestine. The ACCESS organizers team consisted of a variety of groups: new Palestinian

immigrants with a deep investment in Palestinian Liberation, Dearborn Arab community leaders

focused on serving newcoming migrants, Yemeni workers hoping to provide similar social

services to the burgeoning Yemeni community, and other Arab activists with all kinds of political

goals and agendas.51 As Ish Ahmed recalls it, “you could be a good Lefty, a good Muslim, or just

a good person, and you’d find a place to serve at ACCESS.”52

Indeed, even Ish Ahmed’s

grandmother and Muslim feminist Aliya Hassen returned from New York City to serve as the

first director of ACCESS.53 Another group of activists, led by AAUG anthropologist Barbara

Ibid.

52 Ismael Ahmed, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

51 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

50 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Pamela Pennock, August 20, 2020.

49 Malek, A Country Called Amreeka, 73.

48 Nabeel Abraham, interviewed by Pamela Pennock, August 20, 2020.

Aswad and community activist Helen Atwell, joined the ACCESS organizing team after a

successful campaign waged against Dearborn’s racist mayor Orville Hubbard to protect the

Southend from demolition.54

However, tensions among activists mounted as ACCESS began receiving its first federal

grants and an official nonprofit status, alienating activists who felt the direction of ACCESS

became more “reformist.” As discussions emerged around the growing role of ACCESS, Ish

Ahmed remembers meeting with Black Panther Party members, who formerly belonged to the

League. They advised Arab activists not to receive any money from the federal

government—advice that Ish Ahmed and other activists decidedly did not follow.

55 Some

affiliated activists complained that ACCESS became principally “reformist” in its orientation, an

accusation that alienated Ish Ahmed from his former comrades.56 From Ahmed’s perspective, the

ideological purity of his leftist peers kept them from seeing the first-hand impact of the social

services work that ACCESS engaged in.57 Ahmed sees this moment as a time where his priorities

markedly shifted, from “immature” ideas about “revolution” to “really serving people.”58

Nevertheless, by the mid-to-late 1970s, most Arab activist circles gradually took on more

moderate political positions with relation to the state. Pamela Pennock traces the toning down of

revolutionary rhetoric in ACCESS, which “established friendlier relations with the UAW” and

“moved away from its oppositional position, eventually becoming a key institution in the state

and federal nexus of government and nonprofit social service agencies.”59 Abdeen Jabara and

George Khoury both echo similar sentiments towards ACCESS’s evolving role: they both see

59 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left, 168.

Ibid.

55 Ismael Ahmed, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock, May 22, 2012.

54 The Southend demolition mimics other demolitions throughout Detroit and urban centers in the US that

targeted ethnic enclaves and poor neighborhoods to make way for industry and profit.

“corporatization” as inevitable growth and progression, which they do not necessarily criticize.60

However, in relation to ACCESS’s formative role as an organization with the stated goal of

“liberation of our people in the Middle East” through radicalizing immigrants and workers, the

current role of ACCESS is quite far removed from its original overt radicalism. As the

organization grew from the 1970s, so too did its political relationship vis-a-vis the state.

Conclusion

By the mid-1970s, various revolutionary and leftist groups began to dissipate, and the

radical Arab-Black “Third World” coalition in Detroit was certainly no exception. The League of

Revolutionary Black Workers never recovered from the central factional split, with one side of

its leadership pivoting towards a new National Black Workers Congress, and members on the

other side founding the Detroit Black Panther Party and focusing on local scale organizing.

Nevertheless, many radicals coming out of the League continued to fight important battles for

Black Detroiters, from fighting rampant police brutality to welfare struggles. Likewise, Arab

radical circles also dissipated—at least, their revolutionary rhetoric certainly did. They continued

to win important victories for Arab immigrants through the growing body of ACCESS, where

they focused on providing crucial social services for incoming immigrants. Nevertheless,

ACCESS’s growth also pushed it far away from its revolutionary origins, rendering it much more

expedient in relation to the state.

