Contrary to the Black capitalist myth, most Greenwood residents were low wage working people employed by whites and living in substandard housing. It was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District.
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M. BERKELEY—While editorials and other politicians call for Cuomo to resign there is one group that has been quite vocal in supporting him. Black politicians, clergy and so-called civil rights leaders have rallied to his side and disparaged any efforts to dislodge him or to face impeachment by the state legislature. They have deliberately emphasized the sexual harassment allegations and downplayed the issue of death and double dealing with nursing home and hospital lobbies. They know that many people are wary about judging issues of personal behavior so they downplay the serious issue of death and conflicts of interest which would be of greater concern if they were given attention.
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GLEN FORD—Trump has slunk off the national stage for the time being, but we must remember who made him a contender for president in the first place: the Democrats and their corporate media. As Wikileaks revealed , the Clinton campaign encouraged friendly media to boost Trump’s Republican primary prospects, hoping to set up a straw man that could easily be knocked down in November, 2016. By Election Day, the corporate press had lavished $5 billion in free media on Trump – more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and all of Trump’s Republican presidential competitors, combined. If you are desperate to flush the stink of four years of Trump out of your brain, remember who put it there, through constant, daily repetition.
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GLEN FORD—In the latest installment of “The Black and the Powerless,” the usual gaggle of national Black civic organizations are awarded a closed-door meeting with their love-object, president-elect Joe Biden. The civic leaders respectfully requested that the Party protect the voting rights of its most loyal constituency, and use the powers of the executive branch to curtail the police violence that has plagued the Black community since the days of the slave-disciplining “paddy-rollers” – in addition to their perennial concern that more Black faces be elevated to high places in the new administration. However, as senior editor Margaret Kimberley recounts in this issue of BAR, Biden immediately put the house Negroes in their place.
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The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) — the most important and most powerful pro-Black, class-conscious, community protection organization in American history- was born 51 years ago on October 15, 1966. It was so important and so powerful that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described it as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country…” He added that its revolutionary activities, especially the children’s free breakfast program, were “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities… to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
As bad as the FBI’s words were, its actions were even worse. As made clear in the 1976 report by the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence Activities, “In August… 1967, the FBI initiated COINTELPRO (i.e., the counterintelligence program that operated from 1956-1971) to disrupt and ‘neutralize’… (certain) organizations…” By July 1969, indicated the report, “the BPP had become the primary focus of the program and was ultimately the target of 233 of the total authorized… COINTELPRO actions… (targeting pro-Black groups).”
