Oppression is colorblind
In the 1960s and '70s, Irish and black civil rights activists shared a common goal
by Brian Dooley

Protestors at the first filmed civil rights march in Northern Ireland, in
Derry on Oct. 5, 1968, echoed the demands of black Americans in calling for police reform, in chanting "One Man, One Vote," and in singing "We Shall Overcome."

Nationalists in Northern Ireland had been making the identification with black American civil rights activists for years, both in general and in very specific ways. Ties between the two struggles went back for over a century,
from when escaped black slave Frederick Douglass arrived in Ireland in 1845 to campaign for support for the anti-slavery movement in the U.S. He
addressed a political meeting with Daniel O'Connell at Liberty Hall in Dublin, and rallied support for the abolitionist cause in Tipperary, Wexford and Belfast.

By the mid-1960s, many young Nationalists in Northern Ireland drew parallels between their struggle and the push for civil rights in the U.S. In many ways the two movements had similar births -- both reacting to local government discrimination in jobs, housing and votes, both grappling with the limits of non-violent tactics.

Within a week of the Derry march, students at Queen's University Belfast had established a new organization, People's Democracy (PD), which -- under the influence of Michael Farrell -- consciously modeled itself on the U.S.'s Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). The Black Panther Party had been founded two years earlier in Oakland, Calif., by students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like Seale and Newton, many in PD were from the first generation in their families to go on to higher education and retained a strong identification with their working-class origins.

The Panthers began as a police monitoring organization, advising people of
their civil rights and grabbing media attention by parading -- legally -- with guns. Much of their political philosophy echoed that of Marcus Garvey, the father of black nationalism in America. During the 1920s, Garvey modeled his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) on the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Republican Army, publicly supported Republican hunger striker Terence MacSwiney and drew on the political organizing principles of Eamon de Valera.

Black radicals in the U.S. kept a close eye on Ireland in the late 1960s. "All
our sympathies were with the IRA -- even with the Provisionals -- because they took such a clear-cut position on armed struggle," recalled Kathleen
Cleaver, a senior figure in the Black Panther Party's International Section.

Leading black activist Angela Davis recalled "meetings around the situation
in Northern Ireland. The question that was posed was that whether or not in fact Northern Ireland belonged politically to the Third World because of the situation of colonization, because of the continued repression and because of the similarities and the way people -- Catholics -- were treated in Northern Ireland."

In 1969, the Black Panther newspaper carried a prominent article titled
"Ireland Oppressed Fight Back." The piece noted that non-violent protest in
Northern Ireland had failed, and praised those prepared to use force. "Apparently tired of being pushed around by reactionaries without making any retaliation, the Ulster Civil Rights Movement has started to fight back. The rank and file have given practical evidence of their ability to struggle by routing reactionaries and armed police in several battles."

But both movements struggled with definitions of violent and non-violent
protest. The guns brandished by the Black Panthers were unloaded, while
minutes from a 1970 meeting of the local PD branch in Coalisland record that "a long, confused discussion took place [on self-defense] with some members unable to distinguish between defense and attack."

In Boston in 1969, PD's Eilis McDermott met local Black Panther Party
leadership and updated them on the situation in Northern Ireland, after
which she was made an "honorary Black Panther sister." A couple of years
later, PD's most prominent member, Bernadette Devlin, cemented links with black radicals by briefing Huey Newton and visiting leading black activist Angela Davis in jail. Davis had been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, been described by President Richard Nixon as a "terrorist," and was in jail awaiting trial for murder and kidnapping when Devlin visited her in February 1971.

PD's newspaper regularly featured Davis's case, repeatedly called for her
release and described her as "a symbol of all political prisoners, from
[black militant] Ruchell Magee to [Irish Republican] Billy McKee." Davis
was eventually acquitted of all charges, but Devlin's visit to her in jail
caused apoplexy among conservative Irish Americans already upset that Devlin had handed the keys of New York City to the Black Panthers.

Devlin had been presented with the keys of the city by Mayor John Lindsay in 1969, and promptly passed them to Eamonn McCann to present to the Black Panther Party, causing a fair-sized stir in the media. The New York Times reported on 3 March 1970 that McCann handed over "a golden key to the city given by Mayor Lindsay to Bernadette Devlin, the Irish civil rights leader, `as a gesture of solidarity with the black liberation and revolutionary movements in America,' to Black Panther Robert Bay, and quoted a statement sent by Devlin and read at the ceremony declaring, `I return what is rightfully theirs [America's poor], this symbol of the freedom of New York.'"

Although Devlin became something of a legend in black political circles,
links between activists in Northern Ireland and the U.S. were not confined to the radical wings of the civil rights movements.

Two weeks after Bloody Sunday in 1972, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, dispatched senior officials to Belfast to take part in protest marches and to speak at a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) meeting.

Bernard Lee, a veteran of the Atlanta sit-ins and a close associate of King's, was part of the group which included Juanita Abernathy, wife of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, another key King confidante. Juanita Abernathy told the NICRA conference that "the struggle for Irish freedom is the same struggle as that going on in the United States."



Brian Dooley is author of Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in
Northern Ireland and Black America (Pluto Press, 1998; available from Stylus Distributors, 800-232-0223 at $18.95).

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