Black Fundamentalism Louis Farrakhan and the Politics of Conservative Black Nationalism
Marable, Manning
OCTOBER 16, 1995, the largest public gathering of African Americans in history took place in Washington, D.C. The participants had come together under the slogan the Million Man March, with an...
...In October 1984 Innis testified as a "character witness" for LaRouche in a slander suit against NBC...
...Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday...
...Although the majority of former Nation members remained loyal to Wallace Muhammad, Farrakhan carved out his own public image as a militant spokesperson for contemporary black nationalism...
...I negotiated it...
...On February 25, 1962, Elijah Muhammad himself spoke publicly on "Savior's Day" at the Chicago International Amphitheatre, before an audience 72 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 that included Rockwell and other Nazi Party members...
...The Nation as a whole was apathetic toward black militancy and activism inside organized labor and maintained its distance from Marxist politics of any kind...
...White liberals and liberalism had virtually ceased to exist, and affirmative-action policies were widely denounced as "reverse discrimination...
...The rally's keynote address was delivered by Farrakhan, who spoke for nearly three hours...
...His latest book is Black Leadership...
...The first significant step toward this goal was a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in January 1985...
...In the LaRouche newspaper the New Federalist, African-American supporters of LaRouche stated: "It is time to secure the victories of the civil rights movement that was led by Dr...
...the Reverend Floyd Rose, former editor of the Macon Reporter...
...What seems at first to be a curious paradox was no puzzle at all...
...It is trying, through its many tentacles, to infiltrate the black community...
...The following year, the NDPC initiated a legal defense campaign on behalf of Roy Frankhouser, Grand Dragon of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Ku Klux Klan...
...During these years Farrakhan withdrew from the reformed Islamic organization and "reestablished" the old Nation of Islam— going back to the fundamentalism of its former patriarch...
...In the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, Farrakhan's Nation of Islam provided security for the black candidate for a time...
...AS LAROUCHE'S cult grew to perhaps one thousand dedicated members and supporters, it began an extensive involvement in electoral politics...
...In a language both spiritual and visionary, he exhorted black men to transform their lives, to protect their families, to give their time and financial support to black institutions...
...Unknown to both parties, the FBI was also present, and the agency secretly recorded the discussion...
...Reaganism, the "Contract with This article is adapted from Black Leadership, by Manning Marable...
...Just as influential has been the idea of black nationalism...
...Nevertheless, when the National African American Leadership Summit called for a national political convention at St...
...Venable is the Ku Klux Klan lawyer . . . . Go back and read the paper and you'll see that Venable was the one who represented the Black Muslim movement in Louisiana...
...AN EVALUATION of Farrakhan's relationship with racist extremist Lyndon LaRouche requires some background information...
...Throughout the country, perplexed AfricanAmerican activists asked themselves why a white supremacist would be permitted to address a black political convention...
...Prominent African-American feminists such as Angela Davis and Julianne Malveaux denounced the exclusion of women from the mobilization, arguing that Farrakhan's concepts of women were patriarchal and misogynist...
...Quietly LaRouche began to recruit dozens of African Americans into his organization and to develop close relationships with others who might benefit from his financial contributions...
...Innis claimed in the trial that LaRouche was neither a racist nor an anti-Semite and that "the composition of his organization indicates to me that he's not a racist...
...that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Walter Mondale were "Soviet agents...
...Consequently, the Nation of Islam did not seek to challenge white authorities in government or throughout American society...
...On January 28, 1961, Malcolm X and Jeremiah X, the minister of the Atlanta mosque, met with leaders of the KKK...
...When LaRouche was paroled from federal prison in 1994, his organization moved aggressively to deepen its extensive relationship with the Nation...
...Both Malcolm X and Raymond Sharrieff, the supreme captain of the Fruit of Islam (the Nation's security force), privately questioned the public relationship with Rockwell and the Nazis...
...All of these images created by the Muslim movement lent weight to the struggle of the black man in this country against oppression...
...As the NDPC's presidential candidate in the 1980 Democratic primaries, LaRouche won 185,000 votes in fifteen states and received $526,000 in public funds from the Federal Election Commission...
...Instead of perceiving themselves as Americans who "happened to be black," black nationalists often viewed themselves as Africans who happened to reside in the United States...
