In the 1979 hostage crisis, why did Iran free 10 Black Americans before the others?
Since the United States launched a joint military campaign with Israel on Iran in February, many commentators and historians have revisted a chapter of modern history: the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. On 4 November, a student demonstration outside the US embassy in Tehran erupted into an all-out assault on the compound, and 66 Americans were taken hostage. It was the culmination of decades of tension, beginning with the US and Britain’s role in installing the Shah of Iran to safeguard energy interests, and ending with a popular uprising that toppled his oppressive regime and drove him into exile. As many recalled this chapter, one detail has taken on renewed resonance: 16 days into the standoff, 13 hostages, including three white women, four Black women and six Black men, were released.
Why were 10 black hostages released early and what were the global political strains that fed into that moment? James Hughes, then a 30-year-old air force staff sergeant assigned to the embassy, was one of those released hostages. In an interview with the Guardian, he reflects on those fraught days in captivity and how they connect to the current US conflict in Iran today. *** Tall with a thin salt-and-pepper goatee covering his otherwise smooth profile, Hughes cuts a dignified, avuncular figure at age 76. His voice is warm, his words well-measured and softly spoken – a careful calibration honed over a lifetime of military service. A New Orleans native, Hughes came of age during Jim Crow. “I went to a segregated school, had to get off the sidewalk when white people coming,” he says. “I’ve lived through racism and prejudice my whole life.” Hughes served in Vietnam during a moment when Black freedom was being recast as an international project as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis and other civil rights activists were linking racial justice in the United States to anti-imperial struggles abroad. Fresh off his Vietnam service, Hughes arrived in Tehran in the fall of 1979 with little reason to suspect he would become a pawn in an axis-tilting standoff. “I just liked the idea of traveling and seeing different cultures,” he says. “The Iranians I was around when I would go to a bazaar or a bowling alley were real nice people. It was a beautiful country with good food and the best pistachios in the world.”
“Boring” is how Hughes describes his job as an administrative manager. That changed on the cool, drizzly Sunday morning of 4 November, a day after his 30th birthday. Anti-American student demonstrations outside the embassy, a constant presence during his first month on the job, had grown more rancorous after news that the Shah was receiving cancer treatment in the United States. Even as the protests built on the other side of the embassy wall, Hughes assumed they would never make it inside. “I just didn’t think it was going to happen because most countries protect their embassies,” he says, “right to the max.” But then the crowd started spilling over. For three hours, a small contingent of marine guards held back the demonstrators with teargas – just enough time for classified documents to be destroyed. Ultimately, they were overrun, and the protesters took over the embassy as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and local police stood by. “They blindfolded me, tied my hands behind my back and sat me down on the floor,” Hughes recalls of his apprehension. “I realized: this is not a joke.” Hughes remembers spending his days tied to a chair, measuring time by the “death to America” chants leaking through the newspaper-covered windows and surviving on rice, water and goat cheese – which he can’t stomach now after having it forced on him for breakfast each morning in captivity. At one point, he says: “I felt someone touching my skin and my hair. And the thing that went through my mind was they’ve never really seen a real Black person.” Initial restraint toward the American hostages soon gave way to rougher treatment. In one interrogation session, Hughes remembers a pistol pressed against his temple, the hammer cocked, and thinking ‘this is the end of my life’ – and that he might never see his wife and young son again. What was meant to be a formative trip to the cradle of religion instead brought on a crisis of faith. “I was disappointed,” he says, “like, where’s God when you need him?” *** It was what happened next, the release of 13 hostages including Hughes, that saw Iran’s theocratic regime claiming to stand in solidarity with America’s marginalized classes. “Blacks for a long time have lived under oppression and pressure in America and may have been sent [to Iran under duress],” the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said in a statement. The clear intent was to put pressure on the US and bolster the revolution’s legitimacy. A month later, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry said Khomeini was receiving letters from “American Blacks [and] African Blacks [for his] pro-Black actions”. But in the end the move only further underscored how Black American history is repurposed for political uprisings abroad. These days, the cultural exchange cuts both ways – with Black activism invoking the freedom struggles of Palestine and the wider Arab world, and hip-hop often serving as a soundtrack for protest movements across the region. But the back and forth sits uneasily alongside the Islamic Republic’s own undeniable history of repression against its own people. This month alone, Iran has been the backdrop for a wave of near-daily hangings as authorities seek to quash protests amid war with US and Israel. In 2026, however, some Black Americans on social media appear less engaged in conversation about Iran than with Iran. “First and foremost, as-salamu alaykum and happy Ramadan,” said Atlanta-based content creator Jamila Bell. “I’m just here to speak on behalf of my people: we ain’t never had an issue with y’all.” Other users circulated claims of an official Iranian policy to “spare” Black American combatants, an unsubstantiated rumor. Videos of Black Americans wearing keffiyehs and dancing to Arab trap beats have trended across TikTok and Instagram. Some even feature Black service members in skits mocking deployment fears and group dance routines filmed on foreign bases, as misinformation circulates online about Black enlisters expressing regret over their service after receiving Iran-related orders.
