I buried my grandfather the day before Donald J. Trump would be elected as the 47th president of the United States.
Mohamed Daoud was a few weeks away from his 98th birthday. I was his eldest grandson. He lived a remarkable life, and we were different and similar in some striking ways.
With only a sixth-grade education, this man developed the engineering know-how to build and fly his own airplane. While I certainly didn’t inherit his engineering prowess, we did share an obsession with Jerusalem and with the significance of 63rd Street on Chicago’s South Side. As someone who was born and raised in the Jerusalem village of Ein Karem and then moved to the South Side as a Palestinian refugee in the early 1950s, my grandfather spoke passionately to me about both these subjects from his lived experiences.
How my family came from a Jerusalem village to Chicago
My grandfather survived the violent “Nakba” after the creation of the state of Israel, defending his home until the last moment. He eventually, along with 750,000 other Palestinians, fled after hearing reports of atrocities taking place in nearby villages.
His wife was nine months pregnant with their first child, my mother. They stopped to give birth to her in an abandoned home.
Through connections with my grandmother’s family in Chicago, they managed to obtain a visa to the United States. As much as he loved Chicago, he never stopped thinking and talking about his home in Ein Karem.
They rented their first home in Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood at the same time many Black American families were still fleeing the horrors of the Jim Crow South. I once remarked that in some ways, he and the Black folks in those early Englewood years were both refugees.
“No Rami, it was different. I could be white; what they went through was way worse,” my grandfather stated matter of factly.
He didn’t need critical race theory to figure this out. He understood the parallels and differences between Black folks fleeing the same violent institutions responsible for the enslavement of their ancestors and the relative privilege that immigrants ‒ even refugees like my grandfather ‒ experienced as they arrived to this country.
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While he could still drive, he would show up unannounced at my work to see the progress along 63rd Street and delighted in returning to Englewood.
Among the things we spoke about was one of his confrontations with racism. It took place in the fall of 1959, on a day that otherwise was filled with joy. He had gathered at a private airfield to fly the plane he spent months building in his garage. His family crowded around the red single-engine “Star of Ein Karem” for photos.
He had even brought an 8-millimeter camera that an African American friend was helping to operate.