My Issue With Nyle Fort

By NATHAN SMITH ‘20

A few weeks ago, I looked up from a calendar notice on my phone to get my first view of Nyle Fort, this year’s Martin Luther King Day assembly speaker. Mr. Fort wasted no time warming up; he began and ended with energy and passion. Touching on various points of Dr. King’s legacy, Fort argued that the narrative generally taught about Dr. King’s fight is a fairy tale that highlights the non-violent aspects of his resistance and glosses over the grim reality of his struggle. Fort spoke eloquently of the tragic story of racism in America, past and present, and of Dr. King’s fight for civil rights, driving home the point that the fight was, and remains, treacherous. He painted Dr. King in the image of a modern-day militant freedom fighter.

As I listened attentively to Fort’s speech, I appreciated his perspective and message. Hoping to learn more about him, I looked online and discovered, to my distress, that while Fort ardently champions social justice causes, his past statements and actions have caused some watchdog groups to label him as anti-Semitic. 

Fort is a leader of an organization called the Dream Defenders, which has praised the terrorist tactics of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose strategies include “hijackings, assassinations, car bombings, suicide bombings, paramilitary operations against civilian and military targets.” The Dream Defenders’ platform stipulates that by supporting Israel, the United States is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” stating that Israel is involved in state-sponsored “ethnic cleansing.” To bolster this claim, the Dream Defenders falsely asserts that Israel sanctions attacks on Palestinian school children with “tear gas and rubber bullets as they walk home from school.” Turning its position into an ideological wedge, Dream Defenders claims that any person who does not support its anti-Israel stance “no longer stand[s] with Black people.” Far from disavowing these positions, Fort stated in a video available on YouTube that “Zionism has become a euphemism for conquest and colonization and removal, that is, of Muslim land and its people.” 

In poignant contrast, Dr. Martin Luther King marched, literally, arm-in-arm with Jewish civil rights leaders and had words of praise for the State of Israel. Just weeks before his tragic death, in the shadow of the Six-Day War in Israel in 1967, Dr. King delivered a speech to the Rabbinical Assembly in which he stated that “peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity.  I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.” 

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s garnered enormous support from Jews, who contributed legal expertise, money, solidarity, and community activism to aid black Americans in their fight against repression. The alliance between Jews and blacks accelerated the pace of the Civil Rights Movement and achieved tangible results. Jews constituted a disproportionately large amount of the white population in the Civil Rights Movement. More than half of all white lawyers who travelled to the South to defend civil rights were Jews, and Jews donated up to three-quarters of all money donated to civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, established in 1909) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, established in 1960). Many of the journalists who reported on civil rights were Jewish, while polls and election results also indicate that Jews largely supported candidates who supported civil rights. Jewish lawyers worked in concert with black lawyers on civil rights cases to combat discrimination and advocate for desegregation. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black civil rights leaders recognized and appreciated the significant support and friendship of the Jewish community.

Unfortunately, however, this powerful alliance between Jews and blacks ran into roadblocks that eventually weakened the alliance considerably. Some in the black community saw the roles of Jews who became prominent in the movement as too overbearing and controlling; black activists wanted to feel more in charge of their own struggles for equal rights. Others in the black community were impatient with the pacifist activism of Martin Luther King Jr. Some black people in the North saw the their ghettos as just as repressive as the blatant segregated conditions in the South; they were angry at the glacial pace of change toward better circumstances and opportunities, and they urged more militant responses. Some blacks responded to the rallying cries of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, a group in which the ideas of black pride and nationalism mixed in with the religion of Islam, and the anti-semitism of those men and their followers alarmed Jews. With a 1964 poll’s determining that 47 percent of blacks were anti-semitic, it’s clear why Jews were hurt, angry, and unable to support the segment of the black community affiliated the Nation of Islam and heeded its anti-semitism. Over time, many Jews withdrew public and financial support from civil rights causes, shifting their efforts to “Jewish” concerns: the plight of Soviet Jews, and the state of Israel, particularly after Israel’s wars in 1967 and 1973. 

As anyone who has seen the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary will attest, Nyle Fort was correct to point out that Dr. King’s legacy is much more than the uplifting rhetoric of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. King’s fight was an extremely serious and risky endeavor. However, while Nyle Fort has secured a place for himself in the modern-day discussion about racial justice, I believe his rhetoric and associations do a grave injustice to Dr. King’s legacy.

As was true in Dr. King’s day, both systemic anti-black racism and anti-Semitism remain a stain on the fabric of our diverse nation: police killings of unarmed black people; murders of Jewish people in their houses of worship; race-based injustices, implicit and explicit, throughout our schools, healthcare system, and economy; and Nazi’s chanting “Jews will not replace us” and being hailed as “good people” by the President of the United States. The struggle against bigotry and ignorance is with us today, which is why it remains critical that we honor Dr. King.

Obviously, Nyle Fort has a profound understanding of many aspects of Dr. King’s rhetoric, but he clearly missed out on a big one: groups that are targets of any form of bigotry should stand together. While the State of Israel can rightly be criticized for some aspects of its handling of the Palestinian crisis, Nyle Fort’s driving a wedge between Jews who support Israel and black civil rights activists and repeating false and anti-Semitic tropes is, at best, counterproductive, and at worst, its own form of bigotry.   

In his frenetic struggle against injustice today, Nyle Fort’s conception of Dr. King’s legacy has become forgotten the time in the history of the Civil Rights Movement when Jews and black people fought as allies. I hope that Dr. King’s vision of unity between Jews and people of color will wash over Mr. Ford’s consciousness and help him become a more unifying presence – in the true image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.