Thanks, Paul...It seems that having no respect for
the law is a necessary requirement to being a part of the Usurper-in-Chief's
administration. More appropriate criteria: "Birds of a feather
flock together."
What a bunch of lawless ones! There was an old
movie called, "The Outlaw" starring Jane Russell. Hollywood (if
they weren't such leftwingers) could make a killing on a new scandalous
movie entitled "The OutlawS" or "O's
Outlaws" starring You-Know-Who and his hooligan henchmen!
: Fwd: As college student, Holder participated
in ‘armed’ takeover of Columbia ROTC
As college student, Eric Holder
participated in ‘armed’ takeover of former Columbia University ROTC office
Published: 11:56 PM 09/30/2012
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney
General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval
Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black
students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as
“armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.
Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded
to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and
if so, with what sort of weapon.
Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American
Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the
“Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in honor of
a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”
Black radicals from the same group also occupied the office of
Dean of Freshman Henry Coleman until their demands were met. Holder has
publicly acknowledged being a part of that action.
The details of the student-led occupation, including the claim
that the raiders were “armed,” come from a deleted Web page of the Black
Students’ Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the
SAAS. Contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator,
a student newspaper, did not mention weapons.
Holder, now the United States’ highest-ranking law enforcement
official, has given conflicting accounts of this episode during college
commencement addresses at Columbia, but both the BSO’s website and the Daily
Spectator have published facts that conflict with his version of events.
Holder has bragged about his involvement in the “rise of black
consciousness” protests at Columbia.
“I was among a large group of students who felt strongly about the
way we thought the world should be, and we weren’t afraid to make our opinions
heard,” he said
during Columbia’s 2009 commencement exercises. “I did not take a final
exam until my junior year at Columbia — we were on strike every time finals
seemed to roll around — but we ran out of issues by that third year.”
Though then-Dean Carl Hovde declared the occupation of the
Naval ROTC office illegal and said it violated university policy, the college
declined to prosecute any of the students involved. This decision may have been
made to avoid a repeat of violent Columbia campus confrontations between police
and members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1968.
The ROTC headquarters was ultimately renamed the Malcolm X lounge
as the SAAS organization demanded. It later became a hang-out spot for another
future U.S. leader, Barack Obama, according to David Maraniss’
best-selling ”Barack
Obama: The Story.”
Holder told Columbia University’s graduating law students
during a 2010 commencement speech that
the 1970 incident happened “during my senior year,” but Holder was a freshman
at the time. “[S]everal of us took one of our concerns — that black students
needed a designated space to gather on campus — to the Dean [of
Freshmen]’office. This being Columbia, we proceeded to occupy that office.”
Holder also claimed in his 2009 speech that he and his fellow
students decided to “peacefully occupy one of the campus offices.” In contrast,
the
BSO’s website recounted its predecessor organization’s activities by noting
that that “in 1970, a group of armed black students [the SAAS] seized the
abandoned ROTC office.”
While that website is no longer online, a snapshot of its content
from September 2010 is part of the archive.org database.
In a December 2010 GQ
magazine profile of Holder, one of his Columbia friends confirmed that he
and Holder were both part of the ROTC office takeover.
Holder particularly “connected with four other African-American
students” at Columbia, correspondent Wil S. Hylton wrote. “We took over the
ROTC lounge in Hartley Hall and created the Malcolm X Lounge,” said a laughing
Steve Sims, one of those students.
Hylton described Sims as “the attorney general’s closest friend”
and “a man Holder describes as his ‘consigliere.’”
The SAAS was part of a radicalized portion of the Columbia student
body whose protest roots were hardened in the late 1960s. Its members
collaborated with the SDS to stage a series of protests on the New York City
campus in 1968, the year before Eric Holder arrived on campus.
Those earlier protests culminated in a separate armed takeover of
Dean Henry Coleman’s office in which students held him hostage and stopped the
construction of a gymnasium in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, near the
campus.
The BSO
reported on its website as recently as 2010 that those students were “armed
with guns.”
Emboldened by their successes, SAAS leaders continued to press
their demands, eventually working with local black radicals who were not
college students. A young Eric Holder joined the fray in 1969 as a college
freshman.
