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By Benay Mix
Upon listening to of her dying, Mawusi Ture, sister of the late Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), lamented:
“I’m saddened that I simply discovered previously hour our beloved sister and comrade, Ethel Minor has joined the Ancestors. A few of you which can be concerned within the Motion, particularly the solidarity with Palestine/anti-zionist motion will know of Sis. Ethel’s brave political work. She is finest identified for being the person who led the way in which to politically educating SNCC and the broader civil rights motion about Palestine, Zionism, and so forth.”
“Might she Relaxation in Energy,” Ture concluded, “could we proceed her work ‘For a Zionist-free Palestine.’” Mawusi Ture has continued the solidarity work begun by her late brother. She requested me to write down this text, which has been each a problem and an honor.
On September 21, 2022, Ethel Minor made her transition to a different world. An African revolutionary born in Chicago, Illinois, she studied mass communications in Columbia, South America in the course of the early Sixties. There she met Palestinians who had fled their homeland in the course of the Nakba of 1948. The relationships she developed influenced her advocacy work when she returned to the USA.
In 1964 Minor moved to New York the place she served as one in every of Malcolm X’s secretaries and translators. She additionally labored because the workplace supervisor of the Group of Afro-American Unity, and as a liaison to the African, Spanish talking and Arab/Palestinian communities in New York, and to the United Nations and the media.
In 1966, at 33 years of age, Minor moved to Atlanta the place she joined the nationwide employees of the Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She turned Kwame Ture’s secretary, editor of SNCC’s publication, and served as a employees member in its Nationwide Communications Division from 1966 to 1968.
By 1967 with the outbreak of the six-day “Arab-Israeli Battle,” SNCC had begun linking the Black freedom battle in the USA to anticolonial struggles world wide. As an editor, Minor wrote an article condemning the Zionist state’s violence in direction of Palestinians.
Predictably, many reproached her language as antisemitic, and even some SNCC donors withdrew their assist. In response, SNCC launched a follow-up assertion on August 15, 1967. Entitled “The Center East Disaster,” it included lots of the factors made in Minor’s article, however added details about the Holocaust, suppression of American Jewish voices that protested Zionism, and assist given to Zionism by the USA. It concludes:
“Gents, it’s clearly a query of proper and mistaken. Within the Center East, America has labored with and used the highly effective organized Zionist motion to take over one other folks’s residence and to switch these folks with a companion who has nicely served America’s function, a companion that may assist the USA and different white western international locations to use and management the nations of Africa, the Center East and Africa!”
In “Third World Alliances: Arab-American Activists in American Universities, 1967-1973,” Pamela Pennock describes the shut relationship that grew between SNCC activists and the Group of Arab College students (OAS). Certainly, OAS members defended SNCC’s place, and at its 1967 conference handed a decision figuring out “the underlying similarities between the persevering with battle of the Palestinian Arabs in Occupied Palestine in opposition to Zionist invasion and exploitation, and the ever-increasing resistance of the Afro-Individuals in the USA to an influence construction of inequality.”
Minor’s alliance-building prolonged to Reies López Tijerina’s La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, shaped to reclaim Spanish and Mexican land grants in New Mexico. As Maria Varela recollects:
“In 1967 SNCC despatched a delegation of 5 of us to attend a multi-cultural convention convened by Reies Lopez Tijerina in Albuquerque to signal a Treaty of Peace, Concord and Mutual Help. Ralph Featherstone, Willie Ricks, Ethel Minor, Freddie Greene and I made up the delegation. This was most likely the primary time that lots of the Alianza’s membership had met with black people. Ethel put everybody relaxed when she spoke to the conference of over 500 folks in Spanish. All of us went as much as the mountains later that week, the place we got here throughout a household who had been admirers of Malcolm X and had a set of reports clips about him. Ethel was astounded and felt a bond with these people as she was near Malcolm.”