...Abdul Alim Muhammad, a Nation spokesman, told a meeting of La Rouchites: "I want to say on behalf of Minister Louis Farrakhan and the entire Nation of Islam, how much we admire you and respect you for the great work that you are doing...
...It was militant...
...In the latter category was Congress of Racial Equality leader Roy Innis, who first met LaRouche in the early 1980s...
...In June 1994, the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, then executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had initiated the National African American Leadership Summit, an effort to DISSENT / Spring 1998 • 69 BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM forge a united front within the black community...
...Copyright © 1998, Columbia University Press...
...Like other conservative black nationalists before him, Elijah Muhammad advocated the creation of black-owned businesses and thought them central to the collective advancement of the race...
...The African American who initiated this demonstration had been vilified in the national media for more than a decade as racist and anti-Semitic...
...Bond's prediction proved to be all too true...
...Both the Daley machine and the Nation feared the rise of a black radical movement that might challenge the political status quo...
...According to the New Federalist of September 28, 1990, Dr...
...Farrakhan's articulate, charismatic style won over a new generation of black activists in the 1980s and 1990s—an ironic situation for many of them, who had been inspired by the powerful personality of the late Malcolm X. Over the next several years, Farrakhan tried to "repackage" himself as a mainstream leader of the African-American community...
...Many in the audience were stunned: they immediately recognized LaRouche as a leader of fascist extremism in the United States and a defender of the former apartheid regime of South Africa...
...One of LaRouche's sharpest and most perceptive black critics was the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, at that time executive director of the United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice...
...Used by arrangement with Columbia University Press...
...An even more bizarre relationship developed between the Nation of Islam and the American Nazi Party, led by George Lincoln Rockwell...
...Communist Party...
...The NOI publication the Final Call of December 24, 1990, reported that Dr...
...Chavis's personal tragedy symbolizes the political contradictions of black fundamentalist nationalism: its autocratic character, its conservative economic ideology, and its active collaboration with white supremacy and fascism...
...Medgar Evers was at the forefront of the fight for desegregation as state leader of the NAACP in Mississippi...
...From his prison cell, LaRouche launched his 1992 presidential campaign by selecting the Reverend James Bevel as his running mate...
...Louis in September 1996, at least three thousand representatives gathered to participate...
...and that David Rockefeller's "program for world reorganization 74 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 is modeled after the conceptions of Hitler's finance minister...
...When Malcolm X caucused with Fidel Castro during the Cuban leader's visit to the United Nations in 1960, for instance, Muhammad was furious...
...Yet this leader had the political insight to recognize and respond to the deep sense of social crisis within this community, the levels of rage, social alienation, and violence that were destroying an entire population of young African-American males...
...Organized labor, civil rights organizations, and elected officials largely kept their distance, because it was clear that the summit had degenerated into a front organization controlled by Farrakhan...
...Although the great majority of African Americans had endorsed the Million Man March with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that support was by no means universal...
...The Nation gradually reciprocated, citing data generated by LaRouche's research for its own publications...
...At the height of the mobilization against the VietDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 73 BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM nam War, LaRouche established his own radical sect, the National Caucus of Labor Committees...
...A fistfight erupted between several black nationalists and some of LaRouche's supporters, which was broken up by Farrakhan's security force...
...Like the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Muhammad believed that capitalism had no color line...
...Blacks should not "beg" whites for social equality and acceptance but should establish their own racial standards and values for group development...
...Within a few short years, the LaRouche group mutated from the left to the ultra-right, embracing a fascist agenda of extreme anticommunism, racism, and antiSemitism...
...On the first anniversary of the march, 50,000 to 100,000 people gathered before the United Nations to mark the "World Day of Atonement...
...In these same years, LaRouche courted leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and white fascism...
...America," and the growing ideological conservatism of both major parties constituted a retreat from the programs of the civil rights movement...
...The participants had come together under the slogan the Million Man March, with an agenda emphasizing racial pride, personal responsibility, and patriarchal family relations...
...LaRouche's involvement in electoral politics led him to reevaluate his racist positions on civil rights and black politics in general...
...But beginning in 1960, Elijah Muhammad began to move the organization in a new, more conservative direction...
