Highlights include Bernadette Devlin’s barnstorming visit to the U.S. in 1969, when she was given the keys to the city by the Mayor of New York – and promptly handed them over to Eamon McCann to give to the Black Panthers.
Writes Dooley, “Devlin was something of an oddity to the black Americans. Devlin recalled their astonishment towards her: ‘We didn’t know they made white people like you,’ they’d say to me – ‘Are you sure you’re not black?’ I’d say no, there was no question of my being black.'”
While membership in the Black Panther Party hasn’t proved an obstacle for the advancement of many prominent African-Americans, Bernadette McAliskey found her actions from the 1970s had enduring consequences. She was barred from entering the U.S. in 2003 and deported.
Dooley says civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland, a l_ The Commitments, viewed themselves “as the ‘Negroes.'”
He adds, “They sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ at their marches and, in early 1969, deliberately modeled a protest march on the lines of the Selma-Montgomery march. Oddly, perhaps, the Northern Ireland protesters identified more with black American protests than the myriad of protests in Europe that year – in Paris, Prague, Berlin, Rome and London. They saw their struggle as closer to that of African Americans in the U.S.”
Nationalist leaders John Hume and Gerry Adams have both been inspired by black civil rights champions.
In 1999, the early civil rights leader and peace process architect John Hume received the Martin Luther King Peace Award from the civil rights icon’s widow, Coretta Scott King.
Hume, then leader of the SDLP, said King’s philosophy of nonviolence and social justice was central to the Good Friday Agreement, which had been signed the previous year.
“We believed in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King,” said Hume. “We believed in inclusivity, not exclusivity. We believed that true unity among all Irish people was unity of the heart, not unity of the soil.”
On his first major visit to the U.S. in October 1994, in the immediate wake of the IRA ceasefire, Gerry Adams met Rosa Parks in Cleveland. The Sinn F