Obama, the African Colonial

American Thinker ^ | June 25, 2009 | L.E. Ikenga

[neverdem]

Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.

Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign "isms", instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.

The tropes of America's racial history as a way of understanding all things black are useless in understanding the man who got his dreams from his father, a Kenyan exemplar of the African Colonial.

Before I continue, I need to say this: I am a first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970's from the country now called Nigeria. I travel to Nigeria frequently. I see myself as both a proud American and as a proud Igbo (the tribe that we come from -- also sometimes spelled Ibo). Politically, I have always been conservative (though it took this past election for me to commit to this once and for all!); my conservative values come from my Igbo heritage and my place of birth. Of course, none of this qualifies me to say what I am about to -- but at the same time it does.

My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself -- those of us who know our history -- have seen this movie before. Here are two main reasons why many Americans allowed Obama to slip through the cracks despite all of his glaring inconsistencies:

First, Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious. Second, and most importantly, too many Americans know very little about Africa. The one-size-fits-all understanding that many Americans (both black and white) continue to have of Africa might end up bringing dire consequences for this country.

Contrary to the way it continues to be portrayed in mainstream Western culture, Africa is not a continent that can be solely defined by AIDS, ethnic rivalries, poverty and safaris. Africa, like any other continent, has an immense history defined by much diversity and complexity. Africa's long-standing relationship with Europe speaks especially to some of these complexities -- particularly the relationship that has existed between the two continents over the past two centuries. Europe's complete colonization of Africa during the nineteenth century, also known as the Scramble for Africa, produced many unfortunate consequences, the African colonial being one of them.

The African colonial (AC) is a person who by means of their birth or lineage has a direct connection with Africa. However, unlike Africans like me, their worldviews have been largely shaped not by the indigenous beliefs of a specific African tribe but by the ideals of the European imperialism that overwhelmed and dominated Africa during the colonial period. AC's have no real regard for their specific African traditions or histories.  AC's use aspects of their African culture as one would use pieces of costume jewelry: things of little or no value that can be thoughtlessly discarded when they become a negative distraction, or used on a whim to decorate oneself in order to seem exotic. (Hint: Obama's Muslim heritage).

On the other hand, AC's strive to be the best at the culture that they inherited from Europe. Throughout the West, they are tops in their professions as lawyers, doctors, engineers, Ivy League professors and business moguls; this is all well and good. It's when they decide to engage us as politicians that things become messy and convoluted.

The African colonial politician (ACP) feigns repulsion towards the hegemonic paradigms of Western civilization. But at the same time, he is completely enamored of the trappings of its aristocracy or elite culture. The ACP blames and caricatures whitey to no end for all that has gone wrong in the world. He convinces the masses that various forms of African socialism are the best way for redressing the problems that European colonialism motivated in Africa. However, as opposed to really being a hard-core African Leftist who actually believes in something, the ACP uses socialist themes as a way to disguise his true ambitions: a complete power grab whereby the "will of the people" becomes completely irrelevant.

Barack Obama is all of the above. The only difference is that he is here playing (colonial) African politics as usual.  

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father -- an eloquent piece of political propaganda -- Obama styles himself as a misunderstood intellectual who is deeply affected by the sufferings of black people, especially in America and Africa. In the book, Obama clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American. And to prove this, he goes on a quest to understand his Kenyan roots. He is extremely thoughtful of his deceased father's legacy; this provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama.

Barack Obama Sr. was an African colonial to the core; in his case, the apple did not fall far from the tree. All of the telltale signs of Obama's African colonialist attitudes are on full display in the book -- from his feigned antipathy towards Europeans to his view of African tribal associations as distracting elements that get in the way of "progress".  (On p. 308 of Dreams From My Father, Obama says that African tribes should be viewed as an "ancient loyalties".)

Like imperialists of Old World Europe, the ACP sees their constituents not as free thinking individuals who best know how to go about achieving and creating their own means for success. Instead, the ACP sees his constituents as a flock of ignorant sheep that need to be led -- oftentimes to their own slaughter.

