Black Celebrity Endorsements: The Cautionary Tale of Joe Louis’ Endorsement for Wendell Willkie
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Last Tuesday in Atlanta, rapper and political activist Killer Mike (birth name: Michael Render) reiterated his endorsement of Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President. Killer Mike’s introduction of Senator Sanders, in which he explained his endorsement of Bernie Sanders is both passionate and eloquent. Frankly, I think this is a good “get” for Senator Sanders in terms of endorsements for his candidacy.
But I am alarmed by the volume of commentary hoping and hyping that Killer Mike’s endorsement will, somehow, drive up Senator Sanders’ sagging poll numbers among African-Americans. To read much of the commentary on this specific endorsement of Senator Sanders, Mr. Render’s endorsement will unleash torrents of damned-up African American support for Senator Sanders that will allow Sanders to siphon off enough African American supporters of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and sweep Sanders to the Democratic nomination. Historically, gaining black electoral support via black celebrity endorsements is easily said but rarely done, as the case of heavyweight champion Joe Louis’ endorsement of Republican nominee Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presidential campaign shows.
First, let’s just stipulate that in terms of “celebrity”, Killer Mike is not in the same league (or even the same galaxy cluster) as Joe Louis circa 1940. That’s simply an objective fact.
Mr. Louis gave his reasons for supporting Mr. Willkie’s 1940 presidential campaign in his 1978 autobiography Joe Louis, My Life (written with Edna and Art Rust, Jr.):
...I didn’t know too much about Willkie except that he was running on the internationalist wing of the Republican Party out of Indiana. He was real heavy on civil rights. But you know, there was something so sincere and honest about the man that he got my attention. I had started getting involved with politics through Charles Roxborough; he was Roxy’s brother. Charles was the first black Senator from Michigan. Sometimes he’d have me appear at political events and sit me up on the dias. When they’d introduced me, I’d stand up and say “Thank you” and sit right down but I’d listen. I never supported anybody in politics unless I felt that they were giving my people a fair shake.
Well, anyway, through the years, I had always supported Roosevelt. After all, I knew that he was a fan of mine and thank God for the Welfare Relief programs that he had set up, not only helping my people but the whites, too. The thing, you see, was that I honestly felt that Roosevelt was a good human being…
On the other hand, though, he’d been in office for two terms, and he had helped get the Civil Service going but things were wrong with this “fair employment" stuff. I talked to too many black people in Washington D.C. who told me they thought they had good jobs. when, even with “fair employment,” they got bumped out of their jobs by white people. There were things that I felt the President should have done that he just didn’t do. He promised a lot but he didn’t always come through…
But when I listened to Willkie, I fell in love with him. He said things like, “ Every American is going to have a place in this country..” Hell, a lot of people forget black people are Americans too. We’ve been here a long time. God bless Africa, but I never saw it. I am an American. I want me and all black Americans to have the same chance in this country.
I campaigned all over for Wendell Willkie. but he just couldn’t beat Roosevelt. Roosevelt had that special charm. Never mind though, I thought that Willkie would have made one hell of a President. He made me feel that things would have been better for the blacks.
Joe Louis campaigning for Wendell Willkie
Given that Mr. Willkie’s civil rights platform was more liberal than President Roosevelt’s, how did FDR maintain his grip on the black vote? As Nancy Weiss, author of Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR asks:
How could a Democratic President who sidestepped on antilynching legislation, seemed outwardly unperturbed about disenfranchisement and segregation, and presided over relief programs rife with discrimination, win an overwhelming majority of black votes and, in so doing, transform the political habits of black Americans for decades to come?
Farewell to the Party of Lincoln p. 209
Weiss’ superbly documented study of black politics in The New Deal era shows that while black people understood that they were receiving the short end of the economic, racial, and political stick from President Roosevelt, “even the limited racial recognition of the New Deal seemed to many black Americans to be a token of hope” (Weiss 210-11). Also, given the formation of what came to be called The Black Cabinet, African Americans began to see and take note of black participation in national affairs. The (limited) economic benefits that blacks received from The New Deal plus a more active and visible involvement in the national government led to increased black voter registration and participation in the North, especially in the Northern cities and especially among young African Americans (Weiss 228-29).
And, last but not least, there’s the person that noted African American journalist Vernon Jarrett described as "Franklin Roosevelt's secret weapon,” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt:
Q: Was Mrs. Roosevelt responsible for much of his popularity amongst blacks?
