A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories

A COUNTRY CALLED

AMREEKA

Arab Roots, American Stories

Alia Malek

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data

Malek, Alia.

A country called Amreeka: Arab roots, American stories / Alia Malek.

p. cm.

1. Arab Americans—Case studies. 2. Arab Americans—Social conditions—Case studies.

3. Immigrants—United States—Case studies. I. Title.

E184.A65M35 2009

973’.04927–dc22               2008055091

ISBN 978-1-4165-8972-3

ISBN 978-1-4165-9268-6 (ebook)

To

Leyla, for believing

Rana, for reading

Hussam, for faith

Samar, for common sense

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Amreeka is the formal Arabic word for America, the country that approximately a million immigrants from the Arabic-speaking world have come to in search of a home for over a century. The word also represents a place and a myriad of experiences about which Americans—including many Arab Americans themselves—know very little. This book is an attempt to populate Amreeka with human faces, emotions, thoughts, and stories, adding another chapter to the story of the country that we all share.

This book traverses American history as it unfolded during and after the 1960s, stopping in moments of time that are important from an Arab-American perspective. Some of these dates are significant to all Americans, others barely familiar, and yet others virtually unknown. Each chapter introduces a different person, whose eyes and skin serve as our vicarious guides. I have chosen an ensemble cast to account for the diversity within Arab America itself. There are Christians and Muslims of different sects; naturalized and native-born citizens; newcomers and old-timers; Midwesterners, East Coasters, Southerners, Californians, and Texans; urban, suburban, and rural residents; Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, and Yemenis; women and men; rich and poor; adults and children; lovers and fighters.

Today there are at least an estimated 3.5 Million Americans of Arabic-speaking descent, and they live in all fifty states. They are neighbors, classmates, coworkers, voters, consumers, producers, heroes, relatives, and friends. The purpose of this book isn’t to separate them out but to fold their experience into the mosaic of American history and deepen our understanding of who we Americans are.

While there are reports that Arabs came to the Americas with the Spanish explorers in the fifteenth century as slaves, the appearance of Arabic-speaking peoples in significant numbers in the United States may be divided into three eras: the years of the Great Migration from 1880 to 1924, during which mostly Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian Christians arrived; the Nativist period from 1924 to 1965, in which Arab and other immigration was discouraged; and the period from 1965 to the present, in which immigrants from all over the world arrived.

The 1960s serve as the starting point of this book because Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965. Like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, this act was meant to redress past wrongs and move the United States toward a more equitable society.

Since its passage and until 2008, another 30,934,631 people have again arrived on American shores, 841,501 of whom have come from Arabic-speaking countries. These newer Arab immigrants have been different in many ways from their predecessors. Most significantly, many of them have been skilled professionals who were born or came of age after the end of colonialism and the rise of Arab nationalism, and many—nearly 60 percent—have been Muslims. Two important clarifications are important to note here: Arabs account for only about 25 percent of Muslims in America, and Arab-American Muslims still account for only about 24 percent of all Americans believed to be of Arab descent. In addition, technological advances like the airplane, phone, fax, Internet, and satellite television have increasingly shrunk the chasm between the Old and the New World. The post-1965 Arab immigrants also arrived at a time when assimilation pressures were relatively less than before 1924. Together with the other post-1965 immigrants, this wave has dramatically changed the racial, ethnic, and religious makeup of the United States.

For many of us living today in our post-civil rights, hyperconnected, and globalized world, it is impossible to imagine what America, let alone Amreeka, was like before 1965. To make this earlier time tangible, I’ve chosen to open the book with a prologue set in Birmingham, Alabama, where tragedy in 1963 sparked the legislative reforms that followed in 1964 and 1965.

Similarly, each chapter will move us through American history as the country contends with changes in its laws, society, and place in this world. The effects of these dynamics on Arab Americans have been mainly, though not exclusively, explored in academic contexts. This book invites readers to experience these elements vicariously by living the lives of the Arab Americans who have generously shared themselves in these pages.

