>> During his speech at John Lewis's funeral, Bill Clinton brought up a civil rights leader
and activist by the name of Stokely Carmichael.
And before I get into any details about the critique or criticism that followed, I want
you to take a quick look at what he had to say.
>> And I say there were two or three years where the movement went a little bit too far
towards Stokely, but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.
>> In the end, John Lewis prevailed.
So who is Stokely, and what motivated Bill Clinton in this moment to take potshots against
a civil rights activist?
Well, Stokely is actually a super fascinating figure.
And many people saw him as a bridge between MLK And Malcolm X.
And so he actually saw MLK as a mentor, they were friends, and he wanted to empower sharecroppers.
He was really about the workers, he cared about economic injustice, that was a big part
of his identity.
And he really did wanna find fight for the powerless.
And so during the civil rights era, what he did was essentially eventually join the Black
Power movement.
He is usually cited when it comes to the phrase, coining the phrase Black Power.
And in his later years, he actually moved to West Africa and decided that he wanted
to fight for a socialist revolution in Pan-Africa.
And so I bring you that because his identity, what he wanted to fight for, particularly
economic justice, is something that certainly disagrees with the neo-liberal policies and
theory.
That someone like Bill Clinton not only believed in, but certainly implemented when he was
president of the United States, right?
So and John Lewis did clash with him quite a bit.
To give you one example, John Lewis in his book writes about running against Julian Bond
in 1986.
And apparently he got a call from Stokely Carmichael, and Stokely was trying to convince
him to drop out of the race.
And so yes, they certainly did clash.
But it's important to remember that you have the Black Power movement, you have the Black
Panthers for instance, and then you have the civil rights movement.
And there were lots of clashes between various leaders in the civil rights era.
But at the same time to take potshots at someone like this during John Lewis's funeral, as
a white guy is not a good look, right?
And I'm gonna get into more of the motivations behind why Bill Clinton felt the need to say
this during John Lewis's funeral.
But before I do that I wanna to get some of your thoughts Ida.
>> Well, I mean, it's the classic white man divide and conquer.
Only white people are allowed to have a fully realized spectrum when it comes to ideologies
and beliefs.
So you can be a white person in American and be a Republican and a Democrat, and it is
not a reflection of you as a white person in America, it is just apart of who you are.
But when you are a black person, and you are perceived to be revolutionary in America and
a threat to white supremacy, you are perceived to be a bad guy.
I love Malcom X- >> And capitalism.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And I love Stokely Carmichael.
And I love anybody who spoke to me and told me that I didn't have to tolerate being dehumanized
and mistreated.
And that I am a fully realized human being and entitled to all of the freedoms that this
country says I am entitled to as a human being.
So when I see a white man from Arkansas, who says he's a liberal and a Democrat, speaking
this out of black man's funeral.
The ultimate exercise of white privilege to think that you can speak over a black man's
casket and demean another black man is just I mean it is peak, classic white privileged
racist, this is racism, like we're not gonna call it anything else.
How dare you, how dare you?
I think that as people of color, we have to appreciate all of the people in our movement,
the ones that are Martin Luther King who white people love to call on and call him weak.
I would love for you to talk walk in Martin Luther King's shoes for just two weeks when
he was the most hated man in America, aand you tell me if he was weak.
Because he was strong all the way across the aisle to Malcolm X who said by any means necessary
and stood by that window with his gun to protect his family, not to offend, but to defend.
So when I hear people talk like this, and just the fact that you think that you can
say that at a black man's funeral and criticize another man that use his ideology in his opinion
of how to fight for our freedom, which was different from the one in the casket.
But nonetheless fighting for the same thing, the humanity of black people in America, is
just disrespectful and rude, and it's just downright repulsive.
I'm so glad he's gone, him and his saxophone can keep it pushing.
>> So let me give you some of the thoughts of people on social media, people who I actually
trust and had really great points to make.
So for instance, Malaika Jabali, who's an attorney and a columnist over at the Guardian
writes, the gall of white liberals who feel entitled to dictate Black politics Politics
is astounding.
The struggle is not either/or, and considering MLK himself worked with Stokely which is absolutely
true and empathized with his approach, shows how utterly out of depth this man is.
And what Malaika mentions there is 100% true, Stokely which by the way I should note after
he had moved to West Africa, he also changed his name to Kwame Ture, so I'll refer to him
to Turay at this point.
