[Peace-discuss] AWARE and a connection to LaRouche

[C. G. Estabrook]

It was mentioned again at last Sunday's meeting that the proposed
"Forgiveness Weekend" would include participation by Rev. James Bevel and
associates.  After a history in the civil rights movement as a member of
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Bevel left SCLC in 1969
and created the Making of a Man Clinic in 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s, he
founded Students for Education and Economic Development (SEED). In 1992,
he ran for vice president on a ticket with Lyndon LaRouche.

Bevel has also worked with groups controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
His associations are long-established:

Dr. Manning Marable, in a 1986 column, listed Bevel among a small group of
"prominent civil rights spokesmen [who] have gone so far as to form
alliances with ultra-right groups, which might give lip service to blacks'
traditional interests" ... While Rev. Bevel's historic role as a valued
civil rights leader is unquestioned, he has in recent years lost his
constituency and his political moorings. Dr. Manning Marable noted in 1986
that Bevel, had become "a Republican party leader in Chicago's Black
community, and soon earned the reputation as an extremist of the right."
Some time after the LaRouche conviction in January 1989, Bevel began to
appear as a featured speaker at LaRouchian conferences, and began to write
a column in the LaRouchian New Federalist. As Marable noted in 1986: "The
right-wing sect of Lyndon LaRouche has also initiated a campaign to
recruit black supporters. As in the case of the Unification Church, the
LaRouchians work primarily through several fronts, the Schiller Institute
and the National Democratic Policy Committee. Again, the LaRouchians have
been linked to a number of racist and extremist groups, including the
Liberty Lobby, the Klan and neo-Nazis. Currently, the LaRouchians are
vigorously opposing sanctions against South African apartheid." [From
PublicEye.org, the website of Political Research Associates]

For more information on LaRouche's neo-fascism, see
<http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Lyndon_LaRouche> and "Lyndon
LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag" by Chip Berlet at
<http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/nclc1.html>, both with further links.

I think association with LaRouchites can only bring discredit on AWARE.

--CGE