Who Are the Hebrew Israelites and What Do They Believe?

Transcript

Who Are Hebrew Israelites?

AtlasWelcome to YourTalks.

AtlasThe January 2019 confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial had three groups present — Covington Catholic students, Nathan Phillips, and street preachers who identified as Hebrew Israelites — but the media compressed it into two sides and dropped the third entirely.

AtlasThat compression is the story, because a movement with over a century of history and dozens of independent congregations got reduced to a single clip of men shouting scripture on a sidewalk.

NovaThe problem is that compression has real costs: peaceful congregations get labeled extremist, and the factions that have documented antisemitic conduct get to hide behind the confusion.

NovaToday we're tracing where Hebrew Israelism came from and what its followers believe, then separating the movement's ordinary religious life from its genuinely extremist factions.

NovaTo understand how one movement produced both quiet congregations and confrontational street preachers, you have to start at the beginning — late nineteenth-century America, a post-emancipation religious landscape, and a question about who the biblical Israelites actually were.

Origins and Beliefs

NovaThe street preachers at that Lincoln Memorial scene didn't materialize out of nowhere — they came from a religious tradition that's over a century old and almost never gets explained properly.

AtlasWilliam Saunders Crowdy is the clearest starting point: a former Union Army veteran and Baptist deacon who reported divine revelations in 1896 and founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ on the premise that Black Americans descended from the biblical Israelites.

NovaFrank Cherry was doing something similar even earlier — his Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations, started in Chattanooga in 1886 and later moved to Philadelphia, teaching the same core identity claim.

AtlasBoth men were working in the post-Reconstruction moment, when Black religious communities were actively reconstructing identity after emancipation, and the biblical Israelites offered a framework that was both spiritually grounded and historically defiant.

NovaThe core claim, stripped down, is that African Americans are the actual descendants of the biblical Israelites — and depending on the congregation, that claim extends to Hispanics, Native Americans, and other diasporic peoples as well.

AtlasThat shared premise is where the unity ends, because from there the theological interpretations diverge sharply — over Jesus, over the status of rabbinic Jews, over biblical law, over what racial identity means for salvation.

NovaSome congregations read those scriptures and land in a place that looks fairly conventional — devout, community-focused, not particularly confrontational toward outsiders.

AtlasOther groups read the same texts and conclude that white people or mainstream Jewish communities are adversaries, which is where the theology starts generating the rhetoric that watchdog organizations document.

NovaThe reason those two outcomes can come from the same starting point is that there is no central authority — no pope, no synod, no governing body that sets doctrine across the movement.

AtlasThat decentralization also makes the movement's size nearly impossible to measure reliably, because groups are independent, most don't publish membership data, and available counts routinely conflate distinct organizations under a single label.

NovaSo when someone says 'Hebrew Israelites believe X,' the honest answer is that some do, some don't, and the label alone tells you almost nothing about which congregation you're actually describing.

One Movement, Many Factions

AtlasThe One West lineage is where the movement's internal spectrum becomes a classification problem for watchdog institutions, because organizations like ISUPK, IUIC, ICGJC, and Great Millstone share a street-preaching style and a confrontational posture that the ADL and SPLC have specifically documented.

NovaThe SPLC has designated some of those groups as hate groups, and the ADL distinguishes them from the broader movement — but that precision gets lost the moment a cable segment needs a two-word label.

AtlasThe classifications are evidence about named organizations and specific documented rhetoric — antisemitic, anti-white, homophobic, supremacist — not a blanket finding that covers every congregation using the Hebrew Israelite name.

NovaThat distinction matters practically, because a peaceful congregation that shares a theological label with an extremist camp bears none of the documented conduct, and treating them as equivalent is both factually wrong and unfair to the people in those pews.

AtlasThe Covington footage is the clearest case study in what happens when that distinction collapses — the initial viral clip framed the scene as a two-party standoff, and the Hebrew Israelite preachers who had been making racially charged remarks were largely invisible in the first wave of coverage.

NovaThe diocesan investigation released in February 2019 found that the students hadn't initiated the confrontation and hadn't made offensive statements — and it noted that students used a school chant specifically to drown out the preachers.

AtlasThe institutional lesson from Covington is that short video optimizes for a clean villain, and a three-party confrontation with a complicated sequence doesn't survive compression into a fifteen-second clip.

NovaMainstream Jewish institutions add another layer to this: they generally don't recognize Hebrew Israelite ancestry claims as establishing membership in or authority over mainstream Jewish communities, which reflects real disagreements over rabbinic authority, conversion, and theology — not just politics.

AtlasSome African Hebrew Israelite communities have pursued a different path entirely — seeking a relationship with Israel on their own terms rather than seeking validation from mainstream Jewish institutions, which is a distinct project from the One West street-preaching model.

NovaOn the legal side, there's no general FBI designation for Hebrew Israelites as a movement — any criminal or legal findings attach to specific individuals or named organizations, and generalizing those findings to the label as a whole isn't supported by the available evidence.

AtlasA movement can have a coherent religious history stretching back to the 1880s and still contain factions whose specific rhetoric deserves scrutiny — those two facts don't cancel each other out.

NovaThe burden of getting this right falls on whoever is doing the labeling — because misidentifying a peaceful congregation as extremist causes real harm, and letting documented extremist rhetoric slide under a religious umbrella causes a different kind of real harm.

Sources

1. Extremist Sects Within Black Hebrew Israelite Movementadl.org
2. 2019 Lincoln Memorial Confrontationen.wikipedia.org
3. Diocese Report Covcath Students Didnt Instigate Incidentwvxu.org
4. Covington Catholic Teens Cleared Of Wrongdoing By Detective Agencynpr.org
5. Nathan Phillips His Story Hate Division Covingtontheguardian.com
6. Covington Bishop To Students Sorry We Immediately Unthinkingly Threw You Under The Buswashingtonexaminer.com
7. Accounts Past Covington Catholic Sporting Events Raise Questionscincinnati.com
8. Covington Catholic Video Nick Sandmann Magavox.com

More episodes

• Why Are People Leaving Christianity? What Keeps FaithCulture · 8 min
• How Do Waymo Cars Work? Sensors, AI, and Safety DataTechnology · 11 min
• Why Is It Called Black Friday? The Real OriginHistory · 8 min
• Why Is The National Debt A Problem?Business · 13 min
• Why Is RAM So Expensive Now? The AI Shortage ExplainedTechnology · 15 min

Browse every episode