Rep. Allen West’s comments to Red Alert Politics and to others over the past two weeks calling members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus “communists” has cost the freshman congressman a speaking role at a local Florida NAACP event.
West’s comments went viral, and now the Martin County, Fla., chapter of the civil-rights organization has decided to disinvite him from being the keynote speaker at the group’s Sept. 15 dinner.
But the NAACP’s scorn for West’s anti-communism contrasts with its past behavior.
In fact, NAACP President Ben Jealous had laudatory words as recently as January 2012 for a known communist associate of Martin Luther King Jr. by the name of Bayard Rustin.
“There’s a certain statement he made about Communists,” Jerry Gore, president of the Martin County NAACP, told Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers. ‘That statement alone … we do not represent that type of atmosphere.”
NAACP officials, however, were silent in 1998 after the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke at the Socialist Scholars Conference at the City University of New York sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America, which included known communists.
The close ties between the NAACP and the Democratic Party raise the question of viewpoint discrimination.
“While the NAACP of Martin County is certainly entitled to its decision, Congressman West believes this was a missed opportunity for a serious exchange of ideas,” West spokesman Jonathan Blyth told Red Alert Politics in an e-mailed statement. “Given the economic and fiscal troubles facing our nation and the black community in particular, Congressman West believes there needs to be a serious discussion of the direction our nation is headed, and how badly current economic policies are failing Americans of all skin colors, genders, ages and incomes.”
The close connections between individual socialists and communists dates back to the NAACP’s founding in 1909, according to the Socialist Party USA. In fact, this socialist group says its members played an important role in the group’s founding.
The NAACP’s co-founder W.E.B. DuBois was an open member of the Communist Party USA and continued to support Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin even after being admonished by others in the Civil Rights Movement.
DuBois even won the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize prior to his death in 1963.
The communist connections of DuBois and notable communists such as poet Langston Hughes and 1952 Stalin Peace Price winner Paul Robeson did not keep them from winning the NAACP’s prized Spigarn Medal, which recognizes black Americans for their achievements.
Correction: The story originally stated that Allen West lost his membership in the NAACP rather than his being disinvited from a speaking engagement.