However, rather than understanding the dissolution of revolutionary movements in

Detroit as “inevitable,” I contend that these developments cannot be separated from overlapping

state technologies of surveillance and suppression that not only targeted Black and Arab radicals

individually, but specifically targeted their sustained efforts at coalition-building. Throughout the

60 George Khoury, interviewed by Pamela Pennock. July 16, 2012.

Abdeen Jabara, Interviewed by Pamela Pennock, July 23, 2012.

late 60s and early 70s, the state sustained an immense pressure on radical activism that was

continuous with its anticommunist purges in the 1940s. Between the CIA and the DPD, Arab and

Black radicals faced no shortage of police brutality, harassment, intimidation, and surveillance.

Although I could not legally reproduce state surveillance documents, activists themselves

continuously felt the pressure of the state and its deep paranoia at the agenda of Arab-Black

mutual liberation. By foregrounding state anxiety at radical Arab and Black activism, suddenly

the deflation of revolutionary organizing in the mid-70s appears to be far from coincidental or

inevitable. The state waged a battle against radical activism, and for the most part, the state won

that battle.

Although Arab and Black communities in Detroit continued to work together in the

1980s and afterwards, these efforts no longer held a sustained commitment to revolutionary

solidarity to upend the structures of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit. In the 1980s, for example,

Arab and Black organizers worked together as connected minority groups in Reverend Jesse

Jackson’s historic “Rainbow Coalition.”61 However, the strategies pursued by mainstream Arab

and Black activists never quite pushed at the structures separating Arab Detroit from Black

Detroit again. The political strategies utilized by organizations like ACCESS, for instance, more

clearly resemble the strategies pursued by the mosque leadership in the early 20th century.

Rather than fighting to upend intersecting structures of capitalism and imperialism, the locus of

activism during the Reagan era fixated much more on state recognition, congressional

representation, and community-building.62 As such, the state reigned in Black Detroit and Arab

Detroit into their ethnically insular spaces of organization once and for all.

62 Ibid, 202.

61 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left, 212.

Conclusion:

Towards a Renewed Politics of Mutual Struggle

“Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or

not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions

themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power

relations they sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these

alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.”1

-Robin D.G. Kelley

Throughout this thesis, I hope to have shown that Black and Arab radicals overlapping in

Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s could hardly be brushed aside as inevitable, just as much as the

radical coalition’s disintegration in the mid-1970s cannot be understood as determinately

doomed. By viewing Detroit’s radical Third World coalition through a broader lens of Black and

Arab organizing and community-building throughout the 20th century, we put into question the

ways in which these histories are often narrated. Despite being framed entirely within ethnically

homogenous terms, Arab Detroit and Black Detroit formed in constant dialogue with one

another, separated only by their different positions in relation to legal whiteness. Their differing

positions, refracted across racialized housing policies, resulted in largely separate political

practices and organizational structures throughout most of the 20th century. When Arab and

Black radicals crossed paths in the 1960s, they fundamentally put into question the very scaffold

of whiteness itself. Connecting Black liberation with Palestinian liberation, the anti-war

movement, labor organizing, and other avenues of community organizing bridged the historically

established divide between Arab Detroit and Black Detroit. In turn, Arab and Black radicals

1 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002),

ix.

faced the wrath of the state, eager to stop the coalition’s radical dreams and strategic organizing

in their tracks.

However, public institutions in Detroit today narrate the histories of Arab Detroit and

Black Detroit in complete isolation from one another, in spite of their clear intersections. The

history of the radical Third World coalition, and its organizational precedents starting with Black

and Arab migrations in the 20th century, currently exists most visibly in two key locations in

Metro-Detroit: The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, and the

Arab American National Museum in Dearborn. More than any other book or institution in the

city, these museums offer visible representations of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit histories for

public viewing. They stand as triumphant celebrations of the perseverance of Black and Arab US

citizens, providing public education and cultural programming on various issues pertaining to

both communities. However, despite the space dedicated towards Black and Arab radicals in

both museums, each respective museum conforms to the ethnically homogenous terms associated

with telling the story of Arab Detroit and Black Detroit.

The Charles H. Wright Museum takes its attendees on a journey through the African

diaspora in Detroit, ultimately providing a celebration of Black Detroiters’ perseverance and the

promise of US multicultural democracy. Its primary exhibit, “And Still We Rise,” follows

African and Afro-American history from ancient Africa, through chattel slavery, until the present

moment in the city of Detroit. In its Detroit history sections, the exhibit pays nods to Black labor

activists of the UAW generation in the 1930s and the League in the 1960s. Concluding

triumphantly, the museum highlights an immersion into a new America, now holding room for

Black Detroiters after the Civil Rights Era. Its final section, rather than providing space to

highlight ongoing racial violence, largely celebrates the diversity of roles that Black Americans

can now hold in US multicultural democracy.