In this book, readers will spend the 1960s with a football player in Birmingham and a feisty teacher and mother in Baltimore; the 1970s will take them to the auto factories of Detroit for the energy crisis and the streets of Chicago for the hostage crisis; the 1980s will introduce Americans to one of Amreeka’s biggest tragedies in California and let them experience adolescence, Arab-American style, in Texas; the 1990s will reveal how racism can lie just beneath the surface in a small town and how freedom to be yourself can change depending on where you are. At the same time we’ll explore the first Gulf War and the Oklahoma City bombing; in the final three chapters of the 2000s, we’ll encounter the sharp smarts of two political women whose stories illustrate both sides of election 2000, the loss of a community in Brooklyn in 2001, and the journey of a soldier in Baghdad in 2003.

All these stories are meant to answer collectively this question: What does American history look and feel like in the eyes and skin of Arab Americans?

A Country Called

AMREEKA

In the Great Migration of 1880–1924, during which 20 million immigrants entered the United States, approximately 95,000 of them came from Arabic-speaking countries. By 1924, they and their progeny were 200,000 strong.

Before 1924, 90 percent of the Arabic-speaking peoples who came to the States were Christian and mostly Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians. Many of their Jewish compatriots also emigrated at the same time. Their homelands had been brought under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, which both tolerated and persecuted its religious minorities. When the ban on Christian and Jewish conscription into the Ottoman army was lifted early in the twentieth century, their emigration hastened.

For the most part, these Christian Syrians, as they were called, were not skilled laborers. Once they came to the United States, they rarely returned to their homelands. They identified primarily along village lines and only after independence did they develop Syrian and Lebanese identities. While Arabic food, religious rites, and language peppered their lives, it was not and is not a given that they would identify themselves as Arabs.

Many of the Arabic-speaking immigrants settled in major cities and worked as peddlers, selling household goods door to door. Because of the nature of peddling, they also worked in areas not well served by stores, and so unlike other immigrant groups, Syrians could also be found in every state in the Union, in places where no other Syrian or immigrant families lived.

But there were many in America—in both its cities and rural areas—who disdained the newly arrived immigrants and who campaigned to end immigration of peoples they said were inherently un-American.

Seeking to replenish America with the same racial stock of the founding fathers, Congress in response passed a series of laws in 1917, 1921, and 1924 that slowed immigration from southern and eastern Europe while allowing for immigration from northern and western Europe. These laws also greatly reduced the immigration of Arabic-speaking peoples and outright excluded Asians, though Chinese and Japanese immigrants had also already arrived.

The Great Migration was over. Immigration to the United States from anywhere but the desirable areas of Europe would not resume until America—through a series of legislative revolutions in the 1960s—was forced to decide whether equality would remain merely a notion in its founding documents or whether it had a greater role to play as the nation emerged as a world superpower. The one exception worth noting here is the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, which allotted 2,000 visas during 1954–1958 for Palestinians displaced by the creation of the state of Israel.

The crusade for Civil Rights and the changes to American society that it ushered in had been escalating, ever since African Americans who had died for European equality had returned home to find their own country still hostile to them. They and their supporters began to experience victories in their struggle, particularly in the courts; in 1954, they achieved their greatest judicial win. The highest court in the land decided Brown v. Board of education, declaring that separate—segregation—could never be equal. But the lived reality of many African Americans in the country hardly changed immediately. Lawmakers and those who had put them in power needed a push to convince them that the South—where segregation was a way of life—would not come around on its own.

That catalyst would finally come in the spring and summer of 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama.

SEPTEMBER 15, 1963

Prologue

On December 4, 1948, in Birmingham, Alabama, Ed Salem, native son and sophomore left halfback for the University of Alabama, was not going to get dressed and get on the field unless Coach Red Drew let in Ed’s Lebanese friends from the city’s South-side free of charge.

Some of the guys from the neighborhood had already managed to get into Legion Field by selling Cokes and programs in the stands, though they were really there to watch one of their own play in the big game against Auburn University.

Salem! Coach yelled. Get your clothes on!

No sir, not till you open that gate and let our friends come in and see our ball game, Ed responded, referring to himself and the other Lebanese Southside kid on the team, Mike Mizerany.

Let ’em buy a ticket, Coach said.

