Posted on 03/09/2012 4:56:46 AM PST by SJackson
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The Racist Ravings of Derrick Bell
Posted By John Perazzo On March 9, 2012 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 14 Comments
By now, you may already have seen the 1991 video footage of Barack Obama, who was then a 30-year-old student at Harvard Law School, speaking in glowing terms about Harvard professor Derrick Bell, whom Obama described as a man known for “speaking the truth” and for an “excellence of … scholarship” that had not only “opened up new vistas and new horizons,” but had “changed the standards [of what] legal writing is about.” “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama urged the sizable crowd which had gathered to show their support for Professor Bell that day.
Since the release of the video, Obama’s backers have been quick to dismiss it as nothing more than a young scholar’s affectionate tribute to a liberal academic icon who not only made major intellectual contributions to his profession, but who also was a leading champion of racial “diversity” in higher education. For instance, CNN host Soledad O’Brien, when interviewing Breitbart.com’s editor-in-chief Joel Pollak yesterday about the significance of the video, described Bell benignly as “the first tenured African American professor of law at Harvard University,” and characterized the gathering merely as “a rally in support of racial equality among the faculty at Harvard Law School.” O’Brien then asked her guest, with apparent bewilderment, “What part of that was the bombshell? Because I missed it. I don’t get it. What was a bombshell?”
In a similar spirit of willful blindness, Media Matters describes Derrick Bell as “a respected academic” and “an influential figure in the Civil Rights movement.” This portrayal is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s pathetic characterization, a few years back, of Bill Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” But just as the reality of Bill Ayers was far more interesting than Obama indicated at that time, the truth about Derrick Bell is likewise far more compelling than the pablum the left has provided in the wake of this latest video. For you see, by the time Barack Obama was delivering his glowing remarks about Derrick Bell in 1991, the professor had already established—and would continue to cultivate for another two decades—a reputation as someone who thoroughly, resolutely detested the United States and who viewed the nation’s institutions and its people as irremediably racist. In short, until his death last October at the age of 80, Bell was secular academia’s version of Jeremiah Wright—a raging, fulminating racist without the clergyman’s robe. And something about his philosophy resonated strongly with Barack Obama.
Derrick Bell is best known as the founding father of Critical Race Theory, an academic discipline which maintains that society is divided along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines. Critical Race Theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently its legal structures are, by definition, racist and invalid. A logical derivative of this premise, according to Critical Race Theory, is that the members of “oppressed” racial groups are entitled—in fact obligated—to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and are worth observing. Such a perspective’s implications for the ability of civil society to function at all, are nothing short of monumental.
Further, Critical Race Theory holds that because racism is so deeply ingrained in America’s national character, racial preferences (favoring blacks) in employment and higher education are not only permissible but necessary as a means of countering the permanent character flaws of white people who, as Bell put it, seek to “achieve a measure of social stability through their unspoken pact to keep blacks on the bottom.”[1] Asserting that “few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks,” Bell—right around the time Obama was praising him at the Harvard rally—believed that “racial discrimination in the workplace is as vicious (if less obvious) than it was when employers posted signs ‘no negras need apply.’” Bell complained, in fact, that most white employers were loath to hire African Americans for “any position above the most menial.”[2] Nor did the professor look kindly upon his black colleagues who failed to share his enthusiasm for affirmative action. Indeed, Bell was among the first critics to condemn the June 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating: “To place a person who looks black and who, in conservative terms, thinks white, is an insult.”
Ideological conformity among blacks was of the utmost importance to Bell, since wherever he looked, he saw white racism. Lamenting that “no African Americans are insulated from incidents of racial discrimination,” Bell excoriated “a white society that condemns all blacks to quasi citizenship as surely as it segregated our parents.”[3] Claiming that racism was “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” Bell went so far as to state: “The fact that, as victims, we suffer racism’s harm but, as a people, [we] cannot share the responsibility for that harm, may be the crucial component in a definition of what it is to be black in America.”[4] On the premise that “black people will never gain full equality in this country” due to the unending evils of the white “oppressor class,” Bell advised African Americans to squarely confront “the otherwise deadening reality of our permanent subordinate status.”[5] This gloomy view of black destiny was reflected most vividly in the title of Bell’s 1992 book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.
