Op Ed Piece 
The Honorable Walter E. Fauntroy 
  
The co-authors of an article appearing in the Outlook Section of the Washington Post on Sunday, August 5, 2007 (Talk Radio Can’t Handle the Truth) would do well to read both the summary and the entire text of the report that was issued in 1974 by the Senate Committee on Intelligence that was issued chaired at the time by the distinguished and courageous Senator Frank Church of Idaho. He gained national prominence during his service in the Senate through his chairmanship of the Church Committees, which conducted extensive hearings investigating extra-legal FBI and CIA intelligence-gathering and covert operations, including the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO assaults on Dr. martin Luther King, Jr., his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other civil rights organizations in that triumphant, yet tragic decade of the 1960s. The committee also investigated CIA drug smuggling activities in the Golden Triangle and secret U.S.-backed wars in Third World countries.  I suggest this to the authors of the article because I was at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s side as he was targeted by the FBI in its shameful assault on the civil liberties of law abiding citizens at that time. I served as not only as Dr. King’s personal representative in the to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and to the leadership of the U.S. House and Senate but also as one who played pivotal roles on his behalf in organizing both the Historic March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.   

After Dr. King’s assassination, I spent two decades as a member of congress during which my committee assignments and growing seniority on the Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee, on the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, as the co-sponsor of the House Resolution that established the House Select Committee on the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who served as chair of the subcommittee that investigated Dr. King’s assassination, gave me access to information and government files that far exceeds that available to average citizen or even well paid think tank researchers.   

I have freely shared much of what I know with a person like Radio Talk Show activist Joe Madison who, while too young to have been there with us in Birmingham and Selma, has nonetheless the kind of “valiance for truth” to do his own research on a continuing basis, a fact that has made him national treasure in that he has, indeed, become what the authors of the article call “a resource for black people who may not have the financial resources or wherewithal to highlight an injustice.” I can’t thank Mr. Madison enough for passing on to a generation of our people who were not there but are critical thinkers who can evaluate for themselves the scientifically reliable and objectively verifiable information on matters of public policy and public interest that he brings to them on a daily basis on XM radio.   

The first thing that troubles me about the authors of the article in question is that, by their admission in the text, they are seeking to “launch careers in talk radio” by attacking “a black-owned, conglomerate Radio One which runs XM’s Channel 169” that is heard around the world. Their quest to challenge what they consider “A Culture of Conspiracy” in black talk radio and their reverence that they acknowledge for the Cato Institute and for persons like Dr. Walter E. Williams and Talk Show Host Rush Limbaugh are matters of concern for me. 

 Many of us are very clear about the two benefits that the wealthy few of our nation receive for financing “think tanks” like the Cato Institute for which at least one of them acknowledges working. First, they are able to shelter hundreds of millions of their dollars from federal taxation by donating a calculated portion of their earnings to any number of non-profit, educational foundations like the Cato Institute. Second, they finance with that tax benefit money research designed to serve not only their narrow interests in the arena of public policy but also the development of social statistics that they feel support their ranting against “big government” in its efforts to redistribute wealth from those who have more than enough income to meet the needs of those who are either too old, too young, too sick or too poor to have access to adequate income, education, healthcare, housing and justice.   

I ask the public that read the article published in the Post on Sunday and the two persons who wrote it because they somehow consider the thirty (30) year old story that Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and the National Security Council called NSC Memorandum 46 as a forgery to be news today. The fact is that this stale news was made back in 1979 in response to a press conference that Bill Lucy, Randall Robinson and I convened on the subject at the National Press Club here in our nation’s capital. Our assertions about the memorandum were not based on the text of the memo itself but, rather, on basis of the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee headed by Senator Frank Church that had been published years before NSC Memorandum surfaced. What moved us to call attention to the memorandum was the firing of Andrew Young as our nation’s Ambassador to the United Nations in 1979. I, as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Brain Trust on Black Voter Participation and Network Development, felt that the NSC Memorandum 46 was the best summary of the alarming number of actions taken by agencies of our government in the 1960s that had been so courageously detailed by Senator Frank Church in his reports.   

Before reacting, therefore, to what the co-authors of article published in the Post on Sunday had to say in attacking “Black Talk Radio,” let me take a moment to refresh the public on who Mr. William Lucy and Mr. Randall Robinson were at the time.    

Bill Lucy, as Secretary/Treasurer of AFSCME, was the highest ranking African American in the international labor movement. As such, he had established a working relationship with Cyril Ramophosa, the key labor organizer in South Africa who was ultimately successful in pulling together more than thirty-three (33) separate black labor unions into something called the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It was the very well-organized labor movement among black workers that became the very backbone of the Anti-Apartheid Movement on the ground in South Africa. Randall Robinson had been encouraged to found the TransAfrica Forum in 1977 by his employer, Representative Charles C. Diggs, then chairman of the subcommittee on Africa for the House Committee on Foreign Relations. Both Charlie as the founding chairman of the CBC and I, as the one of the thirteen (13) founding members of the CBC who had responsibility for developing a national network vehicle for the CBC that became the National Black Leadership Roundtable (NBLR), believed that there was a critical need for an advocacy organization in the network of national African American organizations that did not have to depend upon government funding o carry out its mission. 
  