He did absolutely see the non-violent way of approaching civil rights as an important
strategy, he did consider MLK, his mentor and was absolutely devastated when MLK was
assassinated.
I'll give you another tweet, the guy behind the Three Strikes Bill thinks Stokely Carmichael
went too far, you love to see it.
And Wesley Lowery, who was a 60 Minutes correspondent said I would love to read an essay rebutting/analyzing/contextualizing
Clinton's comments about Kwame Ture, Stokely Carmichael, at John Lewis' funeral.
There were indeed rivals who often clashed, but in the end, John Lewis one seems remarkably
reductive and likely a historical.
So I wanna turn to one of my favorite debates, it's available on YouTube, you should watch
the full debate.
This is from 1973, I believe, and you hear Kwame Ture make an argument about what needs
to change, what needs to be done in order for true equality to exist.
And I believe that this is the exact messaging that threatened people who believe the things
that Bill Clinton believes, right?
So just take a listen and you'll get what I'm talking about.
>> The only question would be what kind of change do we want?
I think everybody would be for that society.
The question is whether or not it could come about under the present system of this government
or whether that system must be changed?
I for one, believe that it cannot come about under the present system, a capitalist system,
that system must be changed, I believe that.
Many of us would support capitalism because we actually believe that in a capitalist system,
there's a chance for us to get the same amount of money as Rockefeller gets because we're
told that under capitalism there is equality of opportunity.
So that we feel that if this year we didn't make as much as a Rockefeller made, then we
got to work a little bit harder next year, we gonna make it.
But if we carefully examine a capitalist system, you will see that it's based on exploitation,
because the viciousness of capitalism and the reason why once black people examined
we can never be fought is that under a capitalist system, the fruits of those who labor are
enjoyed by somebody else.
That is those who do the laboring, the fruits of their labor they don't enjoy it.
As a matter of fact, we could say under capitalism that the fruits of the labor of the toiling
masses are enjoyed by those who do not labor.
And again, as black people we have clear examples of it.
If we were to get the fruits of our labor from slavery, just from slavery, all we gotta
do is go to Nixon and say, hey, look, you give us the fruits of our labor from from
slavery and we forget the score.
We would be the richest people in the country, again, because under capitalism, the individual
exploits the labor of the people.
>> So as I mentioned, this was the debate that took place in 1973.
Angela Davis was also part of this debate.
It's an incredible discussion, please check out the full context of it.
But I really do believe that it was that type of messaging that made people see Carmichael
as such a threat, right?
And I think that's what Clinton was really referring to when he made that statement during
John Lewis's funeral.
>> And it's so disrespectful that he didn't even see fit to call the man by his name,
right?
That he said Carmichael and not Ture, that's dismissive and just continuously disrespectful.
And listen, where is the line?
Where's the line in what he said?
Whether you are, I don't care what you stand for, where is the line if black people in
America enjoyed the fruits of 400 plus years of labor in this country?
And let's not, we're not even going to include the labor post slavery with the non-living
wages that they've gotten paid for doing all the kinds of work that they've been doing
through Jim Crow, civil rights up until today, where people of color are still not getting
paid as much for doing the same jobs as white people in this country.
If you gave people of color their money and their just due, they would be the richest
people on the planet.
So of course you wanna keep this system in place, because that's the way you keep the
people in place.
Unfortunately people have been brain washed into believing that they too can be Jeff Bezos,
and make a trillion dollars.
And while Jeff Bezos continues to make the money throughout a pandemic where we can't
work, while people who are poor can't even go to the bathroom while they're working,
ridiculous.
>> And I think it's really telling who agreed with what Bill Clinton had to say?
Because while there was certainly some backlash on Twitter for instance, there was a fascinating
tweet by the editor-at-large over at Breitbart, Joel Pollack.
He tweeted Bill Clinton made an important point at John Lewis his funeral that the non-violent
approach of Louis succeeded where Stokely Carmichael's militant style did not, and took
the movement in the wrong direction.
And so just how militant was Kwame Ture?
Well, there have been historians who have studied him of course, one of those individuals
was interviewed on PBS, and I thought that this portion of the interview was telling,
so let's take a look at that.
>> We'd like to put our leaders in boxes.
So Malcolm X was here, Martin Luther King Jr. was here, and so where was Stokely Carmichael
on that continuum?
