Fourth in a series
Re “Samad Sad That Activism Has Dried up in the Black Community”
Democrats, especially black Democrats, faced a pickle of a decision in the spring and summer of 2008 –
Should they support Hillary Rodham Clinton, the wife of the first ersatz black President in history, or little-known Sen. Barack Obama, one of their own?
The fight that ensued is one of the highlights of Dr. Anthony Samad’s new book, “Real Eyez.”
“Basically, the city had been locked down for Hillary Clinton,” Dr. Samad said last week at his book launching party. “There was a generation of us, though, who said, ‘We’re not going with that. If he can’t win, we are going to lose with our choice. We are not going to be guided into a choice that we can’t see making a cultural imprint in our society.’”
The Yeah side backing Ms. Clinton was backboned by black giants in Congress, now-retired U.S. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) and still chugging along Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), along with Los Angeles Sentinel publisher/activist Danny Bakewell.
“We had some real fights with them,” Dr. Samad said.
“It wasn’t so much those people were too establishment as it was that they didn’t put all of the options on the table.
“They said, ‘We are going with Hillary and that’s it.’
“‘Well, can we at least consider another option?’
“And so they never saw that change coming. That is my point.”
Leadership’s blindness to broad cultural changes in recent decades is a foundational theme of Dr. Samad’s book.
Question: Has time passed by the leaders cited?
“I don’t want to talk about their day in the context of leadership because leadership can be twofold. There is an African saying, ‘Old men for counsel, young men for war.’
“Their day may have changed in terms of advocacy in the streets. But they could give wise counsel to a new generation of Africans, help them not make some mistakes that were made in the past.”
(To be continued)