A: Mrs. Roosevelt became Franklin Roosevelt's secret weapon. Many people assumed that he felt correctly toward us but didn't consider it advisable -- his dependency on the solid South -- to state it. Many people assumed that he put her up to do it because he couldn't. Now, that was the assumption. But I think much of what she did, she acted on her own. And he simply used her as an excuse, as if to say, "You know, I can't control you. How many of you can control your wives? I don't have any control over her. This is Eleanor. That's the way she is, and I can't do anything about it. I'm stuck with her." You know, in so many words. But many of us felt that this was his subtle way of expressing his personal feelings also. But Roosevelt never made any speeches to irritate the white South.
One added factor in the maintenance of African American support of President Roosevelt in the 1940 election is that in spite of Mr. Willkie’s progressive civil rights plank, there was what Weiss calls a “paucity of information” on the record as it pertained to Mr. Willkie’s views on race in 1940:
Since Willkie had no previous political career, he had never been required to take stands on issues of vital concern to blacks. Supporters found encouragement in the 1920’s when he had been Democrat, to put the Democratic Party on record in opposition to the Ku Klux Klan. But skeptics saw him as a representative of the public utilities—where discrimination was the rule in employment—and as a big businessman personally unacquainted with blacks and insensitive to their needs.
Farewell to the Party of Lincoln p. 271
[As an aside, the entire story of the 1940 presidential campaign (which included a floor fight at the Republican convention and a nasty general election fight), Willkie’s post-election civil rights activism, and his eventual death in 1944 makes for fascinating reading and is probably worth a diary or two in its own right. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss cites Wendell Willkie’s 1940 campaign as a precedent for the 2016 candidacies of Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina.]
Joe Louis’ endorsement of Wendell Willkie resulted in unprecedented criticism from the black community at a time when Louis was near the height of his fame. In one letter to the editor in the November 8, 1940 issue of the Chicago Defender, the letter writer tells Mr. Louis, “Stick to your boxing, Joe.” Another letter published in the Defender the next day asks “Why stick your neck out and cause many people to dislike you because they disagree with you politically?” Another letter, dated a week later, reminded Mr. Louis that he has “made a lot of money,” some of that money coming from “members of your own race; they in turn earned it through Mr. Roosevelt.” My own personal favorite letter to the editor in the Chicago Defender, dated November 30, 1940, reminds Mr. Louis that while he is, indeed, a “fistic genius,” that “there are among our race political geniuses. These are the men who will represent us in politics.” A New York Times article of November 3, 1940 notes an incident where a black patrolman, James Sloan, was injured following a dispute where President Roosevelt’s secretary, Stephen Early, allegedly kicked him. Mr. Louis went to the hospital and posed with for photographers with Mr. Sloan but when asked by the a reporter who he would vote for, Patrolman Sloan replied that “I am a Democrat, I will vote for Mr. Roosevelt” (Weiss 281).
Still, crowds clamored to see Mr. Louis as he campaigned for Willkie. For example, the November 8, 1940 issue of The Evansville Argus (Indiana), a black newspaper, describes a chaotic scene where "Some 12,000 colored and white citizens gathered at the municipal airport and Lincoln high school athletic field to get their first glimpse of the "Brown —Bomber” on the Sunday before the election as Louis was scheduled to fly into Evansville in "the private plane chartered for the Joe Louis party which included the champion himself, his mother, his bodyguard and Col. Roscoe Conklin Simmons." Mr. Louis’ appearance was canceled because of apparent death threats that he received. In the end, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected to an unprecedented third term in office and black voters awarded FDR an estimated 67% of their votes (Weiss 288).
The simple lesson to be learned here is that black celebrity endorsements are not all that. I could also cite baseball great (and Joe Louis protégé) Jackie Robinson's endorsement of Richard Nixon in 1960; an endorsement that, according to Beschloss, resulted in “a ballplayer who had withstood death threats in 1947 to break the major leagues’ color barrier” being criticized as a “sellout” and “Uncle Tom.” While policies, platforms and legislative votes are historically important (prerequisites, in fact) to black voters, the popular support of Roosevelts (or at least Eleanor) and the Clintons (for all of their faults and policy shade) in black communities illuminate a indispensable maxim for attaining the black vote: It is much less important for us (black people) to get to know you (the candidate) than for you to get to know us.
The Pope could save lives when he visits some of the most HIV–infected areas of the world. Slate: Pope Francis Should End the Ban on Condoms.
