Professor Cornel West, the radio personality and scholar, on Friday lashed out at organizers of Wednesday’s 50th-anniversary commemoration of the March on Washington, saying that it offered scant celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. and his accomplishments, according to Mediaite.
He said the event merely highlighted “the coronation of the bona fide house Negro of the Barack Obama plantation, our dear brother Al Sharpton.”
West lamented that black leadership has become “so sold-out” so as not to have the courage to be a “bull in the china shop,” break rank, and talk about “racism and poverty”.
This is not the first time West has referred to Sharpton as being “on the Obama plantation.” The radio host made the same claim in July when he felt Sharpton did not advocate hard enough for a Department of Justice “civil rights” prosecution against the recently-acquitted George Zimmerman.
Further, he said, the event was unremarkable because black leaders are too fearful to speak out against the nation’s first black president.
Early in the radio show “Smiley and West,” West said of the previous day’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, “We saw of course the coronation of the bonafide house negro of the Obama plantation, our dear brother Al Sharpton, supported by the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very ugly and vicious way”.
[Transcript]CORNEL WEST: Well, on the one hand as you can imagine, that was a beautiful thing. I was there in D.C. to see the magnificent expression of, like, faces and sparkling eyes of everyday people of all colors, hungry, thirsty for justice, hungry, thirsty for truth. Then you turn to so many of the major organizers and major speakers at the march – not too much truth. Not too much talk about justice. Mainly talking about voting rights, and every once in a while you see a vague reference to jobs.
Now, they had some wonderful speakers earlier in the day, but most of the country didn’t get a chance to hear them. But for the most part, there was, Brother Martin himself, I think, would’ve been turning over in his grave. He wants people to talk about Wall Street criminality, he wants people to talk about war crimes, or drones dropping bombs on innocent people. He wants people talking about the new Jim Crow and the privatization of education, and the various ways in which the well to do, the oligarchs and plutocrats are getting away with murder. You didn’t hear that whatsoever. You not only got a tame Martin Luther King Jr., but a real sense in which who he really was at the end of his life hardly surfaced at all.
And we saw of course the coronation of the bonafide house negro of the Obama plantation, our dear brother Al Sharpton supported by the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very ugly and vicious way.
