Henry Louis Gates Jr.

JERUSALEM – Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor at the center of the current national race controversy, has recruited radical black activists to his university department, is a prominent supporter of reparations for the descendants of slaves and has immortalized a communist and socialist activist.

Since 1991, Gates has been teaching African American studies at Harvard, where he serves as the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. De Bois, an American civil rights activist, sociologist, historian and author, was an avowed communist and also a socialist sympathizer.

Du Bois was for a brief time a member of the Socialist Party. In 1927 he infamously traveled to the USSR, where he called the Soviet system "the most hopeful vehicle for the world." Eight years later, he published the book "Black Reconstruction," which offered a Marxist interpretation of the Reconstruction Era.

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The leftist icon officially joined the communist cause in 1950, when he ran for the New York State Senate on the American Labor Party ticket. He lost the election, but eight years later joined Trotskyists, ex-communists, and independent radicals in proposing the creation of a united left-wing coalition to run for seats in New York State elections.

Du Bois joined the Communist Party USA in 1961. He emigrated to Ghana, where he became a naturalized citizen, living in the country's socialist police state. Two years later, the Communist Party named its new youth group the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs.

Serving as director for the Harvard institute immortalizing Du Bois, Gates cultivated black radicals to his race studies department, most prominently bringing in Cornel West, a controversial adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March with close ties to socialist and black extremist groups. West is a declared personal friend of Farrakhan.

Gates also lured to Harvard socialist sympathizer Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist, as well as William Julius Wilson, who is close to the Democrat Socialists of America.

Gates authored two books with West, a long-time member and honorary chair of the Democrat Socialists of America. West served on the black advisory board of Obama's presidential campaign.

From a young age, West proclaimed he admired “the sincere black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party … and the livid black [liberation] theology of James Cone.”

Cone's theology spawned Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's controversial pastor for 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ. West was a strong defender of Wright when the pastor's extreme remarks became national news during last year's campaign season.

Gates himself is a strong supporter of affirmative action and a key member of the reparations movement for the descendants of African slaves. He joined an effort to bring a class action lawsuit for reparations and reportedly has been working privately to urge political and business leaders to keep the issue of slavery at the forefront of social-justice discussions and to support his campaign for reparations.

One of Gates' major sources of intellectual inspiration is Herbert Aptheker, a seminal scholar of African-American history who was a radical American leftist. Aptheker was for decades a leading theorist of the Communist Party U.S.A. before resigning in 1991.

Gates was quoted stating Obama's election last year rivaled the day in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and the day 101 years later when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

"There's never been a moment like this in our lifetime, ever," Gates said.

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