The St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Homa Bay, Kenya, sits on top of a mountain that overlooks a glistening Lake Victoria. When I visited in mid-November, bookmark-size prayer cards were being distributed in anticipation of Pope Francis’ visit to Kenya in late November. The church has one of the largest congregations in a region that has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world.
About one of every four people in Homa Bay is infected with HIV. The government has created public awareness programs and provides condoms. HIV drugs are available for free at the local hospital, and health workers go door-to-door encouraging people to get tested.
Yet the Catholic Church, where its intervention is needed most, has taken a fundamental stance against any use of contraception. The acting head of St. Peter’s, Father Gabriel Otieno, believes that condoms are actually causing the spread of HIV.
Every school holiday, the church holds seminars and tells local young people not to use condoms. “We educate the youth that the use of contraceptives is not in the mind of the church and not in God’s way of dealing with human beings,” Otieno told me as he sat in the church’s living quarters below a framed image of Pope Francis. He has the aura of a man practiced in preaching—even while speaking to one person, his voice rises and falls like an opera singer’s.
Otieno’s theory of why condoms cause HIV in Homa Bay goes something like this: Condoms are ubiquitous. Contraception creates a culture of uninhibited sex. After a while, the youth will stop using condoms but keep having sex. It means that more people will become infected with HIV.
Father Gabriel Otieno, acting head of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Homa Bay, Kenya, Nov. 10, 2015.
Students at Princeton University are protesting the ways it honors the former president, who once threw a civil-rights leader out of the White House. The Atlantic: The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson.
As president, Wilson oversaw unprecedented segregation in federal offices. It’s a shameful side to his legacy that came to a head one fall afternoon in 1914 when he threw the civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter out of the Oval Office.
Trotter led a delegation of blacks to meet with the president on November 12, 1914 to discuss the surge of segregation in the country. Trotter, today largely forgotten, was a nationally prominent civil-rights leader and newspaper editor. In the early 1900s, he was often mentioned in the same breath as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. But unlike Washington, Trotter, an 1895 graduate of Harvard, believed in direct protest actions. In fact, Trotter founded his Boston newspaper,The Guardian, as a vehicle to challenge Washington’s more conciliatory approach to civil rights.
Before Trotter’s confrontation with Wilson in the Oval Office, he was a political supporter of Wilson’s. He had pledged black support for Wilson’s presidential run when the two met face-to-face in July 1912 at the State House in Trenton, New Jersey. Even though then-Governor Wilson offered only vague promises about seeking fairness for all Americans, Trotter apparently came away smitten. “The governor had us draw our chairs right up around him, and shook hands with great cordiality,’’ he wrote a friend later. “When we left he gave me a long handclasp, and used such a pleased tone that I was walking on air.” Trotter viewed Wilson as the lesser of other political evils.
The civil-rights leader was soon having second thoughts. In the fall of 1913, he and other civil-rights leaders, including Ida B. Wells, met with Wilson to express dismay over Jim Crow. Trotter’s wife, Deenie, had even drawn a chart showing which federal offices had begun separating workers by race. Wilson sent them off with vague assurances.
In the next year, segregation did not improve; it worsened. By this time, numerous instances of workplace separation became well publicized. Among them, separate toilets in the U.S. Treasury and the Interior Department, a practice that Wilson’s Treasury secretary, William G. McAdoo, defended: “I am not going to argue the justification of the separate toilets orders, beyond saying that it is difficult to disregard certain feelings and sentiments of white people in a matter of this sort.”
For blacks—who ever since Lincoln’s War had expected some measure of equity from the federal government—the sense of a betrayal ran deep.
.jpg?1448486871 "Woodrow Wilson")
President Woodrow Wilson
Unexplored Interior is a difficult play to watch. It takes the audience back to 1994, when 800,000 people were killed in 100 days, and the world stood by and did nothing.
“It’s really bearing witness,” says playwright Jay O. Sanders. “It’s saying we can’t forget this happened, but most of all, it’s the positive side to say these people are not the other, these people are us.”
He plays Thomas Sibomana, a jailed Hutu government minister and a character based on the real-life former director of Radio Television Libres des Mille Collines. Ferdinand Nahimana, currently in jail in Mali, used the station to broadcast hate messages and incite murder of the Tutsi. Williams’ character is also having an affair with a Tutsi woman, the love of his life, who eventually has to confront the fact that her lover is trying to eradicate her race.
Williams calls his character a psychopath.
