Black-Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson-Gaza Era

Leading into summer 2014, no one could have predicted the actions that pushed Black-Palestinian solidarity into mainstream focus. The police killing of Michael Brown and subsequent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked mass action across the country just as US outcry against Israel's fifty-day war on the Gaza Strip reached its fever pitch. Protesters from Oakland to New York chanted from Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime and began to highlight connections between the two struggles. There are many lesser-known accounts as well. On the first day of a woman of color delegation to Palestine, Angela Davis recounted that one thing that sustained her time in prison was a letter that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails had managed to pass from their families in the West Bank to her colleagues in the US. Present-day developments in Palestinian solidarity with the Black struggle represent an explicit focus on anti-Black state violence and anti-Blackness within Palestinian American and Arab American communities.