Like the European imperialist who spawned him, the ACP is a destroyer of all forms of democracy.

Here are a few examples of what the British did in order to create (in 1914) what is now called Nigeria and what Obama is doing to you: 

1. Convince the people that "clinging" to any aspect of their cultural (tribal) identity or history is bad and regresses the process of "unity". British Imperialists deeply feared people who were loyal to anything other than the state. "Tribalism" made the imperialists have to work harder to get people to just fall in line. Imperialists pitted tribes against each other in order to create chaos that they then blamed on ethnic rivalry. Today many "educated" Nigerians, having believed that their traditions were irrelevant, remain completely ignorant of their ancestry and the history of their own tribes.
2. Confiscate the wealth and resources of the area that you govern by any means necessary in order to redistribute wealth. The British used this tactic to present themselves as empathetic and benevolent leaders who wanted everyone to have a "fair shake". Imperialists are not interested in equality for all. They are interested in controlling all.  
3. Convince the masses that your upper-crust university education naturally puts you on an intellectual plane from which to understand everything even when you understand nothing. Imperialists were able to convince the people that their elite university educations allowed them to understand what Africa needed. Many of today's Nigerians-having followed that lead-hold all sorts of degrees and certificates-but what good are they if you can't find a job?   
4. Lie to the people and tell them that progress is being made even though things are clearly becoming worse.  One thing that the British forgot to mention to their Nigerian constituents was that one day, the resources that were being used to engineer "progress" (which the British had confiscated from the Africans to begin with!) would eventually run out. After WWII, Western Europe could no longer afford to hold on to their African colonies. So all of the counterfeit countries that the Europeans created were then left high-and-dry to fend for themselves. This was the main reason behind the African independence movements of the1950 and 60's. What will a post-Obama America look like?
5. Use every available media outlet to perpetuate the belief that you and your followers are the enlightened ones-and that those who refuse to support you are just barbaric, uncivilized, ignorant curmudgeons.  This speaks for itself.

America, don't be fooled. The Igbos were once made up of a confederacy of clans that ascribed to various forms of democratic government. They took their eyes off the ball and before they knew it, the British were upon them. Also, understand this: the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.

L.E. Ikenga can be reached at leikenga@gmail.com.

[skinkinthegrass]

talk about a time machine, thxs for the re-post.

[LucyT]

Obama hated colonialism, because colonialism meant the natives had to get up and go to school, get religion and work. Under feudalism, the natives got fed, laid around and got laid as their major accomplishments of life.

.

[GeronL]

welfare sis feudalism!!?

[Fred Nerks]

DISCOVER THE NETWORKS
EXCERPT:

...Axelrod graduated from New York’s Stuyvesant High School in June 1972 and enrolled, that fall, at the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science and wrote for the student newspaper. In late 1973 or early 1974, he secured a job as a political columnist for the Hyde Park Herald, a local weekly newspaper. His work at the Herald caught the attention of two particularly noteworthy individuals, David Canter and Don Rose:

David Canter (1923-2004) was the son of Harry Jacob Canter, a lifelong communist who: served as secretary of the Boston Communist Party; ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communist Party ticket in 1930; earned a special invitation to Joseph Stalin’s USSR in 1932; worked in Moscow as an official translator of Lenin’s writings; and later taught at the Abraham Lincoln School, an infamous Chicago-based front that indoctrinated students in the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Like his father, David Canter was also a lifelong communist. He was educated in Stalin’s Soviet Union from 1932-37, before returning with his family to the United States. He later became an attorney and developed ties to the National Lawyers Guild. In the Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications, an exhaustive Congressional analysis compiled between 1955 and 1968, Canter’s name appeared 25 times. On July 12, 1962, Canter was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), where he was questioned about the agendas of Translation World Publishers, the pro-Soviet, Soviet-subsidized publishing house he had co-created with LeRoy Wolins, a well-known communist. Canter refused to answer any HUAC questions about his past or present membership in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Canter’s associate, Don Rose (who is still alive), was never proven to be a CPUSA member. He was, however, a member of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an organization replete with communists and Sixties radicals. He also belonged to the Alliance to End Repression (a suspected Communist Party front), and he did some press work for the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1960s, Rose and Canter collaborated to establish a far-left, pro-communist community newspaper called Hyde Park-Kenwood Voices, which echoed CPUSA propaganda. Soon after meeting Axelrod, Canter and Rose became mentors to the young man and helped shape his political development.