By Bell’s reckoning, “the racism that made slavery feasible” was “far from dead.” He added: “Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”[6] Bell also railed against the racism that motivated acts of white-on-black crime, lamenting that “even our lives … are threatened because of our color.”[7] That claim did not square with the fact that more than 90 percent of African American murder victims nationwide are actually killed by fellow blacks, but it made for a nice sound bite. And in fact, Bell did not entirely turn a blind eye to the epidemic of black-on-black crime. That phenomenon, he explained, was itself a reaction to white oppression: “Victimized themselves by an uncaring society, some blacks vent their rage on victims like themselves.”[8] In other words, whenever something bad happens, it is always the fault of whites.
As Bell saw things, white malevolence knew no bounds. In one of his writings, he mused that if scientists were to someday develop a magical pill that could transform any black person who consumed it into a perfectly law-abiding individual, whites would undoubtedly conspire to destroy it so as to prevent such an effect. Why? Because black crime, he explained, benefits many whites such as those who profit from the manufacture of prison uniforms.[9] Wholly disgusted by the white race, Bell predicted that eventually America would witness the rise of charismatic new black leaders who, in the interests of retribution, would “urge that instead of [African Americans] killing each other, they should go out in gangs and kill a whole lot of white people.”[10] Presumably this was some of the lofty “scholarship” that so impressed Barack Obama.
Bell endorsed a journal called Race Traitor, whose stated aim is “to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin.” Moreover, the publication’s guiding principle is: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” In 1999 Bell signed on to a Race Traitor article that stated: “If the task of the nineteenth century was to overthrow slavery, and the task of the twentieth century was to end legal segregation, the key to solving this country’s problems in the twenty-first century is to abolish the white race as a social category—in other words, eradicate white supremacy entirely.” Among Bell’s fellow signatories were Pete Seeger, Cornel West, and Howard Zinn.
So this was Derrick Bell, the man whom Barack Obama feted on that 1991 day at Harvard, just four years before Obama was to launch his own political career in the home of two America-hating Marxists in Chicago—Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. As Obama lauded Bell, a banner was displayed in the background which read, “Harvard Law School on Strike for Diversity.” To be sure, Bell had already staged numerous sit-ins on behalf of “diversity” during his time at Harvard. Particularly high on his priority list was his wish to pressure the Law School into hiring a black female for a tenured professorship. Even though 45 percent of Harvard Law’s faculty appointments during the preceding decade had gone to minorities and women, none was both black and female—hence Professor Bell’s objection.[11] Bell’s students dutifully echoed the professor’s mantra, bleating that they desperately needed “black women role models” to help them combat “the status quo” that was dominated by “white men.” When Harvard’s dean stated that no attempt to increase “diversity” should override the University’s commitment to academic excellence, the protesters called his position “highly insulting to blacks” and symbolic of “the elitism of Harvard.”[12] It is reasonable to assume that Barack Obama, who helped galvanize campus support for Derrick Bell’s crusade on behalf of black women, more or less shared these views.
At that time, there was one black woman in particular whom Professor Bell wanted Harvard Law to hire—Regina Austin, a fellow adherent of Critical Race Theory who had been serving as a visiting professor at Harvard Law. Though Harvard had a longstanding policy that forbade the hiring of visiting professors during the year of their residence on campus, Bell issued a “non-negotiable demand” that Austin be given a faculty position.[13]
When the Law School refused to make an exception to its policy, Bell took a leave of absence from his teaching post and even staged a hunger strike in protest. Austin, you see, was a kindred spirit to Bell from an ideological perspective. An outspoken advocate of racial separatism and identity politics, she has long held that minority communities are not obliged to accept “traditional values” or “conformity to the law” as defined by the dominant power structure of a racist society.[14] Rather, such communities require an “alternative source of [legal] authority.”
In acknowledgment of the professional sacrifices Professor Bell made on behalf of this same Regina Austin, Barack Obama reverently referred to Bell as “the Rosa Parks of legal education.”
