An Ambivalent Zionism: Walter White, Black Internationalism, and the Politics of Partition

This article examines the long-term Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s, Walter White, role in the partition of Palestine and subsequent visit to Israel with his wife and activist, Poppy Cannon. This article reads White’s and Cannon’s respective autobiographical writings, unpublished articles, and correspondence to unearth what I am calling an ambivalent Zionism. This essay uses the term ambivalent because White’s critique of the Israeli state was motivated less by an ideologically coherent anti-colonial politics of the Nasserist, Pan-Africanist, or communist variety, and more by liberal anti-segregation politics which ultimately precluded him from imagining alternatives to Jewish nationhood. By contrasting White with his more left-wing and pro-Israel peers, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, I argue for re-periodizing Black anti-Zionism to before 1967, when most accounts of Black anti-Zionism begin.