They don’t have the money to buy a ticket, Ed explained.

The 46,000 people who did have tickets, however, were already packed into the bleachers. It was the biggest crowd ever to attend a sports event in Alabama, and they were hungry for the action to start between the state’s two football giants, who had not played against each other in forty-one famine-like years.

In a series that had started in 1893, Alabama’s Crimson Tide and Auburn’s Tigers had last met in 1907 in a draw. After that tie game, a disagreement about the amount of expenses to be paid to players, as well as about who was sufficiently neutral to officiate the games, had been enough to destroy all athletic relations between the two schools. The Alabama legislature had tried to force the universities to play again by threatening to cut off their funding, but to no avail, and so generations of Tigers and Tide had remained deprived of the kind of purpose an annual contest could bestow on their football-watching lives.

Only months before did both schools’ presidents finally decide there was no actual reason not to play each other. The heads of the respective student governments met in a field in Birmingham, broke ground, threw in a hatchet, and buried it deep. Their teams would meet and unleash the pent-up rivalry not in Tuscaloosa or Auburn, but on Legion Field in Birmingham. At last, the day had come.

Eleven thousand of the schools’ 17,000 students had tickets to be inside the stadium, while the other 35,000 seats had been saved for Alabama dignitaries—Governor Folsom and his wife were there—and alumni, though not even all of the old grads could be accommodated. The Lebanese guys with whom Ed had grown up certainly weren’t Alabama dignitaries, and they were hardly alumni; most of them weren’t able to afford college. Ed and Mike were both at the university on athletic scholarships. The team’s families, of course, had tickets. Ed’s mother, Zaki Zarzour Salem, was there with his siblings Helen and George, as was his high-school sweetheart Ann Dugger.

The fervor had spread far beyond Alabama’s borders. All of Dixie’s eyes were in fact watching. The game was the hottest show in town, and a week earlier scalpers were already getting ten dollars a ticket, twice face value. Alumni, journalists, and sports fanatics from across Alabama and the South had poured into Birmingham, filling its hotels to the roofs, crowding its cabs, and jamming its streets. The city was awash with the schools’ colors—Crimson and White, orange and blue.

The old-timers who had played in the ’07 game met up in friendly reunions around town. Alumni of other years’ teams had come as well, including Johnny Mack Brown, the Western actor who traveled all the way from Hollywood, Congressman Sam Hobbs, and kentucky coach Paul Bear Bryant—none having forgotten his Crimson blood.

The real zeal had of course been on campus. The night before in Tuscaloosa, students danced hand-in-hand around a leaping bonfire. At the rally, brave talk and stories from the coaches, pep squads, and campus beauties had been heard while the band struck up old tunes that sent Tide spirits riding high, wide, and handsome.

Saturday finally arrived with weather that was crisp and cool. Fans took over the streets, waving colorful banners at a parade thrown in both schools’ honor in Birmingham. Both Auburn and Alabama brought their bands, pep squads, and noisemaking power that morning for the 10:30 A.M. spectacle, whooping it up in advance of the 2 P.M. game. Regardless of the outcome, the Birmingham News predicted it would be a game they’d all be telling their grand-and great-grandchildren about.

Ed and the rest of the team had stayed away from the hullabaloo on Coach’s orders, spending Friday evening in after a light limbering workout that afternoon. They had taken the bus from Tuscaloosa that morning and as they rode into Birmingham, they caught a glimpse of some of ’Bama’s TNT signs—Tide Nip Tigers—plastered all over downtown store windows and lining the streets approaching Legion Field.

Alabama’s record that season so far was 5-4-1—having just beaten Florida 34–28 the weekend before, in a game where the newspapers credited Ed with shouldering much of the attack. Auburn had been having a tougher year with a 1–7–1 record.

Though the Crimson Tide was a two-touchdown favorite to win, their punter, tackle, and sub fullback were all unable to play that day because of injuries. Those setbacks didn’t worry some of Ed’s teammates, who argued Auburn’s team was just a bunch of country boys, but Ed took nothing for granted and stayed focused. He was there to do a job, and he was going to do it right. All Coach had to do was let the Southside guys in for free.