What does Barack Obama’s high regard for Derrick Bell tell us about the President? Certainly the praise he heaped upon Bell in 1991 reveals something profoundly significant about Obama’s mindset at the age of 30. Some, though, would dismiss it as ancient history. Slightly less ancient, however, is the fact that a 33-year-old Obama routinely assigned works authored by Bell—including the latter’s racialist interpretations of seminal civil-rights cases—as required readings in the courses he taught at the University of Chicago Law School in 1994. To be sure, Bell’s work appeared on Obama’s syllabus more frequently than that of any other author—a clear indication of Obama’s high regard for Bell’s scholarship.
Still more recent was Obama’s alliance with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—an alliance that shifted into high gear when Obama was 34 and remained in high gear (via his collaboration with Ayers on the radical Chicago Annenberg Challenge) until Obama was at least 38. And of course Obama’s attendance at (and his monetary contributions to) Jeremiah Wright‘s famously racist church from approximately age 27 until he was 47, says something noteworthy about his mindset during those years as well.
Pro-Obama automatons will dismiss these and all other references to Obama’s alliances as nothing more than mean-spirited attempts to smear a great man by way of innuendo and “guilt-by-association.” By contrast, people with a capacity to reason can surely understand that there is something far more profound at play here. In the final analysis, people should be free to throw their support behind a socialist who has spent his entire adult life allying himself with America-hating radicals and Marxists, if that is whom they choose to embrace. But when doing so, it is vital that they at least be cognizant of the fact that they are indeed backing such an individual.
Notes:
[1] Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 152.
[2] Ibid., pp. 5, 15.
[3] Ibid., pp. 3, 10.
[4] Cited in Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 17. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, p. 155.
[5] Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, pp. 12, 113.
[6] Ibid., pp. 3, 4.
[7] Ibid., p. 3.
[8] Ibid., p. 196.
[9] Lino Graglia, “Affirmative Discrimination,” National Review (July 5, 1993), p. 30.
[10] Robert Boynton, “Professor Bell, Sage of Black Rage,” New York Observer (October 10, 1994), p. 1.
[11] Fox Butterfield, “Harvard Law School Torn by Race Issue,” The New York Times (April 26, 1990).
[12] Ibid. Fox Butterfield, “Harvard Law Professor Quits Unitl Black Woman Is Named,” The New York Times (April 24, 1990), p. A1.
[13] David Horowitz, The Professors, p. 58.
[14] Ibid., p. 26. Heather MacDonald, “Law School Humbug,” City Journal (Autumn 1995).
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I thought he passed away.
Apparently, the owners of all the teams in the NBA and NFL didn't get the memo.
So our “up from poverty and racial oppression” president was still in law school at the age of thirty? Some missing years in there, twenty five would be usual for a middle class and financially concerned student.
“To place a person who looks black and who, in conservative terms, thinks white, is an insult.”
he was selling hate , it helps to also explain why Herman Cain was such a threat to them.
Someone was writing checks for Barky’s “education.”
It would seem this presidency has been in the works for decades.
all very interesting but will the average moderate get it. never heard of this Bell fellow myself. But Ayers is a household name compared to Bell and nobody cared about the Zero connect to Bullyboy..Billyboy
It seems our president paid attention in class.
Eric Hold must also be a follower of Bell, given how he runs the DOJ. We are not all equal under the law, justice is not blind in his view.
How soon you have forgotten the “community organizing years” prior to law school.
Bell endorsed a journal called Race Traitor, whose stated aim is “to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin.”
I wonder if Hannity knows about these writings specifically. I also wonder if he and other conservatives are hesitant about revealing this or at least revealing it too forcefully as it is so disturbing and disgustingly racist.
It’s becomes more and more obvious that our president is a racist. Not only that but I find the comment by that other professor who hid the tape stating that he doesn’t care who sees it now. Well, it’s not too late to affect the next election. Or is it? What is it too late for? Is there something going on behind the scenes?
He passed away last October.
We are all SO embarrassed that he was from Pittsburgh.