>> I think Stokely is a bridge figure, and I think that Stokely fits in with Dr. King
and Malcolm X as one of these key 20th century proteam figures who bestrides the world stage
of talking about human rights, but also pushing the envelope.
So I'd say when you think about Martin and Malcolm, Carmichael is the bridge figure between
civil rights and Black Power.
And he's the only major Black Power icon who was also a civil rights activist.
So he doesn't just come into activism in the mid late 60s when things get hot.
He actually knew Dr. King, he marched along.
>> They actually got along pretty well.
>> They were good friends.
I mean Stokely cries when King is assassinated.
He considers him a friend, a mentor, older brother, even a father figure.
But Stokely is also mentored by black women like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer.
So he's this very interesting figure, who's also this critic of the Vietnam War, he's
a critic of economic injustice.
So Black Power only tells a part of the story.
>> And look I gotta be honest, I think that these arguments about militantism or how he
was militant and how the message was wrong, no, the message here was about economic injustice.
And that is precisely what conflicted with the ideology of people like Bill Clinton.
Real quick, I'm just gonna remind everyone of what Bill Clinton did, what his legacy
was about when he was president.
In 1994, for instance, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act.
The largest crime bill in history, which allocated $10 billion for prison construction, expanded
the death penalty, and eliminated federal funding for inmate education.
The Act intensified police surveillance and racial profiling, and locked up millions of
non-violent offenders or offences such as drug possession.
It helped usher in the era of mass incarceration that devastated communities of color, for
which Clinton himself had recently apologized for.
The starkest example of the many racist and anti-poor measures directed at African-Americans
and passed during his administration was the 1996 Welfare Reform bill, which transformed
welfare from an exclusive and unequal cash assistance system hat stigmatised its recipients
into one that actually criminalized them.
So we took the system that was already flawed and made it far worse.
And one final point, the personal responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ended
traditional welfare by turning a federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, into
block grants, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, also know as TANF.
That established tougher mandates on poor single mothers and gave states more flexibility
in how they spent welfare dollars, opening the door for increased discrimination against
minorities.
He was all about gutting the social safety net, and of course that conflicts with what
you know Ture was all about, what he wanted to fight for which was economic justice.
>> You know what?
Donald Trump is the 49th President?
50th?
>> 45th. >> 45th, so I will say that there has not
been 1 out of 45 Presidents that has been good for black people in America.
And if that is the truth.
So when we talk about these people, I'm gonna say this militant and radical is always bad
when it comes to black people because they're fighting for their rights.
They're fighting for equality in this country and they're fighting for their just due.
Anytime Breitbart says something in response to Bill Clinton of all people, it's because
he's supporting one of their points, because they uphold white supremacy daily.
But what I wanted to say is, it is the dehumanization of the black man in America from being raped
during slavery, being taken away from their families, being beaten, and and just dehumanized
to the current day from slavery, to Emmett Till, to George Floyd, all the way through.
It is always a threat to white racist America to see a black man who stands on principles
and decides that it is important to defend his people.
And so when you see this attack on someone who is currently, this ideology may still
be a threat but he's not currently a threat in the day.
And still trying to bury people and trying to just kick them throughout to make sure
that the way that those people thought does not resurface in the current day, because
they want to uphold this white supremacy, its just unbelievable to me.
I think that first of all, any black man who looks like he will kick your ass is always
a threat.
Meanwhile, you gotta think about the history of the people who are talking about this.
The people who raped, pillaged, stole, abused, been violent, not just in America, throughout
the world as we talk about these systems of governments that have been infected with America's
disease of violence and and lack of balance.
Those are the people that are threatened by black people that say we're human beings and
we're worth fighting for too.
Those are the people who are threatened by them, it wasn't militant and radical for the
Columbus and and and the things that they did?
That's not radical, that's not militant?
It's only militant when the people who are the marginalized, if you heard of a band of
gay people going around kicking straight people's asses, it would be appalling.
They'd be like, my God, do you see these gay?
Anybody who is marginalized, who fights for it, when you're a black woman or a brown woman,
you're a woman, you're an angry black woman, you got issues.
I get it all the time when I have reason to be angry and enraged.
So I just think it's interesting here, even while you are putting one in the ground, the
final kick you wanna deliver is still to black people who decided to fight for the humanity
and the reparations of black people.
How disgusting, how disgusting?