“To think that someone could sit back and craft a strategy to enable to kill each other ... is downright frightening,” Williams says, shaking his head. “And the way this was all carried out, it was meticulously planned ... it wasn’t happenstance. So to think that people wake up in the morning and that’s their goal is extremely frightening.”
Isaiah Mays as Boy in Unexplored Interior at the Mosaic Theater Co. in Washington, D.C., Oct. 29-Nov. 29, 2015
STAN BAROUH
A Cameroonian developer hopes to ignite Africa’s burgeoning game scene with a rich and fantastical Kickstarter-funded release. The Guardian: Aurion: the mission to create African video-game heroes.
When Madiba Guillaume Olivier was a boy in the bustling city of Douala,Cameroon, he was the envy of all his friends. His father owned a video rental shop, and that gave him access not only to the latest movies, but also to video games; when a new title came in, he would rush around the neighbourhood and invite all his mates over to play. “I had the classic Final Fantasy 7 on PC, and I had a Nintendo, PS1, PS2 and Sega Mega Drive,” he lists over a Skype call. “I played a lot of Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect and Sim City. I think my all time favourite was Total War 2 ... but I only had one controller so we all had to be very patient.”
There was one thing he noticed about the games he played, however: “There weren’t a lot that depicted African heroes”. He’s right of course. Search around and you’ll find Elena, a warrior princess from Street Fighter III, the ruthless Ugandan arms dealer Drebin 893 in Metal Gear Solid 4, the reincarnated warriorZasalamel from Soul Calibur … it’s not a huge or varied roster. When Africa itself has been depicted in mainstream games (beyond the many safari and wildlife hunting sims), it is often through the lens of war and horror: Far Cry 2 depicted gangland battles in a Malaria ravaged wasteland, while Resident Evil 5 provoked controversy for seemingly portraying a colonialist view of the continent as a place of threatening savagery. None of these really explore African mythology, anime or music. “There are not a lot of African creators,” says Olivier. “It seems like creators focus on white heroes because they are white. They create heroes like them”.
But Olivier wanted to changed that, he wanted to rewrite the possibilities of the games industry in Central Africa. In 2003, he and a group of friends who all studied software development together at the University of Yaoundé 1, got together to start making games. While working as website developers, they taught themselves game design, mostly by becoming active in the French online role playing game community, Oniro. In their spare time they started work on their dream project, Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, an epic role-playing adventure involving two young monarchs, hero Enzo Kori-Odan and his wife, Erine Evou, who find themselves usurped by his evil brother-in-law and must fight to reclaim their kindgom.
The game takes its basic story from African myth and tradition, but fuses it with science fiction. The world of world of Auriona exists 10,000 years in the future on a place far from Earth, where they speak an ancient ancestral language. In Madiba’s own words, the concept is simple: “We’re creating our own African fantasy.”
The 13-year-old YouTube star said the video of a white Chicago policeman gunning down a black teenager opened his eyes to systemic racism. The Root: Teenage Obama Critic Renounces Conservatism.
CJ Pearson, the 13-year-old YouTube star, renounced conservatism, CNN reports.
The teenager has used his online platform to criticize President Barack Obama’s policies and to promote conservative viewpoints. He has a huge audience of more than 100,000 Facebook followers and nearly 19,000 YouTube channel subscribers.
On Friday, Pearson expressed several concerns to the network about where the GOP stands on certain issues.
In an email to CNN, he stated: “I was tired of being a champion of a party that turned a blind eye to racial discrimination. Tired of being a champion of any cause that denies equal rights to every American. Tired of being a champion of a party that doesn’t care about the issues important to young people.”
The Georgia teen’s change of heart started after a conversation with a friend about why he failed to denounce racial discrimination. Pearson was concerned that pointing out racism would displease his followers, he admitted to CNN.
“Over the past few days, I thought about essentially how I don’t want people to follow me because I’m that anti-Obama kid, or who called out Hillary Clinton or who took Bernie Sanders to task,” he said.
But the real eye opener came after viewing the video of a white Chicago policeman gunning down Laquan McDonald.
Earlier this month, Pearson stepped down from his position as chairman of Teens for Ted, the Dallas Morning News reported. He said presidential candidate Ted Cruz has not fully addressed issues affecting young people.
CJ Pearson, 13, has used his huge online platform to criticize President Obama’s policies. He told CNN on Nov. 27 that he now renounces conservatism.
YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT
Welcome to the Tuesday’s porch