Much like the Charles H. Wright Museum, the Arab American National Museum follows

individual Arab migrants’ stories throughout the 20th century, critiquing post-9/11 Islamophobia

by highlighting the ability of Arab migrants to “succeed” in the United States. The exhibit

showcases a wide range of Arab migration stories and experiences, culminating in an exhibit that

pays homage to the many achievements of Arab-Americans since their humble beginnings as

immigrants. By taking Arab-Americans out of the space of “Otherness” defined in Islamophobic

and Orientalist discourse, the museum critiques the public discourse surrounding Arab and

Muslim immigrants that particualrly intensified after 9/11.3 However, in doing so, the museum

also celebrates the promise of US multicultural democracy, articulating a space for individually

successful Arab-American professionals. Even Arab activists from Detroit’s radical coalition

feature as individually successful Arab-Americans, rather than as a struggling collective with

radical politics.

Taking these museums in dialogue with the history of mutual struggle between Black and

Arab radicals in the 1960s and 1970s showcases the limitations of liberal identity politics,

fundamentally positioned with the aim of state recognition and celebratory multiculturalism. In

the 1960s, Black and Arab radicals in Detroit articulated their politics against the

anticommunism of the liberal-labor coalition and mosque leadership politics. In their political

3 The museum itself was born out of ACCESS in direct response to 9/11. See Friej, Janice Ann. “The

Arab American National Museum.” Journal of Museum Education. Accessed February 9, 2020.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10598650.2011.11510678.

2 My observations here stem are deeply influenced by Su’ad Abdulkhabeer’s critical final chapter of her

book Muslim Cool, in which she reflects on the limitations of non-profit politics and representation, and

their adherence to the political logic of the US Empire. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool Race,

Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States, (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 178-218.

analyses, the connections between Black liberation, Palestinian liberation and the anti-war

movement could not be compromised—unlike liberal approaches in their communities, which

tethered themselves to their respective struggles at the expense of the other. Today, despite the

museums’ indebtedness to Black and Arab radical organizing, neither museum showcases the

other half of the radical coalition: Black radicals do not appear in the Arab American National

Museum, and the same is true of Arab radicals in the Charles H. Wright Museum. Consequently,

neither Black Detroit or Arab Detroit histories appear beyond the confines of their own

museums. For each museum to tell its historical narrative with the goal of state recognition, it

must retain the imagination of insularity central to liberal identity politics discourse.

By pointing to the limitations of how Detroit’s museums narrate ethnic histories, my goal

is not to dismiss the importance of both museums altogether, nor is it to deny the material

impacts of their educational programming for their respective communities—rather, I want to

show how the politics of state recognition have become an unquestioned habit in our retelling of

ethnic minority histories. The Arab American National Museum and the Charles H. Wright

Museum both put together educational and cultural programming that greatly benefit their

constituents across various communities in Detroit; I myself have greatly benefited from

attending events at both institutions. As such, my aim is not to dismiss them altogether, but rather

to point to the silences in history-telling that takes place within institutions recognized by the

state. By aiming the museums towards state recognition, Black and Arab Detroiters’ radical

histories are imagined as ethnically insular and mutually directed towards celebrating US

multiculturalism, rather than radically imagining different political possibilities by viewing their

histories in dialogue. In many ways, the political logic of recognition operating within museums

does not differ from the politics of Arab mosques after the 1930s, or the politics of ACCESS

after its incorporation as a nonprofit. While they provide deeply important community services

and functions, their ability to do so relies on a muted if not actively celebratory political

disposition towards the very structures that Black and Arab radicals critiqued in the 1960s and

1970s.