...According to the New Federalist, the demonstration's major themes were "Atonement, Reconciliation, and Responsibility" and were "jointly agreed upon by the rally leaders," Farrakhan, Chavis, and Bevel...
...Black elites who favored racial integration, from this perspective, were working against the best interests of Negroes...
...MANNING MARABLE is director of the Institute for Research on African American studies at Columbia University...
...After Chavis was fired from his NAACP position, he became essentially a client of Farrakhan, financially and politically dependent...
...The two parties agreed to establish a truce, as long as the Nation continued to oppose desegregation...
...To most of the African-American men who responded to Farrakhan's call to Washington, it seemed that black people had little alternative but to turn inward...
...surprisingly, he emerged as the new leader...
...3." The endorsers of this statement included Joseph Dickson, publisher of the Birmingham World newspaper...
...It made the whole struggle of the black man in this country pick up momentum because of the unity, the militancy, the tendency to be uncompromising...
...Under the guidance of Elijah Muhammad, the organization grew from its marginal existence in the ghettos of Chicago and the Midwest to assume a significant voice within black America...
...Martin Luther King, and guarantee the economic and moral future of our posterity...
...Bevel proudly introduced "the man of the hour," Lyndon LaRouche...
...On September 1, 1994, the Schiller Institute organized and paid for a public forum in Washington...
...LaRouche's public addresses revealed a bizarre philosophy—a mixture of paranoia, racism, and right-wing ideology...
...76 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...Over the past 150 years, many black nationalist organizations have emerged, reflecting a wide spectrum of ideologies, but several core elements have been characteristic of this tradition...
...Chavis warned African Americans that the "LaRouche organization is clearly racist, works closely with the Klan, and is a supporter of the South African government as well...
...Muhammad spoke in Paris at an international conference sponsored by the Schiller Institute, a LaRouche front organization...
...In 1974 his front organization, the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), collaborated with racist groups in Boston to support an anti-busing candidate for Congress...
...Meanwhile, blacks should seek their own separate territory...
...Only Farrakhan could have given permission for LaRouche to speak...
...LaRouche's front organizations have played upon "the black community's fear of the growing drug problem and the AIDS epidemic...
...For these reasons we hereby endorse the LaRouche-Bevel candidacy, and encourage all citizens to join our new movement and vote LaRouche-Bevel on Nov...
...A surprising number of African American leaders endorsed the campaign...
...In the Atlanta Voice of April 12-18, 1986, the A. Philip Randolph Institute declared: "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance...
...Muhammad developed even more cordial relationships with white supremacists...
...land...
...Garvey's version of racial solidarity entailed an explicit rejection of liberal black intellectuals such as W E. B. Du Bois and reformist organizations like the NAACP...
...In 1995 and 1996, the National African American Leadership Summit's constituency became increasingly smaller and ideologically narrower...
...In 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality was leading "freedom rides" throughout Georgia and Alabama...
...Many liberal elected officials, trade unionists, and civil rights leaders, who feared being identified with Farrakhan's long history of vicious anti-Semitism, refused to support the march...
...It featured Dr...
...By the early 1980s, Farrakhan's activities and speeches had come to the attention of British fascists, who quickly embraced his program of racial separatism...
...For example, LaRouche insisted that Queen Elizabeth II of England was "a kingpin of the global drug traffic...
...The Garvey movement was largely responsible for transforming black nationalism into a mass protest movement with large numbers of working-class, poor, and rural supporters...
...But Muhammad insisted that Rockwell be permitted to appear at Muslim meetings...
...On the convention's final day, the Reverend James Bevel, one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s former lieutenants and a recent convert to political conservatism, was given the podium...
...On June 25, 1961, Rockwell and twenty others wearing Nazi uniforms attended a speech by Malcolm X in Washington, D.C...
...LaRouche's publications began to make favorable references to Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam...
...The Klan offered to help the Nation of Islam obtain as much as twenty thousand acres of land in either Georgia or South Carolina...
...This small religious sect mixed an unorthodox Islam with a patriarchal, conservative outlook on black issues and interests...
...Instantly the crowd turned against Bevel and LaRouche, booing them off the stage...
