Black Anger, White Money – A Crisis for Black Leadership

“It’s insulting that none of us who have been responsible for most registration and turnout are at the table determining priorities.” – Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

“There is something wrong when groups who have closed the gap on enfranchisement with our track record and our history of protecting the vote are not getting funding.” – Melanie L. Campbell, Executive Director, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP)

“There appears to be a dedicated campaign by the party leadership, the Kerry campaign and now ancillary funding organizations to build some political distance between themselves and key traditional leaders of the party base.” – Political scientist Ron Walters, board member, NCBCP

Whatever happens on November 2, traditional African American leadership faces a crisis of historic proportions, a day of reckoning that has been approaching for more than three decades. Having virtually shut down the activist wing of the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement in favor of electoral and broker politics at the dawn of the Seventies, Black leadership now finds itself blackballed from the $200 million-plus soft money Democratic campaign feast. Essentially, they have been sidelined from the only mass action game they chose to play.

With more than $80 million in funding, the Soros-backed voter mobilization 527 America Coming Together (ACT) has assumed leadership of the African American electoral army. The de facto commander is ACT CEO Steve Rosenthal, former AFL-CIO Political Director.

On the mass communications front, political messages are crafted and paid for through the Media Fund, which has raised and spent about $28 million dollars as of October 10. The brainchild of former top Clinton aid Harold Ickes, the Media Fund is currently in the middle of a $5 million advertising campaign centered on Black-oriented radio. The fund’s president, Erik Smith, is a former aid to Missouri Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt. Although selected African American individuals, consultants and public relations and media firms have been recruited to the ACT and Media Fund voter mobilization and media projects, the white folks are firmly in charge of the methodology and the message.

Patricia Ford’s NCBCP, with a 28-year history of electoral organizing including Operation Big Vote and Black Youth Vote, was left out in the cold. Its modest goal to raise $8 million dollars for “voter protection” – ensuring that citizens who show up at the polls are allowed to cast their ballots – now seems beyond reach and out of time. As a result, said Ford, “the election is in peril.”

Net Loss of Black Votes Possible

“We need to train people on what to look out for, and where to look,” she continued. “We could have trained seniors,” but now there is very little time left.

Meanwhile, the GOP will field thousands of volunteer disrupters in Black and Brown precincts who have been trained to “hold people to the letter of the law” – a code for aggressive voter intimidation. Ohio and other Republican-controlled states promise to follow Florida’s 2000 lead in 2004. “Lawyers are fine, but when a person goes to the polling place and gets turned away, someone needs to be right there to assist them,” said Ford. “As it stands now, people are relying on that person to call the Hotline, instead of just going home.”

Experience tells us that untold thousands will simply leave in disgust.

is aware of a letter sent to moneyman George Soros and his richest friends by Ms. Ford and three other co-chairs of the umbrella group, Unity ’04 – Urban League President Marc Morial, Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women, and University of Maryland political scientist Ron Walters – in which they asked only that a funded division of labor be arranged, so that traditional Black organizations might concentrate on thwarting the theft of Black votes “on the ground,” in Ford’s words. To date, there has been no substantial response from the top five pro-Democrat 527s. Said one Black voter mobilization official: “They appear to take their cues from [Steve] Rosenthal and [Harold] Ickes.”

Insults from the DNC

Whoever is sending the signals, hostility to traditional Black leadership is broadcasting at full power from the Democratic National Committee – ruled, like the Kerry campaign, by the corporate-backed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). By law, a “firewall” must exist between the 527s and the Democratic National Committee’s campaign operations. But of course, no wall can separate persons of like political minds. Black Democratic National Committeeman Ben Johnson felt confident enough in his slavish role to insultingly dismiss Black leadership’s grievances. Newhouse News Service recorded Johnson’s outburst in late September:

“Those complaints are coming from old-line folks who make money off controversy,” said Deputy Democratic National Chairman Ben Johnson, who is active in the black voter registration efforts. The key to winning in 2004 will be turnout, not registration, Johnson said, although the party is not neglecting registration.

“There’s a change in the way everything is being done,” Johnson said. “This is a new day, and we have a number of hip-hop artists involved in voter registration.”

Pat Ford finds Johnson’s comments “baffling,” since the NCBCP’s current concerns revolve around Black voter protection at the polls, not registration. And effective turnout requires voter protection.

When asked on October 13 to comment on his deputy’s remarks, DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe said he was “unaware” of the Johnson’s statements. Florida Black Congresswoman Corrine Brown, preparing to join Representatives Alcee Hastings and Kendrick Meek on a four-day “Our Vote, Our Future” bus tour of the state, said: “We’ve got to make sure that everyone feels involved in this process. Clearly, there has been some miscommunication.”

No, Clinton was not the first Black president. But he was the first DLC president. John Kerry hopes to become the second, and we have no choice but to help him.

The DLC, formed in the mid-1980s to suppress the voices of Blacks and labor in the party – and as a direct reaction to the hugely successful Black voter registration drives that accompanied Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns – is determined to keep organized Black America at arms length, and broke. Should Kerry win, traditional Black leadership will be declared irrelevant. As Freedom Rider columnist Margaret Kimberley wrote on September 30: “The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Leadership Council will crow that their dubious strategies were in fact brilliant. Their claims should not go unchallenged.”

Letters of Indignation

Ron Walters, a co-chair of Unity ’04, brooked no insults from Harold Ickes’ Media Fund, whose President, Erik Smith, had the temerity to request “a quote we can use from you for our press materials.” Walters fired back a letter to Media Fund founder Harold Ickes. The NNPA’s Hazel Trice Edney, in an excellent piece of journalism, was the first to reveal the text of the letter:

“Since the 1970s the National Coalition for Black Civic Participation has operated Operation Big Vote and in recent years Black Youth Vote and in this election cycle, the Unity 04 Campaign has been established, staffed and has attempted to raise funds for its activities with meager success. So, we are now to understand that The Media Fund, an entity that is completely unknown in the Black community, but which contains some Black PR firms, has a plan for Black messaging and the resources to enact it.”

“But it is a plan that has been drafted outside of our community, that is to say, without the collective sign-off of any significant collection of Black leaders. Therefore, why should we accept it and cooperate with it? This is an arrogant and divisive usurpation of power and it is destructive of our efforts that began most recently in the Civil Rights movement, where the efforts of Blacks to provide their own leadership in the act of political participation was understood to be the source of their power in the policy system as well.”