With the crowd near frenzy and a chance at legend on the line, Coach Drew had to relent and let the Lebanese boys into the field. Ed reciprocated and pulled on his jersey and gear. The team was ready to play.

The boys entered a soggy Legion Field under a bright sky; the crowd’s hearts and throats screamed for their teams, but they stayed orderly. On hand was Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who had already declared he would not tolerate drunkenness or drinking at this game, which the papers had warned would earn a man a night in his Bastille.

That day, Ed was wearing number 14. The players changed numbers with each game so spectators would have to buy a new program; times were tough even for football both during the war and after, and a lot of boys who might have played were away in the service. The university had recruited players from the North, luring them down with lucrative scholarships. ’Bama even had a one-handed Polish kid from Ohio playing right end. Ed had been spared the war because of his flat feet, which were terrible for marching but never slowed him down running a football field.

The first quarter started with Ed on the bench. In the game’s opening minutes, Auburn fumbled deep in its territory. Alabama recovered the ball and within three plays and before the game could reach its fifth minute, the Tide took its first touchdown. Ed came in to kick the extra point, and he scored. The board now said 7–0, Alabama.

In the second quarter, Coach put Ed in. Auburn’s Tiger line was holding well defensively. Playing to the hometown crowd, Ed took to the air, completing two passes before sending one twenty yards into the arms of his right halfback for the game’s second touchdown. Ed again kicked the extra point, and the score stood 14–0 for the Crimson and White. With the first half nearly over, Alabama drove deep into Auburn’s territory on several more of Ed’s sailing passes and delivered yet another touchdown. Ed again sealed it with the extra point. Going into halftime, Alabama led Auburn 21–0.

When the players returned, the skies had clouded and fans settled in to see if the break in play would change either team’s fate. They did not have to wait long.

Auburn fumbled the kickoff to start the second half, and Alabama recovered again. When the ball got to ed, he showed Legion Field what made him so good—he could run with a ball as well as he could toss it, and he charged off for another touchdown. The score had swollen to 28–0 with Ed’s extra kick. Shortly after, on a bullet thrown by ed, Alabama had its fifth touchdown, to which Ed added the extra point. The score was 35–0, and the game became a rout.

The fourth period brought only more humiliation and pain to the plainsmen. Alabama started playing its third and fourth stringers and scored another three touchdowns, with Ed passing for one of them. He kicked extra points for two of them, with only his eighth finally being blocked. At the end of the day, the Crimson Tide drowned their Tiger rivals in a 55–0 trouncing and provided Alabama fans bragging rights forty-one years in the making.

The Lebanese boys who had known Ed all their lives were beaming. Not only did they now have a hero who was one of their own, but all of Alabama could see what their guys could do! Though Ed’s father had not lived to see the day, his mother had been there to see it all. So had Ann—beautiful Ann with her fair skin and feisty green eyes.

The headlines were unequivocal:

SALEM SOCKS TIGERS WITH AERIAL BOMBS

ED SALEM STARS

SALEM SHINES AS TIDE PASSES ROUT AUBURN

46,000 SEE SALEM’s PASSES TURN TILT INTO COMPLETE ROUT

SALEM SHINES AS ’BAMA GOES TO 55–0 ROUT

Later that season, Ed and Mike got letters, and Ed made the Southeastern Conference’s all-sophomore team. But Ed stayed cool and never let it go to his head. He liked to say, Don’t jump up and down and scream and holla, act like you been there!

All those years of turning the other cheek in Birmingham—even on the football and baseball fields where he excelled—had taught Ed to always keep his cool.

Ed Salem’s people had been in Birmingham just about as long as anyone else’s.

The city was established only in 1871, after the Civil War had ended, by developers with a vision of a New South: industrial and powerful. They named their creation after the manufacturing city in England to hint to the fates the sort of fortunes they were seeking. Alabama’s Birmingham, after all, was founded in a region rich with iron ore, coal, and lime, waiting to be mined, and at the junction of the coming North and South and East and West railroads.