Randall did that for us. He had graduated from my alma mater, Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia and had gone on to do his graduate work at Harvard Law School even as I had gone to do my graduate work in theology at Yale University Divinity School. 
  
I was a part of the trio that convened the press conference because I was president of the NBLR and I had been the first organizer from the movement that Dr. King led to be elected to the Congress. AFSCME had not only been SCLC’s partner in championing the cause on the Garbage Workers in Memphis in 1968 but also one of my strongest supporters in my successful bid to become the first elected to serve as the Delegate to the Congress in 100 years. My election was followed in the next congress by that of Representative Andrew Young, the second from our movement and the first black elected to the Congress from the South since Reconstruction.   

Andy’s first year in congress was 1973, the year in which I wrapped up my work on “Home Rule” legislation for the District of Columbia. For the next three years, I concentrated on organizing in the seventy-seven (77) congressional districts of the Old South where our civil rights organizations had added two million new black voters to the rolls following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the fruit of our movement in Selma, Alabama.   

By 1976, Andy and I had networked so effectively with our people across the South that Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter launched his campaign for the presidency with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s father, Daddy King at his side. Carter won the election in 1976 by the margin that black voters gave him not only across the South but also in key congressional districts across the country where our votes were counted that year.   

It is no mystery why President in only one term appointed more exceptionally well qualified African American judges to the federal bench than all of the presidents of the country put together and tapped Andy Young from the Congress to be our Ambassador to the United Nations. As the Washington Post itself editorialized in that period, Black Power really “Came of Age” in the first half of the decade of the 1970s, only eight years after the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   
I mention all of this as the basis for my appeal to the two authors to read for themselves both the summary and the entire text of the reports that were issued by the Church Committees. 
  
After doing what I had promised my constituents I would do within a two years of my election in 1971; namely, get the congress to pass Home Rule legislation for the District of Columbia by “mastering the arithmetic of Black Political power in coalition with whites of good will in our beloved country,” I turned my attention immediately to the astounding activities of FBI in the conduct of its COINTELPRO assault on the movement. The report explained for me so many of the strange and troubling things that happened to us at the SCLC in the decade of the 60s. I decided to join with my colleague from Texas on the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, in sponsoring a House Resolution to establish a Select Committee to investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in light of the findings of the Church Committees.   

The House passed our resolution, Henry became chair of the subcommittee on the Kennedy Assassination and I became chair of the subcommittee on the King Assassination. That’s a subject I will address at a later time. Suffice it to say with respect to the Lartigue/Morgan article published by the Post, that none of the assertions made in the Brzezinski memo were a surprise to any of us who had read the Church report in its entirety in the early 70s. The accounts of the tactics employed to prevent “durable ties” being established between the leaders of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and so-called Black Nationalist leaders in Africa were laid out in excruciating detail. In fact, I know the names of certain reporters who were paid in the sixties to disseminate “disinformation” about the movement leaders and organizations then through their writings for influential newspapers and magazines that had the same aspirations then that the two writers of this article confess that they have now. The public will be surprised to learn that some of those COINTELPRO journalists of the 60s are still writing for reputable publications in our country today.   

In short, I strongly suggest that the writers of this attack on Black Talk Radio do two things. First, I invite them in particular and the public generally to read both the summary and the entire text of the Church Committee report to determine whether the items summarized in the so-called Brzezinski Memo have any basis in fact as reported by the committee. Second, I suggest that the two authors not limit their reading to the works of their mentors at the Cato Institute or Mr. Walter Williams, Michael Barkum or Rush Limbaugh. 
  
Before they renew their effort to make a career out of bashing well-informed blacks like Mr. Joe Madison who attempt to be “a resource for black people who may not have the financial resources or wherewithal to highlight an injustice,” they might want to read the works of some of the “Sacred Urban Legends” that they shamelessly denigrate in the article. They might want to re-read if they ever read the works of that venerable and brilliant African American Behavioral Psychiatrist, Dr. Francis Cress Welsing that they demean in the article, including her book entitled “The Isis Papers.” They might want to read as well Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s “The Mis-Education of the Negro.” And they might want on tune in on a regular basis to evaluate the scientifically reliable and objectively verifiable truths that Mr. Joe Madison and his alert callers discuss on every day. . 
They just might get a more balance view of the TRUTH that they maintain the “Black Talk Radio Can’t Handle.”

About  Reverend Walter E. Fauntroy