Who are the Black Hebrew Israelites? You may have seen them on street corners of urban areas, sounding like a racist end times preacher. They are a movement of African Americans who believe that the Biblical Israelites were black, and that blacks in America are descendants of those Israelites. Beyond that the many groups that have this belief have wildly different belief sets, some going straight to practicing Judaism, and many going on to sound like a black version of the KKK.

The earliest figures of this movement were former slaves in post Civil War America, starting out in the great plains and moving eastward by the turn of the century. Figures like William Saunders Crowdy, Frank Cherry, Arnold Josiah Ford, and Arthur Wentworth Mathew formed the foundations in the US for this movement, ranging from anti-racist to explicitly racist.

Sources and Affiliate Links

"Chosen People" by Jacob Dorman https://amzn.to/2NoReO9

"Thin Description" by John L. Jackson Jr. https://amzn.to/2xkHXM7

"Barack Obama vs The Black Hebrew Israelites" by Vocab Malone https://amzn.to/2ZZpcKw

"Stepping Into Zion" by Janice W. Fernheimer https://amzn.to/2LsqEAR

"From Babylon to Timbuktu" by Rudolph R. Windsor https://amzn.to/2Nn2TwY

"New World A-Coming" by Judith Weisenfeld https://amzn.to/2XidIoh