---

And during this time, from just after WW2 until he retired in the mid 90’s, Charles T Payne, the brother of Madelyn Dunham was Deputy Director of the Library at the University of Chicago and lived in Hyde Park.

In the seventies, his wife Melanie was on a committee with the wife of David Axelrod.

[Fred Nerks]

http://keywiki.org/index.php/Frank_Marshall_Davis

Frank Marshall Davis, poet, journalist, and educator, lived in Chicago from 1924-1928 and again from 1934-1948. He served as Executive Editor of Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press from 1935-1947. A prolific journalist and arts critic, Davis was also the author of three major volumes of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), and 47th Street (1948).

Active in all arenas of Chicago’s bourgeoning Black cultural scene, Davis was one of the founding members of the late-1930s South Side Writers’ Group associated with Richard Wright, as well as a prominent participant in events organized by the South Side Community Art Center and the Abraham Lincoln School throughout the 1940s. Davis frequently gave public lectures on subjects ranging from the political and social status of African Americans to the history of jazz[2].

---

Then in 1955, Richard Wright accompanied Malcolm X to the Bandung Conference in Jakarta, hosted by President Sukarno, who in turn, visited Malcolm in the US the year after, in 1956.

[Fred Nerks]

JOHN DEWEY

THE GRANDFATHER OF ALICE DEWEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST, ‘INDONESIANIST’ INCLUDED IN THE FOLLOWING ILLUSTRIOUS LIST:

http://keywiki.org/index.php/Intercollegiate_Socialist_Society

The Intercollegiate Socialist Society (later known as the League for Industrial Democracy) was formed on September 12, 1905 at a meeting of approximately one hundred people who met in a loft over Peck’s Restaurant, at 140 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. The purpose of the meeting was to strategize the overthrow of the Christian worldview that still pervaded much of American culture and to replace it with the ideas of a then rather unknown writer by the name of Karl Marx.[1]

SNIP

The following were leaders of the organization:[1]

Intercollegiate Socialist Society
Upton Sinclair, founder
Jack London, first president
Clarence Darrow, who worked as an attorney
Walter Lippmann, later author and director of the Council on Foreign Relations, president of the Harvard Chapter
Walter Reuther, future president of United Auto Workers, headed the Wayne State chapter
Eugene V. Debs, went on to become the five-time Socialist candidate for president, leader at Columbia.
W. E. B. DuBois, later became an official of the NAACP and a CPUSA member
Victor L. Berger, Wisconsin, who became the first Socialist elected to Congress.
League for Industrial Democracy
Norman Thomas, Socialist candidate for president, leader behind the scenes
Robert Lovett, editor of the New Republic, first president
Paul Blanshard, field secretary
John Dewey, honorary vice president (1941), league vice president (1930s)
Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian, treasurer

Members
The following is a list of those who were members of the organization:[1]

Robert N. Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union
Charles Beard, historian
Carroll Binder, editor of the Minneapolis Tribune
Helen Gahagan Douglas, defeated by Richard Nixon for the U.S. Senate
Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice
Sidney Hook, the educational social philosopher
Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most trusted economic advisers
Walter and Victor Reuther, United Auto Workers
Will Rogers, Jr., humorist
Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., the president’s son
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian

[Fred Nerks]

INDONESIAN ARTICLE

ALICE AT THE PALACE

as translated by freeper Brown Deer

READ THE TRANSLATED ARTICLE HERE

Global capitalism has shown its failure, and slowly but surely will meet destruction. Obama, he said, trying to rescue the U.S. economy and the world in general from that peril.

(SAYS ALICE)

Alice Dewey pictured with Sultan Hamengkubuwono X and GKR Hemas kompeks before leaving the palace.

