Word: farrakhan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jesse Jackson that many whites distrust and some even fear. He is the former black radical, the civil rights leader who threatened white businessmen with economic boycotts, the presidential candidate who called Jews "Hymie" and New York City " Hymietown." In his shadow, neither embraced nor disavowed, stands Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim sect, who has praised Hitler and seemed to threaten a black reporter with death...
...controversy had almost subsided when Farrakhan, the Muslim leader who has been making appearances with Jackson and furnishing him with bodyguards, declared on a radio sermon, "We're going to make an example of Milton Coleman! What do [we] intend to do? At this point no physical harm . . . One day soon we will punish you with death!" As a gratuitous aside, Farrakhan allowed that Hitler was "a very great man" albeit a "wicked...
Until his incendiary words burst into national headlines, Farrakhan, 50, was-to whites, at least-the obscure leader of a fringe movement. A onetime nightclub singer known as the Charmer, Farrakhan in 1955 joined the puritanical (no smoking or drinking) Nation of Islam, a black separatist group founded by Elijah Muhammad in the 1930s. Once 250,000-members strong, the Nation of Islam split apart upon Muhammad's death in 1975. His son Imam W. Deen Muhammad renamed the group the American Muslim Mission, rejected many of his father's teachings and began admitting whites. Farrakhan formed...
...Farrakhan, in the tradition of Elijah Muhammad, speaks in an apocalyptic tongue that many whites find frightening but that many blacks do not take seriously. "I don't represent violence," Farrakhan insisted to TIME. "Not at all, and I'm not antiwhite, I'm against that which whites have done to blacks . .. we're anti-oppression, antityranny, anti-exploitation." By any standard, however, his remarks were outrageous in a presidential campaign, and they demanded a quick denunciation from Jackson. None was forthcoming. Instead, Jackson commented that Coleman and Farrakhan were "two very able professionals caught...
Jackson's "Hymie" slur and his failure to repudiate Farrakhan caused outrage in several respected quarters. The New Republic, a leading liberal magazine with a strong pro-Israel slant, editorialized that Jackson's "potential for blighting the future of interracial politics and for wounding the Democratic Party now seems great indeed." Carl T. Rowan, the most widely circulated black columnist, warned that Jackson might be stirring a white backlash that would help re-elect Reagan, "in which case Jackson is going to have to face the conscience-searing question: Why, in his stubborn embrace of a few black...