Iranian social media, meanwhile, has responded through its own stream of viral posts and memes. One widely shared image shows an Iranian Shahed 136 drone bearing the likeness of Tupac Shakur, alongside the words “In memory of Tupac” and “Killuminati”, a reference drawn from the conspiracy-tinged mythology that has long surrounded the rapper’s critiques of American power and control. In another video, an Iranian creator lectures on Malcolm X and other Black American civil rights activists against a desert backdrop. Historically, Iran has long appeared most deliberate in its engagement. The Iranian Revolution’s successful overthrow of the Shah chimed with some on the Black American left who saw it both as a model of resistance and a potential ideological ally. In 1980, when Miami residents took to the streets after four police officers were acquitted in the death of an unarmed Black marine, Iranian state media and officials organized solidarity demonstrations across the country, including a mass rally in Tehran that drew an estimated 200,000 people calling for social justice for Black Americans. In 1984, to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Islamic Republic issued a Malcolm X commemorative postage stamp – 15 years before the United States. In 1980, after the hostage crisis ended, a message appeared on a wall outside the US embassy in Tehran, a graffiti postscript: “Dear American minority, brothers and sisters (Blacks and Indians), study the holy Qu’ran and start a revolution against US discrimination. God and Iranian Muslim people are supporting you. Down with Reagan.” During a 1984 tour of Syria, Libya and Algeria, Iranian president Ali Khamenei promoted the Afro-American Human Rights Watch Committee, an Iran-led initiative intended to address racism in the United States, Israel and apartheid South Africa. But the effort never moved beyond rhetoric. “The Islamic Republic in 1979 and even into the early 80s was kind of a Rorschach test,” says Benjamin R Young, a political scientist at Fayetteville State University. “It took in all these political elements at the time – Islam, anti-imperialism, Persian intellectualism – that many African American activists were particularly attracted to. But the Islamic Republic changed a lot. A lot of that early hope got squashed.” Louis Farrakhan, the polarizing Nation of Islam chief, was a passionate advocate for the Islamic Republic and made regular trips to Iran. On a 1996 visit to Tehran for the 17th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, he was invited to address the Iranian parliament, a permission that is rarely granted to foreign heads of state. An Iranian newspaper quoted him calling the US by the Ayatollah’s preferred nickname, “the great Satan”, and further saying that “God will destroy America at the hands of Moslems”. In response, the US state department criticized Farrakhan for “cavorting” with those who “support international terrorism”.
