Rotten to the COREFrom the
Rotten to the CORE
From the Village Voice
CORE Hustles White Firms With Race
Equal Opportunity Scam
by Nick Charles
April 23 - 29, 2003
The help-wanted ad in a local paper said the job was working for a national fundraiser. It was right up Phil Cooper's alley. After several decades at a major corporation, he was given a severance package and a decent pension in 2000. But he still needed to work to make ends meet. So last April he went to the third floor at 817 Broadway and filled out an application. The ad didn't say so, and Cooper (not his real name) didn't realize he was applying for a job at the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), run by Roy Innis, the controversial Republican who recently called for the Justice Department to investigate mosques attended by African Americans for potential terrorist recruitment.
. . . Ethical or moral questions at CORE have been raised as far back as 1976, when the state received complaints that CORE was browbeating companies into donations. In 1981, the state accused CORE of illegal fundraising practices, questioning the way the group represented itself. Under a settlement agreement, Innis, CORE's chairman, admitted no wrongdoing, but had to pay $35,000 to CORE out of his own funds. Innis charged racism.
While Innis professes that CORE maintains community projects, on closer scrutiny these often turn out to be nothing more than paper programs.
. . . He straddles a contradiction, which allows him to operate with impunity. Opposed to affirmative action, busing, and gun control, and a critic of "race mongers" such as presidential candidate Reverend Al Sharpton, Innis is at the head of the post-race movement. "My brand of conservatism is the traditional, most decent and rational expression of the American personality," Innis told The New York Times in 1996. But when he or CORE is challenged, Innis is the first to howl racism.
Since taking the helm in 1968, Innis, once a registered Democrat, has steered CORE to the right, making occasional detours into ideological lunacy such as befriending Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He ended the group's integrationist tradition, turning it into an operation that gives aid and comfort to those who want to see the civil rights gains of the last 40 years erased.
. . . In its glory days, CORE was part of the big three civil right organizations, along with the NAACP and the Urban League. But it is now a specter of its former self, run as a fiefdom by Innis. In the 1980s, he had a few televised physical dust-ups with white supremacist Tom Metzger and with Sharpton. Last December, Innis defended Senator Trent Lott, saying that Lott was not racist, even though his praise of the good old segregationist days cost him the Senate majority leadership.
