"A Common Struggle": Ben Bella, Martin Luther King Jr. and a Toast to the People of Algeria

Ahmed Ben Bella had been prime minister for barely two weeks when he landed in the United States on October 9, 1962. The day before, the United Nations General Assembly had admitted the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria as a member, and he had come to New York to see his country take its seat. President John F. Kennedy had written to him on October 4, inviting him to the White House while he was in America.

The meeting people still talk about from that week happened in New York, though, and it was Ben Bella's own idea. When the State Department asked him what he would most like to do during his stay, he said he wanted to meet Martin Luther King Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University tells the story, drawing on the memories of King's adviser and friend Clarence B. Jones. The State Department telephoned King's office in Atlanta. King's secretary called Jones. On October 13, 1962, the leader of Algeria's revolution and the leader of America's civil rights movement sat down together in New York, and they talked for two hours.

Jones was struck by how much his visitor knew. Ben Bella, he recalled, "was encyclopedic about his knowledge of the civil rights movement in the United States." He had spent years in his own fight for freedom, and all that time he had been following the fight of Black Americans for theirs.

Afterward the two men spoke to the press, and each backed the other. King put it in one sentence that is still quoted in both countries: "The battle of the Algerians against colonialism and the battle of the Negro against segregation is a common struggle." On October 27 he wrote about the meeting for his own readers, in a column in the New York Amsterdam News, Harlem's best-known newspaper, under the title "People in Action: My Talk with Ben Bella." The King Institute sums up what the encounter meant: it "provided the civil rights movement with valuable support from a prominent world leader."

Two days after seeing King, Ben Bella was in Washington. On the morning of October 15, the flags of the fifty states lined the South Lawn of the White House, a 21-gun salute was fired, and at 11:45, according to the record kept by the American Presidency Project, Kennedy stepped forward to greet him. The State Department's Office of the Historian notes that Ben Bella was the "first foreign leader to receive a welcoming ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House." Nobody had been received there that way before.

"It is with the greatest personal pleasure that I welcome you to the United States," Kennedy said. He called Ben Bella "a strong patriot who has given many indications under the most difficult circumstances of your devotion to your country and your love for freedom," and hoped he would "recognize the hand of friendship which we extend to the people of Algeria."

Ben Bella thanked him for something Algerians had not forgotten: "a clear and courageous stand you have taken many years ago already in favor Algerian independence." He meant the senator's speech of 1957. The briefing memo prepared for Kennedy before the visit had said much the same: his guest "comes with great personal respect for you, dating from your 1957 Senate speech."

At lunch in the State Dining Room, Kennedy spoke about the people at the table. "I think that all of us in this country, whatever our political views may be, respect courage," he said. Sitting with them were "a man who was imprisoned over 5 years for his country," a foreign minister "imprisoned 3 or 4 years," and "the Commandant who helped lead the guerrilla forces in the Sahara region."

He finished with words Algerians still like to quote. "I think that Algeria has a chance to prove that all those who wanted to hold back the tide of history were wrong," he said, and he asked the guests to join him "in drinking with me to the people of Algeria." Ben Bella answered by hoping that what happened in both countries would "promote the cause of the great universal aim of mankind, mutual understanding, peace, welfare, and true brotherhood."

The afternoon talks were open and direct. Kennedy asked about Algeria's non-alignment, and Ben Bella explained it: his country stood against imperialism, colonialism, racial discrimination, nuclear tests and arms races. To Secretary of State Dean Rusk he said that Algeria had paid a high price to take its place in the world and meant to play a constructive part in it. The two countries, he told Rusk, "might not always agree entirely but could esteem one another."

The joint statement released that day spoke of "a useful and cordial exchange of views" and of both leaders' hopes "for a close and continuing friendship between the two countries."

Americans tend to remember that week for the scene in New York, a revolutionary leader from Africa who, offered anything he liked, chose an afternoon with Martin Luther King Jr. Algerians remember a prime minister of a few weeks standing on the South Lawn, honored in a way no visitor had been before, by the man who had spoken up for their independence five years earlier. Both memories come from the same seven days in October 1962.

Dr Mohammed Doumir