The black convicts who were leased to work in the mines kept profit margins high—they were free labor—but they were not enough. The demand for workers beckoned whites and newly freed blacks from the surrounding countryside, and the city grew from 3,000 in 1880 to 38,000 by the turn of the century, earning Birmingham the name the Magic City.

People with work and money to spend soon needed items to purchase, so Lebanese immigrants who had already landed in the cities of the Northeast and the Great Lakes came down to Birmingham, offering their numbers not to the mines, but for commerce’s sake. While blacks, whites, and other immigrants—namely southern Italians, Scots, and Slovaks—broke their backs working deep in the bowels of Birmingham’s Red Mountain, the Lebanese strapped on their own heavy packs laden with notions, dry goods, tinware, combs, linens, and laces—and peddled on foot all over Birmingham and the surrounding hills and fields. They traded with whites and blacks, speaking little English and using every penny to raise their large families.

Birmingham was booming, and to shout it to the world, the city commissioned a 56-foot-tall cast-iron statue of Vulcan—the Roman God of the Forge—to be exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1904 in St. Louis. A year later, when Vulcan came home to Birmingham, the Lebanese—who called themselves Syrians then—started their own Syrian Young Men’s Society. But as fast as the Magic City was growing, it still hungered for more bodies to labor, and in 1907 the Alabama legislature enacted a law that established a commission to promote immigration. They had hoped to attract desirable white citizens of the United States first, followed by citizens of the English-speaking and Germanic countries, then France and the Scandinavian countries, and then Belgium.

What they got instead were more Italians, more Lebanese, and their Mediterranean neighbors, the Greeks. Italians who were not working in the mines opened grocery stores selling fresh meat, staples, and canned goods. The Greeks sold fruits and vegetables from stands set up along the city’s streets, and the Lebanese peddled some more. By the 1920s, the Lebanese gave up their roaming sales and established shops, some becoming wholesalers and retailers of groceries and produce, while others sold linens and dry goods; most of them lived in the rooms behind their stores. As soon as they could reach the counter, their children were initiated in the family business, working before and after school and on Saturdays.

But they always needed more money. Enterprising Lebanese women opened their windows as they cooked their food, hoping to entice nearby workers who soon started stopping by and paying for a meal. Others sold moonshine and hosted in their back rooms the kind of card games where a man could bet, with one of their children serving as a lookout. If the police managed to sneak in, on account of a child abandoning his post to relieve himself, the Lebanese kept them quiet with heaping servings of their strange food that smelled and tasted so good.

Most of them had come from Zahleh, a town of red-roofed stone houses 3,000 feet toward the heavens on the eastern foothills of Mount Sannine in the Beqaa Valley, and from Wadi al-`Arayish, the Valley of the Vines, at its base. The wadi and its vines had been nourished for millennia by the Birdawni River, which flowed from the mountain’s womb and through a wooded gorge; to give thanks, antiquity’s rulers had erected, not twenty miles away in Baalbek, a magnificent temple to their own Roman god, Bacchus, deity of wine.

Although the ancient columned temple had remained imposing and impressive through centuries, it was but a relic, and the region’s sons and daughters had begun leaving by 1870, seeking New World opportunities when the Old failed to feed them and frustrated their aspirations to be free. By 1915, sixty-five families had found their way to Birmingham and its valleys cradled by the more modest—but more lush—slopes of America’s Appalachian mountain range.

They made Birmingham their home. The Maronites among them—a sect of Catholics founded by patron saint Maron, a monk from Syria who had died in the fifth century—had established a church in 1910. In 1917, they had formed the Phoenician Club to buy a burial plot in Elm-wood Cemetery, and in 1921, the Melkites—another sect of eastern rite Catholics—had established their own church. The community had also founded an Arabic school to teach their children the language and literature of their homeland.

But there were plenty in Birmingham who did not like the immigrants who answered their call, Lebanese included. They disdained their foreign languages, names, and origins and suspected their dubious racial stock, given their olive skin and darker features. They called these new kinds of darkies dagos—Italians from Sicily had been the largest immigrant group, and looked enough like the Lebanese—or foreigners, and there were those who challenged their right to use the fountains, bathrooms, or entrances reserved for white people.