Instead, I hope to articulate a renewed politics of mutual struggle, reflecting on how

Detroit’s Third World coalition provided an unprecedented challenge to the neat delineation of

Arab Detroit and Black Detroit that remains deeply entrenched in the present day. Though the

museums do not prominently feature intersecting Black and Arab Detroiters’ histories, the

literature around Black and Arab radicals in Detroit has certainly appreciated their overlapping

politics.4 However, these narratives still primarily position Arab radicals or Black radicals at the

center, allowing their coalitional peers to appear on the sidelines of the narrative. Throughout

this thesis, I hope to have put into question the habit of constructing “Arab Detroit” and “Black

Detroit” as their own insular histories by following suit with the political practices and analyses

of the Third World coalition, who broke from their communities to build a coalition against

overwhelming internal and external pressures. By understanding how Arab Detroit and Black

Detroit are constituted in relation to legal whiteness, typified by the US state, we can articulate a

politics of turning back from state recognition.

Mutual struggle, coined by a contemporary Detroit activist Ras Jah-T in the

accompanying film to my thesis, Detroit, the Intersection, posits Black and Arab Detroiters as

allies in a struggle towards collective liberation from racial and imperial violence. Jah-T, a key

former organizer in the Detroit Will Breathe movement, argues that solidarity has become an

4 Dan Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998).

Pamela Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against

Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

inadequate framework for Black and Arab Detroiters in coalition. He says that he is not looking

for solidarity, per se, but:

“Mutual struggle between allies. I’m not really here for lip service or reform, I’m not for

being, like, ‘I feel your pain,’ I’m for, ‘Where are our enemies, let us mutually destroy

them, so that we can both survive.”

Jah-T’s attempt to nuance the rhetoric of solidarity puts into question the terms of coalitional

work: rather than patronizing solidarity, he calls for a politics of mutual struggle attuned to

capitalism and imperialism on a global scale. In doing so, Jah-T arrives at a politics similar to the

Third World coalition’s insistence on bridging Black liberation, Palestinian liberation and the

anti-war movement together. Jah-T and the Third World coalition did not aim their politics

primarily at achieving state recognition, but at turning towards intersecting struggles engendered

by global racial capitalism.

However, as many activists interviewed for Detroit, the Intersection point out, the

renewed coalition of mutual struggle must be accompanied by a deep interrogation of the

different intersectional positionalities that Black and Arab Detroiters historically held towards

whiteness. Detroit activists in 2020 pointed out endemic racism within the Arab

community—many community members responded with ambivalence towards police brutality

and the 2020 protests. Interestingly, Arab radicals recall similar reactions from the broader Arab

community after the 1967 Rebellion. To foster a coalition of mutual struggle between Arab and

Black Detroiters, activists recognize that their struggles cannot be conflated, because power does

not operate flatly. As shown throughout the thesis, while both Black and Arab migrants to

Detroit throughout the 20th century faced discrimination and exclusionary policies, the earliest

Arab migrants held a significantly closer proximity to legal whiteness. In fact, as I have shown,

much of the early mosque-building and Syrian nationalist organizing were premised upon that

proximity to legal whiteness, embedded in citizenship and naturalization laws. Black migrants

from the South, on the other hand, arrived in the wake of slavery and a violent Jim Crow South

to reside in poor, overcrowded Detroit neighborhoods. The legacy of these housing policies

remains ongoing: the bulk of the Arab community resides in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that

historically excluded Black migrants from residing within it. For any sort of coalition to work

today, the different positions that Arab and Black Detroiters hold towards whiteness must be

critically worked through, rather than ahistorically transcended.

As young Detroiters articulate their dreams for a liberated future, they would do well to

draw on the visions and strategies of the Third World coalition, reflecting upon their own lived

experiences to creatively articulate new strategies of struggle. While Arab and Black radicals did

not ultimately dismantle the implicated power structures of capitalism, racism, and imperialism,

their political practices left behind important blueprints for contemporary struggle. Insofar as

Palestine remains occupied and racial violence remains ongoing, young activists will always be

able to draw upon the organizing strategies of Detroit's Third World coalition. As such,

evaluating the success of Arab and Black radicals does not rest primarily on their ability to

dismantle the structures that oppress their peoples, but on their ability to inspire radical

possibilities for young Detroiters to reflect upon. To conclude, I leave the reader with the

addendum to this thesis, Detroit, the Intersection, where activists, young and old, put 2020 and

1967 in dialogue with one another.

https://vimeo.com/493409687

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