Of course, not all Black Americans see Iranians as comrades in a shared struggle against US imperialism, or find it easy to look past the civil rights abuses of both the Shah and the Islamic Republic. During the 1979 crisis, Vernon Jordan, then president of the National Urban League and later a trusted confidante of Bill Clinton, argued that the Black American hostages should have remained in Iran until all Americans were released – a view that aligned with longstanding resistance to Pan-African-style internationalism among Black conservatives since the beginning of the movement. Jordan believed the Black hostages would have been welcomed as heroes if they had stayed. Many Americans viewed their release less as a merciful gesture than an act of betrayal – and Hughes heard from scores of them. “All kinds of hate mail would come to me saying: ‘You should’ve stayed. You’re a coward. Black people never stay true,’” he recalls. “[But] I was handcuffed, under armed guard and taken out of the embassy to the airport. It wasn’t like I walked out of my own free will.” Over the years, US geopolitical rivals have exploited Black Americans’ legitimate grievances to counter American lectures on human rights. During the cold war, Maoist China and North Korea cultivated ties with Black internationalists viewed by US authorities as subversives. In 2016, Russian operatives amplified racial divisions through social media posts denouncing the Black Lives Matter movement – part of a longer tradition stretching back to 1930s propaganda campaigns that spotlighted lynchings in the US to deflect criticism of Stalin-era abuses. “It’s all a very shallow calculation,” says Young. “These kinds of regimes are very self-interested and know that race is a very delicate issue in America that is sensitive to pinpricks.” But the appeal of these tactics has always been uneven. The Iranian students behind the embassy takeover were not always unified in their support for Khomeini’s decision. Charles Jones Jr, a Black American communications specialist, remained in detention amid rumors among his captors that he was a spy – an allegation he denied until his death in 2015. *** In his own case, Hughes remembers being marched into a room with his 12 fellow captives and told they were being released early. The message, he recalls, came through figures associated with Khomeini’s office, including his son Ahmad Khomeini, a forceful critic of the United States – but the decision, he recalls, was delayed twice before it was finally carried out. From there, they were taken under armed guard to Tehran airport and flown to Paris, where Hughes was officially received, his ordeal over after 16 days; after a stopover at Wiesbaden air base for treatment, he was transported to Andrews air force base in time for Thanksgiving. But with 52 Americans still held hostage, the ticker tape parades down Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue and New York City’s Canyon of Heroes would have to hold for another 14 months until the hostage crisis was fully resolved. Algerian diplomats mediated the negotiations between the US and Iran, while the CIA mounted a covert operation to rescue six Americans who had escaped the embassy – a mission dramatized in the 2012 film Argo. The Algiers Accords were signed on 19 January 1981, bringing an official end to the 444-day hostage crisis just as Ronald Reagan began his presidency. Eight days later, all 66 freed hostages were honored in a White House ceremony – but only the hostages in the final group of 52 that was released were feted in New York and DC parades that turned out hundreds of thousands.In 2015, Congress passed a spending bill awarding the hostages who were held for the full 444 days up to $4.4m each in government restitution; those who were freed after 16 days received nothing. “It still bothers me,” Hughes says of the treatment – an echo, perhaps, of separate-but-equal logic. “I felt like that was a little racist.”
Hughes says the ordeal left him with crippling PTSD that contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage and strained his second. “I started to withdraw from the people around me,” he remembers. “I saw a [Veterans Affairs] psychologist for three years. I had no energy to do anything. I told myself I had a magic key, that when I started feeling things, I could just turn the key and be OK. But then my wife, Jodi, would tell me: ‘There’s no such thing as a magic key.’ Even now. When I start to go into a dark hole, she’ll pull me out.” In 2003, the Pentagon began awarding PoW medals to Iran hostages after years of advocacy efforts on behalf of noncombatant recipients. The final 53 hostages often received medals in more timely, formal settings, while the remaining 13 faced bureaucratic delays and neglect. Hughes’s medal arrived without warning in 2012, delivered by UPS to his Denver-area home – and left on the porch. It was only after the major general of the Colorado national guard learned of the delivery that Hughes was ultimately honored in an official ceremony at Fort Logan, the Veterans Affairs cemetery where he worked as an administrator before retiring from military service. It meant the world for Hughes to close the chapter with Jodi and their daughter, Kalee, beside him. “They treated them like they were special,” he says. “That made me feel good in the end.” *** A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that Black Americans oppose the Iran conflict at higher rates than other racial groups. The Trump administration’s broader overhaul of military leadership and rollback of diversity initiatives has only deepened that sense of unease, including the removal of senior Black officers from key positions. Black Americans have served in every US conflict and make up 18% of the Department of Defense’s total military force. From the Buffalo Soldiers to the Tuskegee Airmen, military participation has been shaped as much by duty to country as by the promise of upward mobility. At each turn, they’ve faced a familiar bind: balancing service to a nation that has often failed to fully include them with awareness of the wars they are asked to fight.
Asked about the current Iran crisis, Hughes remains ever the good soldier, respectful of the chain of command. “Whether I think we should’ve gone to war with Iran or not, it’s just another opinion,” he says. “I don’t make policy and I don’t decide what’s going to happen in the world, I just do what I can to vote and leave it at that.” What he will allow is that young people want to know what happened, that young Black Americans “are embracing Black history more than they have in the past, as it’s being erased by a government that’s trying to ‘fix’ history”, he says. “When I see people wearing Make America Great Again [garb], I always ask myself: ‘How far back do they want to go?’”