Black people in this town may be Democrats, but they’re not
all crazy racist certifiable whack-jobs like this guy.
It just occurred to me that at the time of this video, the USA was in the process of hiring a Supreme Court Justice by the name of Clarence Thomas. Obama should have been out front defending the future Supreme Court Justice instead of a black racist. He certainly has his share of dangerous, nutty friends.
Obama in 2001 radio interview:
...But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.Obama wishes to scrap the limits placed on government powers because they get in the way of his redistributive schemes--...I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
I noticed that as well. Probably just the fact that they know the media will protect him and most Americans will never even see the tape anyway.
It doesn't stem from white America's unfair treatment of blacks, or from the fact that their forbears were "slave owners." It stems from the truth that many blacks are possessed of a self-loathing; a deep belief in the inherent unfairness of the fact that they were born black and others were born white.
Rather than do the hard work of coming to grips with their own self-animus, it is far easier and more convenient to simply diisplace that aggression by hating white people.
As long as there are blacks in America, there will be racial hatred. And it will be aimed at whites, merely because they are white.
;-\
A Class Sends Message To Harvard Law School
Special to The New York Times
Published: November 21, 1990
In a small basement classroom at Harvard Law School, 22 students gather week after week for a class no one was expected to take.
The course offers no credit. (snip)
This is no ordinary class. It is a civil rights seminar taught by Derrick A. Bell Jr., the soft-spoken black professor who broke ranks with Harvard last spring by vowing to take an unpaid leave of absence until the law school appoints a minority woman to its tenured faculty. Of the faculty’s 62 tenured members, three are black and five are women.
For Mr. Bell, one of the nation’s leading legal scholars, teaching his fall semester class, “Civil Rights at the Crossroads,” without his annual salary of about $120,000 is an extension of his protest.
(snip)
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/tocn-mla000738-derrick-bell-teaches-a-civil-rights-course
(VIDEO at link)
Derrick Bell teaches a civil rights course
Cite
Summary
Derrick Bell takes a leave of absence to protest the lack of minority faculty at Harvard Law
Topics
Affirmative action programs, Universities and colleges, African American law teachers, Civil rights, Segregation, Harvard University
12/03/1990
Well, his grandmother was a typical white person. And in the kerfuffle between the black professor and the white policeman Obama was quick to note that the police acted stupidly. But hell, that is nothing more than the culmination of a young scholar's education and association with professorial race baiters.
The guy lived in and espoused a paradox. He claims that aggressive racial favoritism is required to right what he sees as the wrongs of the American past, while embracing the political party that institutionalized the wrongs of which he bases his theory, while at the same time, denigrating those of his own ethnicity who succeed without the racial favoritism he espouses (threats to his theory).
Furthermore, he talks of society and politics based on a white culture, but when one looks at the world history of black cultures, not a society or political system has progressed due to violence and corruption that is systemic within. So he actually is pulling a baseless theory out of his a** that only those with no or an aberrant education can embrace.
Bell also railed against the racism that motivated acts of white-on-black crime, lamenting that “even our lives … are threatened because of our color.”[7] That claim did not square with the fact that more than 90 percent of African American murder victims nationwide are actually killed by fellow blacks, but it made for a nice sound bite.
Is there anyone on Freerepublic that wouldn’t leap at the chance to vote for either Thomas Sowell or Col. West if either were running for president? Is there anyone here who wouldn’t count himself lucky to get such a chance? Is there anyone here who would even give a passing notice to the ethnicity of either man?
The battle is on.
No more "hope and change" fluff. Barrack Obama is allied with American-hating radicals and Marxists. Are you in?
I know quite a few leftists who would say yes to that, but I know quite a few more who would balk.
A vote for Obama is a vote to further tear down the America you grew up in and replace it with late sixties Eastern European style marxist state.
Are you in?
hmmmm......I wonder why?
What would these race baiters do if there had never been slavery in the US?
I despise these people. Obama included.
NO.
bookmark Derrick Bell “no credit” class, 1990 article
I wonder if Obama was a no-credit student in Bell’s “Civil Rights at the Crossroads” class.