[gaijin]

Bfl

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/obamas_new_nationalism_more_sukarno_than_teddy_roosevelt.html

Lolo was a well-connected young Indonesian student, firmly entrenched in the fabric of the Indonesian ruling class, is supported by several facts.

Lolo’s mother was closely related to Sultan Hamenkubuwono IX, the hereditary ruler of Yogyakarta. From 1949 until his death in1988, the sultan was a towering figure of civilian influence within first the Sukarno, and later the Suharto government. He served as the national minister of Foreign Affairs under Sukarno, and from 1973 to 1978, he was also Suharto’s vice president.

Mayo Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half sister, has publicly mentioned her grandmother’s “royal blood,” and University of Hawaii anthropology professor Alice Dewey, Stanley Ann Dunham’s close friend and thesis adviser, told me in a phone interview last year1 that:

Lolo’s mother, Ann, and Maya lived inside the royal area of Yogyokarta when I visited them in 1978-1979. She was related to the Sultan, I think probably at the second-cousin level or maybe even the first-cousin level. They — Ann, her daughter Maya, and her mother-in-law— lived in a house very near the center of that walled area, which suggested to me that she had a fairly close family relationship to the sultan. The betang is traditionally the area reserved for the extended royal family of the Sultan Hamengkubuwono. No one who was a foreigner without royal blood could live there.

Soetoro’s familial relations to the Sultan would explain why he received a scholarship to the University of Hawaii East-West Center program. Typically, foreign governments recommend students who have some sort of political connection.

[Fred Nerks]

MORE ILLUSTRIOUS NAMES ASSOCIATED WITH JOHN DEWEY:

Early career as Marxist[edit]At the beginning of his career, Hook was a prominent expert on Karl Marx’s philosophy and was himself a Marxist. He attended the lectures of Karl Korsch in Berlin in 1928 and conducted research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the summer of 1929.[2] At first, he wrote enthusiastically about the Soviet Union, and, in 1932, supported the Communist Party’s candidate, William Z. Foster, when he ran for President of the United States. However, Hook broke completely with the Comintern in 1933, holding its policies responsible for the triumph of Nazism in Germany. He accused Joseph Stalin of putting “the needs of the Russian state” over the needs of the international revolution.[3]

However, Hook remained active in some of the causes of the far Left during the Great Depression. In 1933, with James Burnham, Hook was one of the organizers of the American Workers Party, led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A.J. Muste.[4] Hook also debated the meaning of Marxism with radical Max Eastman in a series of public exchanges.[5] (Eastman, like Hook, had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University.) In the late 1930s, Hook assisted Leon Trotsky in his efforts to clear his name in a special Commission of Inquiry headed by Dewey, which investigated Stalinist charges made against Trotsky during the Moscow Trials.

[Fred Nerks]

[Fred Nerks]

SUKARNO MAKES A FURTHER PRIVATE VISIT TO THE US IN 1959, ONE OF HIS ENTOURAGE IS SHOWN AS LT SUTORO, HIS ADDRESS;

THE PALACE

[Fred Nerks]

APRIL 21, 1961 SUKARNO MEETS ELVIS IN HAWAII

IMAGE SOURCE

[Fred Nerks]

DISCOVER THE NETWORKS>
EXCERPT:

...Axelrod graduated from New York’s Stuyvesant High School in June 1972 and enrolled, that fall, at the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science and wrote for the student newspaper. In late 1973 or early 1974, he secured a job as a political columnist for the Hyde Park Herald, a local weekly newspaper. His work at the Herald caught the attention of two particularly noteworthy individuals, David Canter and Don Rose:

David Canter (1923-2004) was the son of Harry Jacob Canter, a lifelong communist who: served as secretary of the Boston Communist Party; ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communist Party ticket in 1930; earned a special invitation to Joseph Stalin’s USSR in 1932; worked in Moscow as an official translator of Lenin’s writings; and later taught at the Abraham Lincoln School, an infamous Chicago-based front that indoctrinated students in the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Like his father, David Canter was also a lifelong communist. He was educated in Stalin’s Soviet Union from 1932-37, before returning with his family to the United States. He later became an attorney and developed ties to the National Lawyers Guild. In the Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications, an exhaustive Congressional analysis compiled between 1955 and 1968, Canter’s name appeared 25 times. On July 12, 1962, Canter was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), where he was questioned about the agendas of Translation World Publishers, the pro-Soviet, Soviet-subsidized publishing house he had co-created with LeRoy Wolins, a well-known communist. Canter refused to answer any HUAC questions about his past or present membership in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Canter’s associate, Don Rose (who is still alive), was never proven to be a CPUSA member. He was, however, a member of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an organization replete with communists and Sixties radicals. He also belonged to the Alliance to End Repression (a suspected Communist Party front), and he did some press work for the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1960s, Rose and Canter collaborated to establish a far-left, pro-communist community newspaper called Hyde Park-Kenwood Voices, which echoed CPUSA propaganda. Soon after meeting Axelrod, Canter and Rose became mentors to the young man and helped shape his political development.

---

And during this time, from just after WW2 until he retired in the mid 90’s, Charles T Payne, the brother of Madelyn Dunham was Deputy Director of the Library at the University of Chicago and lived in Hyde Park.

In the seventies, his wife Melanie was on a committee with the wife of David Axelrod.

[Fred Nerks]

FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS
Active in all arenas of Chicago’s bourgeoning Black cultural scene, Davis was one of the founding members of the late-1930s South Side Writers’ Group associated with Richard Wright, as well as a prominent participant in events organized by the South Side Community Art Center and the Abraham Lincoln School throughout the 1940s. Davis frequently gave public lectures on subjects ranging from the political and social status of African Americans to the history of jazz[2].

---

And Richard Wright accompanied MalcolmX to the Bandung Conference in 1955, hosted by Sukarno, in Jakarta, Indonesia.

[Fred Nerks]

SOURCE - frontpagemagazine blog comments:

It’s not surprising Marx wrote about the exploitation of working people. He was intimately familiar with exploitation of working people, since he personally exploited everyone around him his entire life. He was a broke loser who sponged off everyone around him, borrowed money and never paid it back, and believed it was the obligation of his family and friends to support him in his “great work” so that he wouldn’t have to earn a living. Stephan Molyneux paints a chilling portrait of the monster that Marx was in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA2lCBJu2Gg
That the ideas of Marx would be popular among other people who share his belief that the world owes them something is not surprising.

---

Video is a must-see

[thouworm]

Greetings Fred Nerks: Hope you are well. I see it has been nearly a year since I have posted here--- and can you believe "African Colonial" is approaching its 5th anniversary!

The article below, by Daniel Greenfield, seemed to me to be a worthy addition to this august thread.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Black Hitler of Harlem

Posted by Daniel Greenfield [March 08, 2014] @ the Sultan Knish blog

The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches outside the stores of Harlem's dwindling Jewish community. 

The cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a pioneering labor leader-- but was known back then as the Black Hitler.

A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.

In his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.

He vowed an "an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites."

Speeches like these earned him the title, 'Black Hitler' and intimidated local businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union. 

The enterprising community organizer dubbed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid, and when he opened his mosque, he expanded his name to His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid. His press man claimed that he had been born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. In reality he had been born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts and in Chicago had briefly claimed to be Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric. Like the Nation of Islam, which was finding its feet at around the same time, his theology was a hodgepodge of Islam and anything else he picked up along the way.

It is unknown what connection Sufi Abdul Hamid had to the burgeoning Nation of Islam, which took the same mix of racism, anti-semitism, black nationalism and Islam and became a major movement, but in the year before he moved to Harlem, Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad disappeared, and his successor Elijah Muhammad moved to Chicago after conflicts with the state government and rival NOI leaders.  Hamid was probably never part of the Nation of Islam, but he had almost certainly seen it in action and his New York operation was guided by similar methods.

