How a rarely discussed religious group became part of the viral Covington story.
A video of an interaction between white high school students and an indigenous activist that went viral over the weekend has sparked a wild internet debate, and thrust a little known religious group into the spotlight.
On Saturday, a viral video emerged of a teenage boy wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat standing in front of Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist and Omaha elder, as he beat a drum and sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The video was taken on Friday, the same day as the Indigenous Peoples March, and showed other boys, many of them also in Trump-branded apparel, dancing and laughing nearby.
Philips told several media outlets that he believed the students, who were from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky, and were in DC to participate in the annual March for Life, were mocking him, and the video was shared repeatedly as a powerful example of racism in the Trump era.
But the conversation began to shift on Sunday when some observers claimed that a small group of Black Hebrew Israelite protesters standing nearby were to blame for the incident.
Another, longer video soon emerged, showing a verbal exchange between the Covington students and a small group of Black Hebrew Israelite protesters in the moments before Phillips appeared.
In a statement on Sunday, Nick Sandmann, the boy in the initial video, argued that the Hebrew Israelites instigated the incident and that his classmates “wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us.”
President Donald Trump, conservative commentators, and a number of prominent journalists responded to the second video and Sandmann’s statement by saying that the early criticism of students was overblown, and the result of a rush to judgement. Phillips, for his part, explained in interviews that he wanted to separate the students and the Hebrew Israelites, noting that the men were vastly outnumbered by students. “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey,” Phillips said.
The Black Hebrew Israelites, meanwhile, have said that they are being used as a scapegoat for the students’ behavior. Now, more than three days after the video first went viral, the small group finds itself in the middle of a controversy over very different framings of the rally incident.
The Black Hebrew Israelites are an offshoot of a broader religious movement scholars often call Black Israelism, which dates back to slavery and Reconstruction, if not earlier.
Writing for the Washington Post, journalist Sam Kestenbaum explains that Black Israelism is “a complex American religious movement” whose various sects are loosely bound by a belief that “African Americans are the literal descendants of the Israelites of the Bible and have been severed from their true heritage.”
Several figures played a role in the creation of this movement, including William Saunders Crowdy, a former slave who embraced parts of Judaism while arguing that there were deep connections between African Americans and biblical Israelites, the descendants of the prophet Jacob.
