Why Many Black Americans Feel Solidarity With Palestinians

In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him. “I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion...