Obama and the Ex-Klansman

We print below the remarks of a comrade at the New York forum on Booker T. Washington.

Many people we talk to tell us they will vote for Obama in opposition to the openly racist Republican candidates. But a vote for this capitalist politician is a vote against the emancipation of the working class. A vote for Obama is a vote against black freedom and equality.

This forum on the rehabilitation of Booker T. Washington reminded me of a speech Obama gave at the funeral of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia in July of 2010. Senator Byrd was a former leader of the KKK, later an arch-segregationist who unsuccessfully filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Senator Byrd’s endorsement of Obama for president was crucial to his 2008 campaign’s effort to prove to the bourgeoisie that he was a safe bet for their class interests.

So Obama gave a speech at Senator Byrd’s funeral in 2010. After making a coy reference to the things this ex-Klan leader “said and things he did that he came to regret,” Obama went on to say, “Robert Byrd was a mountain eagle and his lowest swoop was still higher than the other birds upon the plain.” That was Obama’s tribute, quoted in the Washington Post online.

Racist terrorists like the KKK are not ancient history. The Spartacist League has organized protests aimed at stopping fascist terrorists, who pose a deadly threat against the working class. We look to the power of labor to do this, not the capitalist state. One of these mobilizations we organized was in Springfield, Illinois, in 1994 and hundreds of trade unionists, students and others took part. It was just prior to this rally that our party had our first and possibly only interaction with Obama.

We invited people we were very much in political disagreement with to endorse our united-front demonstration. Our call to stop the Klan touched a nerve with pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucrats and even black Democratic politicians like Emil Jones, and many of them endorsed our united front. After we got Emil Jones’s endorsement, one of our comrades in Chicago called up Emil Jones’s protégée, Barack Obama. Obama refused to endorse the mobilization to stop the Klan from marching in Springfield.

All of this transpired in December 1993-January 1994, before Barack Obama became an Illinois state senator, U.S. Senator, and then Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism. Now he’s a war criminal like the presidents who came before him, with the blood of many thousands of Afghanis, Iraqis, Libyans and Pakistanis on his hands. Now he has many notches in his belt, like the deportation of 1,000,000 immigrants, the union-busting bailout of the auto industry, and legalizing the indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

The Spartacist League has a program to fight against imperialism, racial oppression and the exploitation of the multiracial working class. Don’t vote for your class enemies in the Democratic Party. Join us in the struggle to build a workers party that will fight for socialist revolution.