Shortly after Minor’s dying, one other fighter died. On November 3, 2022, Fatima Bernawi, the primary Palestinian girl political prisoner of the fashionable Palestinian revolutionary period, made her transition on the age of 83. The 2 girls won’t have identified one another, however spiritually they shared each African descent and participation within the battle for the liberation of Palestine.
It was becoming that Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Community revealed a eulogy for Bernawi, a participant within the Palestinian prisoners’ motion and life-long fighter for justice. Born in Jerusalem to a Nigerian father and Palestinian mom, she got here of age in a group from sub-Saharan Africa who had come to Jerusalem for pilgrimage or commerce after which remained within the metropolis to boost their households.
After Bernawi joined the Fateh motion, she turned one of many first girls to plan armed battle in Palestine, “[She] joined the Palestinian revolution at an early stage, and had a key function in establishing the organizational and guerrilla cells of the Fatah motion contained in the occupied territories,” the Fateh motion stated.
An Israeli navy court docket sentenced her to life in jail for planting explosives in Zion cinema which was standard amongst Israeli troopers in West Jerusalem. On the time it was exhibiting a movie that glorified Zionist aggression.
“Together with Dalal al-Mughrabi, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, and Leila Khaled,” Samidoun’s eulogy concludes, “Bernawi remained an emblem of Palestinian girls’s steadfastness and dedication by all means to liberate their homeland from the river to the ocean.” She was launched on November 11, 1977 as a part of a prisoner launch settlement.
The paths of each girls by no means crossed in individual, however the struggles that they had been very a lot part of crossed usually. On the event of Bernawi’s passing, Inside Our Lifetime—United for Palestine recalled that in August 1968, talking on the OAS conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Kwame Ture declared, “The youth are going to guide their Arab world to victory. They’re going to guide it as Fatima Bernawi is doing…Sure, you must all change into Woman Fatima.”
Extra not too long ago, it was apt that the Jacksonville Group Motion Committee (JCAC) additionally paid tribute to Fatima Bernawi. A Black-led grassroots group created to combat for justice and liberation, members stick with it Minor’s work by inserting Palestine on the core of worldwide battle. “Fatima was a freedom fighter and he or she taught us how one can combat! And we’re gonna combat all day and evening till we get it proper!,” JCAC declared shortly after the resistance fighter’s dying.
Bernawi was a “first”—the primary Palestinian girl political prisoner within the trendy battle. She accepted that title with extra grace than many such “firsts” do at this time. She understood that she owed a lot to the ladies who got here earlier than her, and hoped that her legacy would encourage those that come after. In response to Samidoun, she was all the time cautious “to quote fellow Palestinian girls who had been jailed within the 20 years of occupation prior, together with many ladies detained, held in compelled labor camps and subjected to harsh violence by occupation troopers in the course of the Nakba,” in addition to others who had been subjected to harsh punishment by the Zionists.
Of their tribute to Ethel Minor, the All-African Individuals’s Revolutionary Social gathering (AAPRP) famous that she, too, appreciated the worth of collective organizing. “The discharge of the record of organizers and organizations she helped,” reads the assertion, “and the documentation of their and her contributions to and achievements within the Motion will shock the world, and alter the historic narrative, eternally.”
Minor was a “quiet storm,” the tribute says, who in her low-key method made historical past. “The discharge of the record of organizers and organizations she helped, and the documentation of their and her contributions to and achievements within the Motion will shock the world, and alter the historic narrative, eternally.”
With a view to really honor her legacy, “armies of African, Palestinian, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Latino, European, and Different younger, revolutionary girls should be impressed, enabled, and empowered to assist archive, write, and movie Ethel’s story.” Hopefully, these tales, too, will cross borders to incorporate her work with Palestinians, Columbians, the Nation of Islam, SNCC, Alianza, so in that method, her world perspective will stick with it.
– Benay Mix earned her doctorate in American Research from the College of New Mexico. Her scholarly works embrace Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Phrases’: ‘Located Data’ within the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this text to The Palestine Chronicle.
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