The funeral for civil rights icon John Lewis was supposed to honor the man, his work in Congress and the changes he pushed forward through his career. But former President Bill Clinton used the event to chastize another activist, Stokely Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture). It has some wondering, who invited Bill Clinton to Lewis’s funeral?
Clinton spoke about Lewis’s involvement in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and how Lewis lost the job as leader of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael. “It was a pretty good job for a guy that young and from Troy, Alabama,” Clinton said. “It must have been painful to lose, but he showed as a young man there are some things that you just cannot do to hang on to a position because if you do, then, you won’t be who you are anymore. And I say there were two or three years there, where the movement went a little too far towards Stokely, but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.”
Instead of honoring Lewis, Clinton bashed Ture. It was typical of Clinton.
“First and foremost, Clinton’s history with the Black community is one of tasteless trickery and foul fraud,” The Northstar reported. “Clinton did the good old fashioned bait-and-switch on us just like he did with his wife and his famous mistress.”
The so-called “first Black president,” Clinton liked to lure Black people in by having them think he was one of them while at the same time his actions were against them. His 1994 crime bill, for example, featured the infamous “three strikes” law that resulted in the imprisonment of millions of young Black men.
Kwame Ture’s approach to Black American liberation was more aggressive than Lewis’s strategy but they both had the same goal. Lewis’s funeral wasn’t a good time to cancel Ture.
“That Democrat only wants the negro who agrees. With power & money, they can STRUCTURE that in, on the political & corporate level. Really only one corporate confederacy. They turned JL into a prophet while canceling others into antichrists. Institutionalize the bias,” The Moguldom Nation founder @JamarlinMartin tweeted.
Martin also reminded people that this is Clinton’s modus operandi. Clinton once chastized hip-hop activist and author Sister Souljah during the 1992 presidential campaign over remarks she made about Black-on-white violence during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.
Martin tweeted, “Clinton still has a Sister Souljah attack in him. Clinton & Biden both have a similar Democrat ‘you ain’t Black’ entitlement. They lack self-awareness of authorship & devastation of their crime bill. Kwame & Souljah were the bad ones, not conforming enough. Not John Lewis enough.”
Temple University and BET News host Marc Lamont was offended by Clinton’s performance at the Lewis homecoming. He tweeted, “WOW. This is so tone deaf. So disrespectful. So inaccurate. This is what happens when we let people think they got a cookout seat.”
“Bill Clinton has never been on the righteous side of right and he couldn’t even keep his pettiness out of a funeral speech. That sh** was written down and read out loud in front of Black people there to honor a fallen hero, and it doesn’t matter how many cans of seasoning salt (I don’t know WTF ‘seasoned’ salt is) the Clintons have, I ain’t fucking with nothing they are cooking. Not one thing,” Stephen A. Crockett Jr. wrote in The Root.
A philosophy major from Howard University, Carmichael was a rising young community organizer in the civil rights movement. He worked with SNCC to register African-Americans in Alabama and Mississippi to vote in the face of violent resistance from segregationists.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
While Carmichael spent the early ’60s embracing nonviolent protest such as sit-ins, marches, assemblies, he began to venture closer to the Black power movement, which was more aggressive in its fight for rights.
Carmichael soon became a target of the FBI. He moved abroad to Guinea and was tracked by the CIA. He changed his name to Kwame Ture in homage to two African heroes — his friend Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of independent Ghana), and Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea, the country that welcomed Carmichael as an honored citizen, NPR reported.
Ture died in Guinea in 1998 at age 57 of prostate cancer.
