Finding Black Socialists

Facts are stubborn things and they often get lost in the emotions surrounding demagoguery. Lewis Diuguid's column is the latest in the countless attempts by the Left to label any criticism of Barack Obama as racist. Beyond the fact that his assertions are libelous and a vile disrespect of those who have suffered from real racism, he bolsters his thesis with examples that run counter to his own argument:

"J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans."

Diuguid repeats the hagiographies of these men as benignly fighting only for equality, when in fact they were exactly what Hoover purported them to be.

*W.E.B. Dubois was a communist and openly so. He was a member of the Socialist Party and later the Communist Party U.S.A. He wrote glowingly of the USSR and expounded the virtues of Marxism.

*Paul Robeson was also openly communist and a devoted follower of Josef Stalin.

*A. Philip Randolph was a member of Eugene Debs Socialist Party and edited The Messenger, a radical monthly magazine.

*Martin Luther King Jr., while not an open advocate of socialism, certainly had sympathies toward Democratic Socialism and associated with Communists.

In short, although American and European Socialists and Communists were almost exclusively white, Diuguid manages to find actual Black socialists to make the argument that calling Obama a socialist is racism. Is exposing irony going to be the next expression of racism? Might as well be. Everything else is.