...Armed with clubs, pipes, and other weapons, LaRouche's cult tried to disrupt public meetings and physically intimidate radical activists...
...LaRouche's prize recruit, however, was the Reverend James Bevel, the former aide to King...
...In 1994, following Chavis's ouster as head of the NAACP, representatives of the Nation of Islam once again joined forces with the La Rouchites...
...Back in the United States, in the wake of the controversies surrounding Farrakhan's statements about Jews and Zionism, white American racists developed an appreciation for him as well...
...The Million Man March did not focus primarily on issues of public policy...
...In the language of an earlier racial conservative, Booker T. Washington, black folk had to "cast down their buckets where they are...
...He rapidly transformed the Nation, renouncing the group's separatist ideology and bringing it into compliance with the tenets and practices of orthodox Islam...
...To this day, Farrakhan retains his belief in "racial purity" and opposes integration as a strategy for black advancement...
...It minimized its involvement in politics and opposed any overt protest for desegregation and civil rights...
...It was precisely at this historical moment that the Nation of Islam deemphasized politics, became overtly antagonistic to the civil rights movement, and grew ever more autocratic and conservative ideologically...
...In effect, the Nation of Islam preached an economic strategy of "black capitalism" strikingly similar to that championed more than a century ago by Booker T. Washington...
...He still supports in principle a separate state for all African Americans and a territorial division of the country along racial lines...
...F ROM ITS founding in Detroit during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nation of Islam reflected most of the core themes of traditional black nationalism...
...Estimates of the crowd's size ranged from five hundred thousand to well over one million...
...Similarly, Muhammad was deeply opposed to communism, partly on the grounds that it was atheistic...
...Elijah Muhammad got old [James] Venable...
...The first practical step toward this objective was to establish a land base somewhere in the Deep South...
...The Nation's representatives and the Klansmen shared their views on race and quickly found common ground...
...In Chicago, the national headquarters of the Nation, Muhammad cultivated a cordial understanding with that city's powerful political boss, Richard J. Daley...
...When the brothers in Monroe, Louisiana, were involved in trouble with the police...
...Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that the vast majority of African Americans are still unaware that some of their most prominent leaders have betrayed their interests by consorting with those who oppose their very existence as a people...
...It was only a short step from this Race First dogma to the argument that the only whites who were capable of honest and sincere dialogue with black people were overt racists and white supremacists...
...But the actual content of the Nation's program was strict racial separatism, patriarchy, and extreme intolerance of any critics of the movement...
...But Rockwell viewed the racial policies of the Nation of Islam as worthy of his support...
...7 mosque...
...The July 1990 issue of the Spotlight, the publication of the fascist, racist Liberty Lobby, featured an interview with Farrakhan, in which he remarked that "America was founded by white people for white people...
...The publication of the National Front, a paramilitary organization with a record of racist assaults against black people in Great Britain, praised Farrakhan as "God-sent...
...among the most prominent were the Reverend Hosea Williams, field director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and county commissioner of De Kalb County, Georgia, and Amelia Boynton Robinson, a civil rights movement veteran and a 1990 recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr...
...As mosques were organized in Atlanta, Richmond, Miami, and other southern cities, the Nation of Islam more aggressively pushed its call for a separate black territory or "home...
...THE POLITICAL question here is why Elijah Muhammad sought an informal alliance with fascists and racists...
...African-American leaders who favored integration, such as Martin Luther King Jr., were clearly disloyal to their own people's best interests...
...His economic philosophy, like that of Elijah Muhammad, is a version of black entrepreneurial capitalism, the political economy of Booker T. Washington...
...From that day onward the Klan never interfered with the Black Muslim movement in the South...
...When Malcolm X broke from the Nation of Islam in 1964, his most bitter critic was the leader of the Nation's Boston mosque, Louis X. Louis X denounced Malcolm X as a "hypocrite" and a traitor "worthy of death...
...On issue after issue, Farrakhan's positions on major public policies are as reactionary as those of Newt Gingrich...
...and Mattie Harkness, former president of the Pickens County, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP...
...With the exception of several prominent speakers such as Jesse Jackson, few addresses at the march called extensively for militant actions against the Republicancontrolled Congress or the most conservative Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson...
...I sat there...