My guess, YES.
Even if not, he no doubt got credit
for it anyway.
The Harvard Black Law Students Association (HBLSA) was founded in 1967. Today HBLSA is the largest chapter in the National Black Law Students Association. With well over 100 members, HBLSA is truly reflective of the diversity that exists within the Black community of Harvard Law School. HBLSA alumni range from Charles Ogletree, renowned legal scholar and our very own advisor, to Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts, to Debra Lee, CEO of BET, to Barack and Michelle Obama, President and First Lady of the United States of America.
(snip)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
???
http://gratewire.com/topic/students-occupy-deans-office-at-harvard-law-school
I found that Barack might not be the only Obama on the tapes.
In May 1988, Harvard Law students, borrowing from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,
and foreshadowing the Occupy movement of 2011, occupied the Harvard Law
School’s dean’s office. The students were supporting Professor Derrick
Bell’s demand that the law school hire professors on the basis of race.
One of the students “dressed in black” and occupying the dean’s
office appears to be Michelle Obama (Harvard Law ’88). Here is a link
to the grainy video. (lower right at about ten seconds in, wearing white Keds):
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/tocn-mla000572-students-occupy-dean-s-office-at-harvard-law-school
VIDEO at link:
Students occupy Dean's office at Harvard Law School
1:00:17: Visual: Shots of Harvard Law students studying their textbooks as they occupy the Dean's office in the administration building of Harvard Law School. Most of the students are African American. Marcus Jones reports that 50 Harvard Law School students marched into the administration building in the afternoon; that most of the students are African American; that many of the students wore black as a show of solidarity.
Date Covered
05/10/1988
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/tocn-mla000573-students-end-demonstration-at-harvard-law-school
Summary
David Boeri reports that a group of Harvard Law students occupied the Dean's office overnight to protest the lack of minority faculty at the school. Boeri notes that the students held a rally for their cause this morning. Boeri’s report includes footage of Charles Ogletree (Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School) addressing a rally of students outside of the school. Boeri notes that the sit-in is over for now and that student leaders met with James Vorenberg (Dean, Harvard Law School) to discuss their demands for an increase in minority faculty members. Boeri interviews Robert Wilkins (Harvard Black Law Students Association) about the meeting with the Dean.
(snip)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
wiki:
In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,[35] and president of the journal in his second year.[31][36]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Wilkins
Wilkins was born in 1963 in Muncie, Indiana,[1] where he was raised by a single mother.[2] He studied chemical engineering at Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1986.[3] Wilkins then earned his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1989.[4]
(snip)
During the 111th Congress, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recommended Wilkins for filling a vacancy on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.[8] On May 20, 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Wilkins to a judgeship on the District Court for the District of Columbia.[4] He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 22, 2010.[9] Wilkins received his commission on December 27, 2010.[10]
(snip)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(no link)
Freedom to think at Harvard Law
THE WASHINGTON TIMES - Wednesday, JULY 17, 1991
Author: Eric Felten, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Dean Robert Clark was not about to see his Harvard Law School office be turned into the Columbia University president’s office of the 1990s. No cigar-smoking students with their feet up on his desk. So when student protesters staged sit-ins blocking his office lobby for the second time in a semester last fall, he cracked down.
The students were following the lead of Professor Derrick Bell , who has taken a leave of absence from the university until a black woman professor is appointed to the law school. Mr. Bell is protesting the school’s unwillingness to offer tenure to Anita Allen, a visiting professor from Georgetown University and a black woman.
“We took pictures of the students in the office so that we would know who they were, and [we] told them they were in clear violation of university rules,” Mr. Clark says. The students also were told that if they did not leave the office by the end of the day, they would be disciplined. They were sent letters saying such protests would not be tolerated in the future.
“They waited a little past the deadline, to show they weren’t intimidated,” Mr. Clark says. With a hint of mischief, he adds, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this - because I don’t want to encourage them to try it again - but they haven’t been back.”
