There’s been a lot of attention focused on Attorney General Eric Holder’s indictment of America as “a nation of cowards” on issues of race.
It was a shockingly divisive statement.
But lost to most observers was the way the end of speech about Black History Month paid tribute to racially divisive and extremist black leaders of the past – often overlooking more significant black historical figures who accomplished more and promoted racial unity.
What does that tell you?
It tells me Holder was sending a signal.
The race-baiting is not about to end, now that Barack Obama has become president. It’s about to go into overdrive.
Let’s skip down the speech, to the overlooked part. Holder talked about how he, as the nation’s first black attorney general, is a part of black history.
“I stood, and stand, on the shoulders of many other black Americans,” he said. “Admittedly, the identities of some of these people, through the passage of time, have become lost to us – the men, and women, who labored long in fields, who were later legally and systemically discriminated against, who were lynched by the hundreds in the century just past and those others who have been too long denied the fruits of our great American culture. The names of too many of these people, these heroes and heroines, are lost to us. But the names of others of these people should strike a resonant chord in the historical ear of all in our nation: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Charles Drew, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Vivian Malone, Rosa Parks, Marion Anderson, Emmit Till. These are just some of the people who should be generally recognized and are just some of the people to whom all of us, black and white, owe such a debt of gratitude. It is on their broad shoulders that I stand as I hope that others will some day stand on my more narrow ones.”
Indeed these are just some of the people notable in America’s racial history.
Conspicuously absent from Holder’s list of heroes are Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.
Let’s contrast one of Holder’s heroes, W.E.B Du Bois, and one of his non-heroes, Booker T. Washington.
Du Bois is most noted for founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He is less renowned, however, for his adoring support of Soviet Communism and the nice things he said about Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, before, of course, Adolf Hitler double-crossed Josef Stalin and attacked Russia.
Upon the death of Stalin on March 16, 1953, Du Bois wrote in the National Journal: “Josef Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also – and this was the highest proof of his greatness – he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.”
Understand that by then it was well-known that Stalin was the biggest mass murderer in history until that point.
Du Bois also believed blacks should agitate against whites at every turn. He quarreled openly with his contemporary, Booker T. Washington, who advocated assimilation and integration.
So why is Holder elevating extremists like Du Bois and Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, another card-carrying Stalinist, at the expense of unifying political and social figures like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver?
The answer is simple.
It is the extremists and socialists and haters with whom Eric Holder more clearly identifies.