The year was 1932. In Germany, the actual Hitler was running for president. In New York City, Mayor Jimmy Walker was still reigning as the corrupt but entertaining figurehead of Tammany Hall's Democratic party apparatus, but in a few months the Seabury Commission's investigation into the city's horrifyingly corrupt justice system would send the Tin Pan Alley singing mayor fleeing off to Europe along with his showgirl wife.  

The Great Depression had hit New York's prosperous commercial sector like a sledgehammer. The city that never slept had not gone quiet, but it had slowed down. New York's black population had exploded in its boom days drawn by the lure of jobs, but now that the bust had come the streets of Harlem were full of unemployed men.

The time was ripe for a messiah or a violent explosion. And Sufi Abdul Hamid offered them both.

Hamid was not the only one working the streets of Harlem. The Young Communist League and the Young Liberators had been there first looking for cannon fodder for the revolution. The Japanese were dreaming of a black army that would serve as their fifth column in the conquest of the United States. Both were to be disappointed. The Black Communist, once commonplace among Harlem intellectuals, would become an endangered species beginning with the Hitler-Stalin pact and ending with the liberal takeover of civil rights. But for now black intellectuals would visit Japan and even endorse its brutal invasion of China.

Imperial Japan's simultaneous cultivation of Muslims in order to subvert the British Empire, also led to ties between Japanese officials and the Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad. The Moorish Science Temple, a more explicit fusion of Islam, Asiatic exoticism and Black Nationalism, another pseudo-Islamic cult operating out of Chicago. would eventually be investigated by the FBI for ties to Japan. These days, its members are more likely to be investigated for squatting empty mansions on the grounds that they are descendants of the ancient Moabites of Africa and represent a sovereign nation.

The Temple was a probable influence on Hamid's Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility. The People's Voice, a left wing black newspaper, would even claim that Hamid's temple had been funded by Japan.

Sufi Abdul Hamid was not limited to Japanese money. He had something better. For all his theatrics,  under the slick mustache, the gold lined cape and gleaming dagger, beat the heart of a community organizer.

What Hamid came up with was a combination labor union, employment agency, protection racket, Islamic cult and protest movement. With black unemployment in Harlem running as high as 50 percent, he offered to find jobs for black men who paid him a dollar. And to make sure they got hired, his men picketed businesses demanding that they be put on the payroll. Businesses which didn't have a proper proportion of black employees were accused of racism and exploitation. Businesses which did were harassed anyway until they fired their black employees and hired Hamid's men instead.

Hamid's 125th street stepladder harangues intimidated Jewish store owners and customers, and many black customers as well. Whenever he succeeded, he picked up more recruits who might not believe in his religious message, but liked the idea of getting a job. Businesses that paid up didn't have to worry that the cape wearing hatemonger would show up in front of their store screaming violent threats.

Hamid's following grew. As did his bank account.

By 1938, Hamid had his own private plane and a white secretary. His union had gone through many names, from the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance to the Afro-American Federation of Labor. Adam Clayton Powell briefly joined forces with Sufi Abdul Hamid in labor protests and store boycotts, but Hamid was too power hungry to work with anyone for long.

Black Hitler's rhetoric moved beyond anti-white and anti-Jewish racism to targeting light skinned blacks. Violent clashes with rival black unions led to Hamid's arrest for stabbing Hammie Snipes, a former follower of Marcus Garvey turned Communist labor union organizer. Finally the courts barred Hamid from his picketing and forced him to focus his energies on his mosque. But before that the Black Hitler would play a role in Harlem's first race riot.

The Harlem riot of 1935 had many of the characteristics of what would become the typical race riot. False information about police brutality circulated by radicals looking to stir up a mob. Looting misrepresented as a civil rights protest. And a swelling undercurrent of bigotry portrayed as outrage. As Congresswoman Maxine Waters would call the LA riots, "a revolution" and a "a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice"; Nannie H. Burroughs compared the Harlem riot to the Boston Tea Party and claimed that it was the duty of the oppressed to revolt.

The tactic was an old one, unleash violence and then claim to be the only ones who could bottle it up. Hamid had begun by intimidating storeowners with the threat of racial violence, but the race riot of 1935 would intimidate the entire neighborhood and eventually the entire city. Once unleashed and legitimized, the violence could no longer be bottled up again.

A race riot before 1935 had been an unusual phenomenon in Harlem. After 1935, it became far less so. Next year when Joe Louis lost his first fight against Max Schmeling, Harlem rioters attacked white men in the street and dropped bricks from buildings on passing cars.

The 1935 riot would destroy as many black businesses as white ones. But the Communists who had played a major role in organizing the riot, did not want to see black men reach the middle class, and  Sufi Abdul Hamid wanted to increase the scope of his protection racket. The courts had taken a dim view of his labor organizing tactics, but a race riot allowed stores to be hit up in a whole new way.

The riots and arsons went on for three days. Two hundred stores were destroyed and many more were looted. Fires were set to cries of "Let it burn". Entire businesses were wiped out. Some never recovered. The damage to Harlem's business district was estimated at one million dollars. Bodies went to hospitals and morgues.

In what would also become a commonplace feature of race riots, afterward, in a bid to gain mainstream political influence, the Black Hitler debuted a more moderate image.

In an interview with The Nation magazine, he disavowed bigotry and claimed to be a champion of the underprivileged. Liberal newspapers and magazines were all too eager to embrace the myth that the riot was caused by oppression rather than radical manipulation. The New York Times championed an aid package for Harlem. While some Jewish newspapers called the attacks a 'Pogrom', the socialist  Forward insisted on whitewashing the attacks as a protest against the authorities.

The judicial crackdown on Hamid's labor extortion racket refocused his attention on his mosque, the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, where he dubbed himself a Bishop. His nickname migrated from the Black Hitler to the Black Mufti. He married Queenie St. Clair, who ran Harlem's numbers racket, but their marriage ended badly when Queenie shot him, but failed to kill him. Hamid married again and bought a private plane, an obscene luxury at a time when many of those he claimed to help didn't have enough to eat. But Hamid frugally kept it low on gas. The plane ran out of fuel over Long Island and crashed. Hamid died, survived by his white secretary who suffered only a broken elbow.

His new wife, a candle shop owner and fortune teller named Dorothy Hamid, who styled herself Madame Fu Futtam, and improbably claimed to be Asian, attempted to keep Hamid's mosque going with visits that he reportedly made to her nightly from beyond the grave. Her prediction that Hamid would return from the grave in sixty days did not come true.

Not long after the mosque became a dance hall featuring a one legged dancer. Today the site at 103 Morningside Avenue is the home of St. Luke's Baptist Church.

But though Sufi Abdul Hamid is mostly forgotten today, his legacy lives on.

60 years later, back on 125th street where the Black Hitler had delivered his stepladder harangues, the smashed windows and burning stores would make a comeback.

In the winter of 1995,Al Sharpton and his National Action Network went to Harlem to lead a protest against another Jewish store, Freddie's Fashion Mart. Sharpton denounced Freddie's owner as a "White Interloper" in Harlem, protesters mimed tossing matches into the store, and one of them threatened to "Burn the Jew Store Down".

Finally one of the protesters pulled out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set the store on fire. Seven of the store's mostly Hispanic employees died in the blaze.

Sharpton's prominence is a testament to how mainstream Sufi Abdul Hamid's form of community organizing had become. When Obama visited Sharpton to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his National Action Network, he was commemorating not just the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, but an organization which had ominous similarities to Hamid's own.

The Freddie's protests had been led by Morris Powell who ran the National Action Network's Buy Black Committee, which echoed Hamid's Don't Buy campaign. Powell's tactic of standing outside and screaming hatefilled slurs at passerby would have been entirely familiar to Hamid. "Keep going right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our people. Don’t give the Jew a dime."

Powell's record goes back to 1984 when he broke the head of a Korean woman during one of his pickets. There is no doubt that Sharpton knew exactly whom he was bringing on board.

Sharpton too had plenty in common with the Black Hitler. Like Hamid, Sharpton started out with a flamboyant personality, playing on bigotry while terrorizing storeowners and entire communities, fueling the perception that he was the man who could unleash or tamp down racial violence, and then toned down his rhetoric in exchange for political influence. Hamid never lived long enough to see the president come down to pay homage to him, but Al Sharpton did.

The Black Hitler demonstrated that racial violence is profitable. Today Hamid is remembered as a pioneering union organizer. And Sharpton has been to the White House more often than any black leader. Sharpton's gold medallion and Hamid's turban and cape were showpieces. Their bigoted rhetoric and mob pickets a way of playing on violent populism. Self-interested protests whose goal is to boost the profile of a leader and the bank accounts of his organization have become the bread and butter of more mainstream leaders like Jesse Jackson. Their occasional outbursts of bigotry are forgiven for the power, protection and influence that they bring to the table.

Even after the fire, Powell returned to Freddie's screaming, "Freddie Ain't Dead Yet". The Black Hitler ain't dead yet either. Not until his tactics are disavowed for good.

[Fred Nerks]

In an article filled with one rip-roaring gem after another, it's almost impossible to pick the one that stands out the most; I've never read anything so hilarious, from start to finish! (Well, the koran comes close) I always knew the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were total idiotic jokes perpetrated upon blacks whose ancient beliefs featured much magic and shamanism, but this one, this Black Hitler takes the ultimate prize:

The judicial crackdown on Hamid's labor extortion racket refocused his attention on his mosque, the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, where he dubbed himself a Bishop. His nickname migrated from the Black Hitler to the Black Mufti. He married Queenie St. Clair, who ran Harlem's numbers racket, but their marriage ended badly when Queenie shot him, but failed to kill him. Hamid married again and bought a private plane, an obscene luxury at a time when many of those he claimed to help didn't have enough to eat. But Hamid frugally kept it low on gas. The plane ran out of fuel over Long Island and crashed. Hamid died, survived by his white secretary who suffered only a broken elbow...

Needs to be made into a film, starring Paul Robeson as the singing Bishop, and Maya Angelou as Queenie St Clair. Pity one is dead and the other is too old...I would have paid a king's ransom to see it.

As a footnote, here's the NOBLE ALI DREW:

MOORISH SCIENCE TEMPLE

Quote from Noble Drew Ali Here are some inspiring words from, Noble Drew Ali, someone we have heard about all the days of our lives, but have you ever had a direct quote from him? Here's one: If you have race pride and love your race, join the Moorish Science Temple of America and become a part of the Divine Movement. Then you will have power to redeem your race because you will know who you are and who your forefathers were, because where there is UNITY there is strength, 'Together we stand and Divided we fall'. Come, good people, because I, the Prophet, sent to redeem this Nation from mental slavery which you now have, need every one of you who think that your condition can be better.

[Fred Nerks]

MARCUS GARVEY AND BLACK SOLIDARITY

Colin Grant begins Negro With a Hat by relat­ing the story of Garvey’s death. And, in the sort of cos­mic irony that would seem too trite were it fic­tional, it would be a news­pa­per head­line that led to his death. Recov­er­ing from a debil­i­tat­ing stroke in his Lon­don home in 1940, Gar­vey was shown clip­pings announc­ing that “Mar­cus Gar­vey Dies in Lon­don.” An old polit­i­cal rival had begun spread­ing rumors of his death and the pre­ma­ture obit­u­ar­ies were filled with damn­ing and unflat­ter­ing por­tray­als of his life. Gar­vey, dis­traught over these vicious accounts, col­lapsed from another mas­sive stroke while read­ing them. He died two weeks later on June 10, 1940.

[Fred Nerks]

REPOSTING A COMMENT THAT IS MISSING THE GRAPHIC:

FOR THE RECORD:

WHO WAS BORN JANUARY 8, 1961? IN EQUATORIAL GUINEA? THE DATE OF BIRTH ON THIS DOCUMENT: 01.08.1961 IS NOT!!! AUGUST 1, 1961.

THE DATE OF BIRTH IS: JANUARY 8, 1961.

474 posted on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 9:11:06 AM by Fred Nerks (FAIR DINKUM!)

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