(snip)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_L._Allen
Anita LaFrance Allen-Castellito (born March 24, 1953)[1] is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is also a senior fellow in the bioethics department of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a collaborating faculty member in African studies, and an affiliated faculty member in the women’s studies program. In 2010 President Barack Obama named Allen to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is a Hastings Center Fellow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Obama
Robinson majored in sociology and minored in African American studies and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.[4][25] She earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[26] At Harvard she participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minorities[27] and worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases.[28]
Too grainy to say. And that woman is shorter than MO.
But, really, if there'd been a racial protest in HLS when Michelle was there the real surprise would be if she didn't participate.
See also post #34.
And, those feet are huge. ;)
Good find!
Is she tall enough? feet big enough?
Your links demonstrate and add to the overwhelming evidence we have that Obama’s radical ties are unbroken to this day.
LucyT: Ping to thread and posts
The average moderate won’t get it. This is all too esoteric for them
There’s something fishy about this. The video was hidden during ‘08, but then shown publicly to a room full of people shortly after Professor Bell died. I’m betting this is some sort of strategy on zero’s part. This criticism of Bell is going to backfire.
You can make the same statement about any country on this planet.....Every race or nationality has an inherent bias for their own...That's just human nature.
http://bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1409325&position=4
Ogletree: I was joking about Obama video clip
By Chris Cassidy
Friday, March 9, 2012 - Updated 6 hours ago
Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree told the Herald he was just kidding when he suggested that a decades-old clip of a young Barack Obama praising and embracing controversial Professor Derrick Bell was kept hidden from voters during the 2008 campaign.
“It was a big joke,” Ogletree said. “If you watch the tape, the audience is laughing when I’m laughing.”
(snip)
wiki:
Ogletree taught both Barack and Michelle Obama at Harvard; he has remained close to Barack Obama throughout his political career.[5] He appeared briefly on the joint Daily Show-Colbert Report election night coverage of the 2008 presidential election, making a few remarks about his personal knowledge of the Obamas.
Ogletree has written opinion pieces on the state of race in the United States for major publications.[6] Ogletree also served as the moderator for a panel discussion on civil rights in baseball on March 28, 2008 that accompanied the second annual Major League Baseball civil rights exhibition game the following day between the New York Mets and the Chicago White Sox.[7]
On July 21, 2009, Ogletree issued a statement in response to the arrest of his Harvard colleague and client, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose arrest at his own home became a major news story about the nexus of politics, police power, and race that summer.[8] Professor Ogletree later wrote a book about the events entitled The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America.
After the September 2009 death of Senator Ted Kennedy, Ogletree’s name was suggested as one of the possible appointees to Kennedy’s seat as a “placeholder” until a special election could be held. ...
Originally posted on August 20, 2011, featuring an AP story about Obama’s Martha Vineyard vacation, which he was still in the middle of.
Charles Ogletree was a black panther. He is also the lawyer of Henry Louis Gates, the racist Harvard professor whose racism caused the beer summit. Ogletree’s daughter Rashida was recently hired into Holder’s Justice Department as a lawyer. Ogletree is still a militant leftist and is still called on by the Obamas for advice.
OAK BLUFFS, Mass. (AP) — President Barack Obama put in a brief appearance Saturday at the home of his friend and one-time teacher, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, as he continued his Martha’s Vineyard vacation.
(snip)
New White House Visitor Database: Professor Ogletree has Visited 14 Times
Kagan, Obama, and the Harvard Legacy of Literary Fraud
Tribe's transgression had come to light only after he had publicly defended his colleague Ogletree, who just three weeks earlier had publicly apologized for the unauthorized heist of verbiage from Yale scholar Jack Balkin's book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, and the stashing of it, nearly word-for-word, in his own book, All Deliberate Speed.
Appalled by Tribe's hypocrisy, an anonymous tipster alerted conservative scholar Joseph Bottum, who penned a damning 5,000 word article for The Weekly Standard, which revealed the extent of Tribe's theft and resulted in Tribe's half-hearted mea culpa.
In reviewing the case, Kagan and then Harvard President Larry Summers faced an obvious challenge: Ogletree was a black star on a faculty often criticized for being overly white; even more problematic, Tribe was the superstar of the judicial left.