...Following Malcolm's assassination, Louis X was BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM named to lead Harlem's Temple No...
...In any case, by the mid-1980s LaRouche had concluded that his organization had to develop allies within the African-American community...
...Much of LaRouche's violence and hatred focused on the black movement...
...Farrakhan astutely employed the radical style he had learned from Malcolm X and in subsequent encounters with Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, and other third world revolutionaries...
...Although the quest for equality has always been the central feature of black activism, it was by no means universal as a response to white domination...
...At least five thousand African Americans attended the rally, which also featured banners in support of President Reagan's Star Wars nuclear weapons scheme: "I Have a Dream, and Build the Beam...
...If white society could not be transformed democratically to include racial minorities, African Americans on their own had to employ their resources and skills for the survival and uplift of their race...
...An all-black state could be a protective shield, behind which African Americans could develop economic enterprises, schools, social institutions, and families...
...Lesbian- and gay-rights activists pointed to the many blatantly homophobic statements made by Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (NOI...
...One of Muhammad's sons, Wallace Muhammad, had sided with Malcolm X during the schism with his father...
...Given its fundamentalist orientation, it is not surprising that the Nation of Islam sought to establish relationships with white conservatives...
...Malcolm X reportedly attributed "the whole [civil rights] struggle to a Jewish conspiracy DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 71 BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM carried out by unsuspecting blacks...
...He has described homosexuality as "unnatural and sick...
...In 1985, Julian Bond suggested that if LaRouche's efforts to expand his influence among blacks were successful, "a section of black America will have become allied with its own worst enemy...
...Muhammad, who accused the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith of "engineering" Chavis's removal...
...Jeremiah attended Klan rallies . . . they never bothered him, never touched him...
...In 1977 he declared that African Americans who fight for equal rights are obsessed with "zoological specifications of microconstituencies' self interests" and "distinctions which would be proper to the classification of varieties of monkeys and baboons...
...Although Jackson disavowed Farrakhan's support during his 1988 presidential campaign, the Nation of Islam won praise as it involved itself in voter-registration campaigns and electoral activity...
...The mainstream leadership of the black community was not fooled by LaRouche's new tactics...
...This faith in black entrepreneurship explained Washington's hostility to labor unions, socialism, and racial politics...
...First and foremost was the belief that African Americans were an oppressed nation or national minority trapped inside a predominantly white society...
...Within less than a year, many of the worst fears about where Farrakhan intended to take the black movement had come to pass...
...HISTORIANS OF the African-American experience have tended to emphasize black people's long struggle for equal treatment and civil rights...
...This may have been the motivation for the Nation of Islam's secret dialogue with the Ku Klux Klan...
...LaRouche later provided intelligence information on the U.S...
...The National Front subsequently distributed leaflets defending the Nation of Islam's positions...
...With the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, the Nation of Islam was thrown into chaos...
...Divine intervention would one day eliminate the sickness of white domination...
...Farrakhan was publicly praised by Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger for his recognition that the American system was a "rotting carcass" and that the Jews were "parasites...
...Malcolm X would later charge that there was a "conspiracy" among the Nation of Islam, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazis...
...Since no spiritual dialogue with white America was possible, African Americans had to separate themselves from its evil influences...
...At the 1985 Savior's Day conference, one guest speaker was Arthur Butz, a Holocaust denier and author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century...
...Renamed Louis Farrakhan, the charismatic minister had, by the late 1960s, been appointed "national representative" of the Nation of Islam...
...For decades, many black nationalists have advocated some type of territorial separation between the races inside the United States, because they see interracial harmony as impossible...
...With some variations, these tenets have been the foundation of black nationalist politics from the militant emigrationism of Martin Delany in the 1850s to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s...
...In the early 1920s, Garvey made contacts with representatives of the Anglo-Saxon Club and the White American Society, which were part 70 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM of a growing Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—oriented movement in the post—World War I period...
...Malcolm focused his attention primarily on Muhammad's corrupt personal behavior, which he described as "more mercenary .. . more interested in wealth . . . and, yes, more interested in girls...
...Anyone with the will and energy to build an enterprise providing goods and services to his people should be rewarded...
...But despite these external changes, the central ideology of the Nation of Islam remained as fundamentalist and conservative as ever...