The SAAS also actively supported the Black Panthers and the Black
Power movement, according to Stefan Bradley, professor of African-American
studies at Saint Louis University and author of the 2009 book “Harlem
vs. Columbia University.” He has described the Columbia organization as
being separatist in nature.
“In 1969, SAAS has taken up a new campaign to establish a Black
Institute on campus that would house a black studies program, an all-black
admissions board, all-black faculty members, administrators and staff and they
wanted the university to pay for it,” Bradley told an audience in 2009.
Though Columbia never met all of the black militants’ demands, it
brought more black students to campus through its affirmative action program,
introduced Black Studies courses and hired black radical Charles V.
Hamilton — co-author of “Black
Power” with Black Panther Party ”Honorary Prime Minister” Stokely
Carmichael (by then renamed Kwame Ture).
“The university hadn’t thought of all of this by itself,” said
Bradley. “It took black students [in the SAAS] to do this.”
In March 1970 the SAAS released a statement supporting twenty-one
Black Panthers charged with plotting to blow up department stores, railroad
tracks, a police station and the New York Botanical Gardens.
The SAAS, along with the SDS and other radical campus groups,
staged a campus rally on March 12, 1970 featuring Afeni Shakur — one of the
Panthers out on bail and the future mother of rapper Tupac Shakur.
The rally’s purpose, The Columbia Daily Spectator reported, was to
raise bail money for the twenty other Panthers and to call on District Attorney
Frank Hogan to drop the charges. All 21 defendants would later be acquitted
after a lengthy trial.
The April 21, 1970 SAAS raid on the Naval ROTC office and Dean
Coleman’s office came one month after the Black Panther arrests. The
Columbia Daily Spectator released a series of demands from the student leaders
on April 23 in which they claimed to be occupying the ROTC office for the
purpose of “self-determination and dignity.” They needed the space, they said,
because of “the general racist nature of American society.”
In their statement, the SAAS leaders also decried “this racist
university campus” — in particular its alleged “involvement in the continued
political harassment of the Black Panther Party” — along with what they called
a “lack of concern for Black people whether they be students or workers” and a
“general contempt towards the beliefs of Black students in particular and Black
people in general.”
“Black students recognize the necessity of not letting the
university set a dangerous precedent in its dealings with Black people,” the
statement read in part, “that is letting white people direct the action and
forces that affect Black people toward goals they (white people) feel are
correct.”
Among the black professors who publicly supported Holder and the
SAAS during this period was Black history teacher Hollis Lynch, who is one
of four professors Holder later
said “shaped my worldview.”
Entering Columbia Law School in September 1973, Holder joined the
Black American Law Students Association. Less than a month later, that
organization joined other minority activist groups in a coalition that demanded
the retraction of a letter to President Gerald Ford, signed by six Columbia
professors, that argued against affirmative action and racial quotas.
“Merit should be rewarded, without regard to race, sex, creed, or
any other external factor,” the professors wrote to President Ford. Following a
campaign marked by what two of those professors called “rhetoric and names
hurled” at them, they changed their position and denied they actually
opposed affirmative action.
The Columbia Spectator’s editorial page later argued against
affirmative action as a factor in university admissions, touching off another
controversy with the coalition that included the Black American Law Students
Association. “Affirmative action is just a nice name for a quota, and quotas
are just a nice name for racism,” the editorial board wrote.
In response, the minority students’ coalition responded
that “traditional academic criteria have a built-in bias” that leaves many
minority students “automatically excluded.”
“[A]ffirmative action is neither racist nor sexist,” they wrote.
“Rather it is opposition to it, which fails to provide alternative means for
eradicating bias, that supports the racist and sexist status quo.”
As attorney general, Holder has defended the affirmative action
policies that are now the status quo. In February 2012, Holder
said during a World Leaders Forum at Columbia University that he “can’t
actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.”
“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation
practices,” Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does
it begin. … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they
are entitled?”
Holder has also come under fire for presiding over a Justice
Department that declined to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party
who allegedly intimidated white voters outside a Philadelphia polling precinct
in 2008.