Ogletree’s first intensive experience in the courtroom sparked his intent to pursue trial law as a career. He attended nearly every day of the trial of Black Power activist and Communist Angela Davis. Some of parts of the Davis trial were tedious, Ogletree recalled in I've Known Rivers, but “the process and strategies were fascinating. I sat there wondering how they were going to tie all this together.” After graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford in 1974, Ogletree stayed on a year to earn a master's degree. At the urging of his soon-to-be wife, he applied to Harvard Law School; the newlyweds moved to the Boston area upon his acceptance and enrollment in the fall of 1975. From the start, Ogletree recalled, he felt unease in the markedly different, monied East Coast enclave. Furthermore, the city was then in the middle of a vicious battle over busing that pitted its ethnic-American communities against the African-American populace. Academia itself was also especially tedious, and at one point he nearly quit the prestigious School of Law. “At Harvard the pressure was on, participation was mandatory, there was always a lot of competition and tension in the air,” Ogletree recalled in I've Known Rivers. He survived by closely allying himself with other African-American students and continued his political activism, even becoming national president of the Black Law Students Association.
Read more: Ogletree Charles Jr. Biography - Selected writings - Law, School, American, and African - JRank Articles http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2366/Ogletree-Jr-Charles.html#ixzz1ofJ7lITE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/images/micheleobama.jpg
If anyone asked Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. 20 years ago which member of the Obama family would wind up in national politics, he would have picked Michelle.
Ogletree first met Michelle Obama ’88 in the fall of 1985 when both arrived at Harvard Law School for the first time, she as a student and he as a visiting professor. As a student in his trial advocacy workshop, Ogletree says her commitment to public service was already clear.
“She made a commitment to her father, who did not go to college, that she would pursue her talents to help her community,” says Ogletree.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HT: Weaselzippers
The home of Professor Charles Ogletree, a friend and former law school professor of President Barack Obama, is visible during a social event with the president in attendance in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., Saturday, Aug. 20, 2011.
From your post:
“He edited a campus Black Panther newspaper called The Real News and traveled to Africa and Cuba as part of student activist groups.
Ogletree’s first intensive experience in the courtroom sparked his intent to pursue trial law as a career. He attended nearly every day of the trial of Black Power activist and Communist Angela Davis. “
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Protecting former Panthers
On December 8 2005, former Black Panther Party members, John L. Bowman, Hank Jones and Ray Boudreaux held a meeting at the Washington, DC office of Trans-Africa Forum. They were complaining about re-newed police investigations of a 1971 police killing in San Francisco that they had been accused of.
They had been indicted at the time by a grand jury, but were released when the court rendered a decision stating the methods used to obtain information were illegal.
The former Panthers were flanked by Danny Glover, “reparations” activist Ron Daniels, Democratic Socialists of America member Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Charles Ogletree.
Charles Ogletree, said that the community should protect the rights of the former Panthers with their lives[8].
“These gentlemen, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones and others have been victims of the most vicious forms of American terrorism and torture...It takes a village to protect its elders. We tell them today, through our presence here and through our commitment that we will provide a protective blanket over them. They will not come in this village and take these elders, except over our dead bodies.”
http://www.keywiki.org/index.php/Charles_Ogletree
Why Did Obama Free a Black Liberation Army Member? [Marilyn Buck]
Consider Jill Elijah. She writes on behalf of Buck’s release that “a warm nurturing living arrangement is available to Ms. Buck in my home located in Brooklyn. . . . I and my family look forward to her joining our home.” The letterhead? Harvard Law School, where Elijah runs the criminal justice institute. Also on the letterhead in the Elijah letter to the Justice Department is Charles Ogletree, President Obama’s dear friend and mentor. Having Ogletree’s name associated with such a request was like mailing Buck the keys to her jail cell. Ogletree’s daughter Rashida was recently hired into Holder’s Justice Department as a lawyer.