...Theologically, the Nation of Islam taught its members that Euro-Americans were literally "devils," incapable of overcoming their racial hatred...
...Freedom Medal...
...It was during the federal government's successful prosecution of LaRouche that the organization accelerated its efforts to cultivate friends and allies among black Americans...
...From 1949 until his expulsion in 1966, LaRouche was an activist in the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization...
...It was supremely ironic that Chavis, who had so clearly comprehended the dangers of LaRouche's fascist and racist politics a decade earlier, became politically and financially dependent upon the LaRouche-Farrakhan liaison...
...There were significant elements in their respective ideologies that brought Farrakhan and LaRouche into agreement...
...Muhammad defined miscegenation as a type of "mongolization" that would culminate in the genetic and social destruction of the black race...
...LaRouche front organizations sponsored the event, which was theoretically held in honor of Dr...
...They have gotten black recruits with their strong anti-drug line and their suggestion that all AIDS victims be quarantined...
...In one of his last speeches, Malcolm X provided part of the answer...
...The Nazis, like the KKK, bitterly opposed civil rights and social equality for black people...
...He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies— Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions—much the way Hitler did in Germany" In 1985 African-American leader Julian Bond accused LaRouche of "using the elderly and the politically unsophisticated to promote his brand of right-wing totalitarianism, his alliance with Nazis and the Klan, his BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM support for the white supremacists in South Africa, and for President Reagan's 'Star Wars' Program...
...And I was the one who went back to Chicago and told Elijah Muhammad what they had offered...
...After the Million Man March, Bevel began working closely with Farrakhan's representatives and with Chavis...
...Also central to black nationalism was the insight that an oppressed people could survive in a hostile environment only if they constructed their own institutions and enterprises...
...On several occasions, he has expressed support for the death penalty as a punishment for many different "crimes," such as interracial sex...
...Perhaps he took careful note of Ronald Reagan's cultivation of a coterie of black apologists for his reactionary policies...
...Only days before his assassination four years later, Malcolm X publicly revealed his detailed negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan: They wanted to make this land available to him so that his program of separation would sound more feasible to Negroes...
...But a more probable cause was the rapid acceleration of the black freedom movement during these years...
...In a nationally syndicated column, in August 1986, Chavis sharply denounced "LaRouche and his band of fanatics" for attempting "to win black recruits...
...Muhammad biographer Claude Andrew Clegg III observed that Rockwell and Elijah Muhammad "exchanged correspondence and apparently worked out an agreement of mutual assistance...
...anti-apartheid movement to the apartheid regime in South Africa...
...Through the beginning of the 1960s, he declared, "there was not a better organization among black people in this country than the Muslim movement...
...A decade later, Garvey even identified his political accomplishments with those of European fascism, proclaiming that UNIA activists were "the first fascists...
...Muhammad met with King on one occasion, but he frequently denounced the civil rights leader for encouraging African Americans "to submit to the white man and to become one of them...
...Hundreds of idealistic, militant young people established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in late 1960, to campaign for civil rights and to register African-American voters...
...In the next few years, the Nation of IsDISSENT / Spring 1998 • 75 BLACK FUNDAMENTALISM lam and the Schiller Institute collaborated in public forums at Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia...
...The dangerous connections between Farrakhan and LaRouche only repeat the historical pattern of Garvey's associations with white racists in the 1920s and Elijah Muhammad's relationship with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan a generation later...
...In 1973 the La Rouchites initiated "Operation Mop Up," a series of violent assaults against members of the U.S...
...The social philosophy behind its agenda was deeply conservative and pessimistic about the likelihood that whites would ever recognize or respond to blacks' grievances...
...The political logic behind this was relatively clear...
...I listened to their offer...
...Farrakhan's racial fundamentalism has unmistakable parallels with fascist and white racist ideologies and organizations...
...I- AROUCHE'S empire was seriously threatened when in 1989 he and six of his top I aides were convicted of federal fraud and tax evasion charges, receiving prison sentences of up to fifteen years...
...The realization of critical self-awareness could be achieved only by grounding oneself in the rituals, culture, and traditions generated by and among black people...
...Beginning in January 1960, desegregation protests erupted across the South...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