To make it worse, these immigrants were Catholic, a religion whose adherents many in Alabama believed were loyal only to the Pope, who wanted to make the United States a colony of the Vatican, and for whom there was no place in a Baptist heaven. As for the earthly kingdom, unlike blacks, who knew their place, these foreigners were annoyingly upwardly mobile. But the Ku Klux Klan—which had been revived after 1915 by a former preacher not too far away in Harpersville, Alabama—was there to remind them that their presence was less than desired and carefully watched.

The Lebanese all knew about what had happened to Irishman Father Coyle and still told it as a cautionary tale to their children. On August 11, 1921, Father Coyle had married a white woman to her Puerto Rican fiancé in a secret wedding. Her father, a Methodist minister and Klansman, had refused to officiate, as the Puerto Rican was dark-skinned and a Catholic. Not two hours later, the minister had found Father Coyle on the porch of his rectory and put a bullet in his head for marrying his daughter to Mr. Gussman. The minister was defended by a team of lawyers that included a local lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice named Hugo Black. He was found innocent. That same year, the Nation magazine proclaimed that Birmingham was the American hotbed of anti-Catholic fanaticism. By 1924, Klan membership had peaked, with 115,000 members in Alabama.

The intense dislike of the Catholic foreigners—even when born in America—that so-called native whites felt was hardly discouraged by Birmingham’s ruling industrialist class. The more fractured and fragmented their labor force, after all, the fatter their profit margins. And if these groups were fighting, there would be no danger of solidarity with the unequivocally not-white blacks.

In focusing on these foreigners, the Klan helped fuel a growing nativist sentiment spreading across the nation, which advocated for a preservation of America’s true racial blood—Anglo-Saxon—from the immigrants who were polluting it.

From Dixie, Alabaman and other southern legislators in Congress warned against the Asiatic and African blood pulsing through the veins of the Mediterranean immigrants who had come to the nation and urged their fellow lawmakers to stem any further arrival. A senator from North Carolina appealed for the preservation of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in America against the spawn of the Phoenician curse, who were nothing more than the degenerate progeny of the Asiatic hordes which, long centuries ago, overran the shores of the Mediterranean.

In this nativist time, the federal government began enforcing the immigration statute that had been on the books since 1790, that required those applying for naturalization to prove they were free white persons. Courts in different parts of the country—from Massachusetts to Oregon to Georgia—struggled with whether or not Syrians—as they were called—were white. Some courts held in their favor, deciding petitioners were considered by science to be Caucasian or were too light to be black. Other courts held that the Founding Fathers had not meant white in a scientific sense and that petitioners were too dark to be white. The federal government, however, had no such struggle, and in each case opposed the Syrians’ naturalization on the grounds they were not white for the purposes of naturalization.

Similarly categorical had been a Judge Smith in South Carolina, who had repeatedly denied Syrians citizenship on the grounds they were not white. Syrian Americans from the more established communities in New York City and Boston had petitioned to be heard on the matter, because of a deep feeling that they had been collectively humiliated by being declared unfit for American citizenship and not white. They made two principal arguments: 1) that European Jews, also Semites, had been admitted without question and 2) that as the people of the land where Judaism and Christianity were born, it would be inconceivable that the statute would have intended to exclude them, because that would have excluded their ancient compatriot, Jesus Christ.

Judge Smith had quickly dispatched of the first, saying that Jews were European by race and Jewish by religion. As for the second argument, he had been quite insulted:

The apostrophic utterance that He cannot be supposed to have clothed his Divinity in the body of one of a race that an American Congress would not admit to citizenship is purely emotional and without logical consequence…. The pertinent statement rather is that a dark complexioned present inhabitant of what formerly was ancient phoenicia is not entitled to the inference that he must be of the race commonly known as the white race in 1790, merely because 2000 years ago Judea … was the scene of the labor of one who proclaimed that He had come to save from spiritual destruction all mankind.

Judge Smith deferred to what would have been understood by persons in 1790 at the time the statute was passed. He concluded that to the average citizen:

"All the world was foreign, unknown, and black to him except the American Indians (whom he counted almost as vermin) and the inhabitants of Europe