MAHA NASSAR This article examines early Palestinian engagements with multiple facets of the Black American struggle for freedom through a content analysis of influential Palestinian press outlets in Arabic prior to 1967. It argues that, since the 1930s, Palestinian intellectuals with strong anti-colonial views linked anti-Black racism in the United States to larger imperial and Cold War dynamics, and that they connected Black American mobilizations against racism to decolonization movements around the world. This article also examines Mahmoud Darwish’s early analytical writings on race as a social construct in both the U.S. and Israeli contexts. Understanding these early engagements sheds light on subsequent developments in Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity and on Palestinian Afro-Arab cultural imaginaries. IN 1966 PALESTINIAN POET AND ESSAYIST Mahmoud Darwish, at the time a citizen of Israel, wrote a column in the Communist newspaper al-Ittihad titled “Letter to a Negro.” In it, he expressed his sense of connection to Black Americans, and particularly to writer James Baldwin. “When I read the book by your gifted writer James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name,” Darwish wrote, “I felt as if James were writing about me personally, about the ‘Negroes’ in Israel, making only minor adjustments to the details in the picture. When he wrote about love, he was narrating my love story. And when he wrote about hate, he reflected my hate. ” 1 This passage not only illustrates Darwish’s awareness of Black oppression in the United States, but also highlights the specific connections he made between Baldwin’s analytical writings on race and his own experience as a minoritized citizen of Israel. Darwish was arguably the first Palestinian to do so, building on a longer history of Palestinian intellectual and discursive engagement with the Black freedom struggle. A number of scholars have recently shed new light on how Palestinians and Black Americans have compared their respective struggles for freedom. 2 Their studies generally trace the rise of Black-Palestinian solidarity to the period after 1967, paying less attention to earlier periods of engagement and also overlooking those Palestinians who remained inside the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line) after the State of Israel was established. Moreover, given the dominance of English-language sources in this body of scholarship, several important Palestinian perspectives and voices, particularly those of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel, have not been adequately investigated. Conceptually, while race as an analytical framework is increasingly the subject of Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLVIII, No. 4 (Summer 2019), p. 17, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2019 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.17. Summer 2019 || 17 Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement prior to 1967