Minister Farrakhan’s Encounter With Anne Frank—in Birmingham?

by Tingba Muhammad

Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, is the place where savage whites sicced their savage dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on women and children churchgoers in May of 1963, presenting to the world the reality of Black misery in America. News footage of the pogrom in that Birmingham park shocked the world, proving that white supremacy was at the very core of American society. Kelly Ingram Park is holy land.

Minister Louis Farrakhan’s recent pilgrimage to Alabama to highlight the very same issue of Black voting rights that sent whites into a violent rage 50 years ago had powerful symbolic meaning. A coalition of wise leaders, including Alabama state senator Hank Sanders, Tuskegee mayor Johnny Ford, and Dr. Charles Steele, the CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), invited The Minister, who together reclaimed the 4-acre park and gave Blacks a powerful new vision of their role and mission in this final movement for our ultimate freedom.

At the same time, Blacks watched in perplexed awe as Richard Friedman, the executive director of the Birmingham Jewish Federation, actually scolded the Black leaders as if they were his own personal negro property. This should not have been a surprise. Research has now revealed that Jews—our long-claimed “best friends”—had actually dominated the African slave trade and owned MOST of the cotton plantations right here in Alabama. A slave to this satanic Jewish tradition, Friedman had to admit to Jewish Week newspaper that his people actually support the Supreme Court’s ruling to eviscerate the legal protections of Black voting rights in America. Dr. King could easily have been speaking of Birmingham Jews when he said, “White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor.”

But that was not the only anti-Black scheming that was going on in Birmingham. Buried in Richard Friedman’s whining diatribe was this interesting tidbit: “Yet, there was Farrakhan…speaking not too far away from a tree planted in the park commemorating Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who perished in the Holocaust whose diary has inspired millions.”

Before Friedman made it known, Blacks had no idea that a tree in Kelly Ingram Park had been planted and dedicated to a Dutch-speaking German Jewish girl whose family was victimized by the Nazi regime. Though it was no doubt an horrific experience, it happened in Europe and had no connection to Birmingham, to Alabama, or to the Civil Rights Movement at all. In fact, Anne Frank, who is said to have been murdered at age 15, never got closer to this country than Amsterdam, 4,500 miles away. Yet this Kelly Ingram Park tree bearing her name was used by Friedman to suggest—get this—that Minister Farrakhan’s presence in the Alabama park desecrates this German girl’s legacy!

Anne Frank is not unknown to Black Americans. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was translated into English in 1952, and if they stayed in school long enough the book would have been required reading. And the classroom assignment was probably accompanied by some form of the solemn reflection received by one of our NOI researchers from his high school English teacher: “This is one of the best and most important books you could ever read.” The insertion of the book into the American curriculum is to generate in Black children a sympathy for the Jewish girl as she recounts her and her family’s two years in a secret apartment hiding from their Nazi oppressors. And through her experiences we are to come away believing that Blacks and Jews share a common history of suffering and oppression, even though Jews actually were the architects of slavery, Jim Crow oppression, Black sharecropping, and white supremacy here in America.

But it is a measure of pure Jewish power that these same Black American students know nothing of the experiences of Harriet Ann Jacobs, a little Black girl who carries the Jewish name of her owner and father. She was sold to another cruel white man who threatened to sell her children if she refused his sexual advances. She spent seven years hiding in an attic crawl space right here in America! Our young sister Harriet wrote of her horrific experience in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. Here she writes of her escape from her white tormenter:

“I passed a wretched night; for the heat of the swamp, the mosquitos, and the constant terror of snakes, had brought on a burning fever. I had just dropped asleep, when they came and told me it was time to go back to that horrid swamp. I could scarcely summon courage to rise. But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.”

In her lonely trauma a young Black girl leaves a powerful testament of her experiences for the future generations of Black children, who ought to know of and learn from her very real and widespread American pain. But somehow a Jewish girl’s Holocaust in another hemisphere replaced the Black Holocaust, in schools here at home.

But the insult only increases. In the shade of that “Anne Frank tree” stands the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls about the same age as Harriet—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair—were blown to bits in a white terrorist attack on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963. And yet 49 years after that horrifying slaughter, there is no memorial for them in Kelly Ingram Park! Birmingham’s Jews have installed one for their suffering German girl before our murdered Black girls have theirs.

So how did a German girl come to have a tree planted in Black sacred soil in America? We KNOW that there is no memorial honoring the lives of our four little girls at the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam; nor was one ever contemplated. Turns out, the Anne Frank tree idea was advanced in 2010 and spearheaded by the same Birmingham Jewish Federation that now uses the tree as a rhetorical weapon against Minister Farrakhan and Alabama’s Black leaders!

For more on this topic see the Nation of Islam book series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. Download the free guide by clicking here.

To purchase the series click here.