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March 9, 2012 Shocking new documents detail DOJ’s reasons for releasing Marxist bomber
Another thing Adams points to with Elijah’s letters is that they’re written on Harvard letterhead. One of President Obama’s law school professors, Harvard Director Emeritus Charles Ogletree, appears on the letterhead. Adams said Ogletree has lots of pull with the president.
“The letters from Harvard with Charles Ogletree in the letterhead are telling,” Adams said. “Ogletree is a personal friend of President Obama and having his name on a letter seeking Buck’s release is like sending Buck the keys to open her jail cell.”
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Obama stayed with Ogletree in Aug 2004, right after his 2004 DNC speech
Now I understand the timing and locale for Obama’s summer vacations.
(no link)
Black intellectuals focus on condition of African-Americans Discussion sends mixed message to Clinton about race relations, his initiative
The Dallas Morning News - Sunday, August 31, 1997
Author: New York Times News Service
EDGARTOWN, Mass. - The former Black Panther wondered why her son, a college graduate, was working in a supermarket. A Supreme Court justice’s one-time accuser wondered why she saw so many Confederate flags in Oklahoma. And a law professor wondered how to keep people from withdrawing to islands - metaphorical ones - when faced with the subject of race.
These concerns were voiced within the white clapboard walls of the Old Whaling Church on Friday night as 10 of the United States’ foremost black intellectuals led a sometimes measured and sometimes passionate, humorous or prickly discussion over whether and how to hold a national conversation about race.
The participants included Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther ; Anita Hill, whose testimony during the 1991 Supreme Court nomination hearings of Clarence Thomas started a national debate over sexual harassment; and Patricia Williams, an author and law professor at Columbia University.
But the man who is trying to lead that conversation during the next year, President Clinton, did not attend. His aides said that he was concerned about disrupting both the event and his three-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.
“I’m not concerned that he’s not here,” professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School said. “I’m concerned if he’s not hearing. “ But if Mr. Clinton eventually listens to the tape of the evening’s debate that his aides said he would receive, he will hear a decidedly mixed message - about his race initiative, about the state of black-white relations, and about the economic and political condition of black Americans.
And that outcome clearly delighted the moderator, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, which organized the event, as well as similar ones in past years. Mr. Gates said that the three-hour discussion underscored the “multiplicity of opinion within one little section of the American mosaic. “ Martha’s Vineyard is the setting for the annual panels, which have dealt before with subjects such as affirmative action, in part because of the island’s history as an integrated resort, and in part because so many potential panelists unwind there. (In introducing Mr. Ogletree , Mr. Gates said, “He is also, I understand, a master fisherman in these waters. “) More than 400 people, including many celebrities, paid $50 to attend.
(snip)
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(no link)
What’s up with Obama secrecy? // Pullout quote pullout quote pullout qoute pullout quote.
Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - Thursday, September 9, 2004
Author: Lynn Sweet
Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama is running two campaigns.
One you see.
One you don’t.
(snip)
While the vast majority of Obama’s campaign cash comes from Illinois, Obama has raised a significant amount of money — 24 percent of his cash — from out-of-state donations. Obama, for example, does not want you to know that last month he collected money at a cocktail fund-raiser in the town of Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard , the famous vacation island off Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. The trip seemed very worthwhile. Obama combined it with an appearance on a panel to discuss the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in the country, moderated by Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree .
(snip)
Law license, Wash, DC, 2007
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"For me his [Derrick Bell] loss is personally devastating. He started out as an inspiring teacher and mentor who became a close and beloved friend.
I was particularly thrilled that he taught my daughter, Rashida Ogletree George, when she was a student at NYU Law School and a teaching assistant for Bell. "
Derrick Bell: Losing a champion for equality by Charles J. Ogletree Jr.
Rashida J Ogletree – Department of Justice
Rashida J Ogletree (GS 15) is an employee working for the Department of Justice / Offices of Boards and Divisions in Washington, DC. In the fiscal year 2010, this employee received a base salary of $123,758.
Salary for Rashida J Ogletree
Base Salary $123,758
Bonus $0
Pay Grade GS 15
Position General Attorney
Series 0905
Department/Agency Department of Justice / Offices of Boards and Divisions
Location Washington, DC
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