Wednesday 28 November 2018

The Women’s March’s Farrakhan problem, and my own.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, speaking at the Watergate Hotel in 2017, and Tamika Mallory, one of the Women’s March leaders. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Bebeto Matthews/AP, Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Did you know that one of the leading figures in the Compromise of 1877, which after a deadlock in the Electoral College delivered the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for a promise to end Reconstruction, was a Jewish congressman from Louisiana named William M. Levy?

I didn’t either; I had to look it up, and only after some digging found the relevant passage in historian C. Vann Woodward’s account of that chaotic, catastrophic vote in the House of Representatives, which ushered in nearly a century of disenfranchisement and oppression of Southern blacks. And now that I do know, let me say loud and clear that while ending Reconstruction in that way was a terrible mistake, it has nothing to do with me, because I wasn’t there.

But the fact that this took place before any living Jews were born doesn’t much matter to Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader. It was Farrakhan who introduced me to Levy’s treachery in a speech he gave last year at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. Here’s some of what he had to say, at approximately the one-hour mark:



By Jerry Adler.
Full story at Yahoo News.

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