UPDATED: Tea Party Republicans Flocking to Appear Monday at White Nationalist-Connected March
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Iowa Rep. Steve King, former Rep. Allen West and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions are all planning to appear at an anti-immigration reform rally held by a group with close connections to the white nationalist movement. According to Right Wing Watch, the Black American Leadership Association (BALA) is not the grass-roots organization it purports to be, but rather a longstanding cabal of anti-immigration activists who have “deep connections” to white nationalist John Tanton, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”
The march, called the “D.C. March for Jobs,” with its “Just say ‘No’ to Amnesty” theme is slated for Monday and is expected to draw a heavily tea party-affiliated, far-right crowd. Michelle Cottle at the Daily Beast wrote Friday that BALA is believed to be “the latest in a series of minority front groups providing anti-immigration extremists cover from charges of racism.”
Tea party leaders, wrote Cottle, have been “downright giddy” at having a group of activists of color on hand to point to when critics call out the recent anti-immigration reform putsch by conservatives as a display of racial animus.
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Cottle wrote that while BALA’s existence only dates to the publication of its Facebook page in mid-May, at least a dozen of its members are long-time anti-immigration activists have have spent decades pushing the message that immigration will be economically devastating to the black community. Under different NAMEs over the years, including the African American Leadership Council, Choose Black America and the Coalition for the Future American Worker, this group of activists have been pushing policy agendas that Cottle called ‘misleading, dangerously divisive, and sadly predictable.’Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights, told Cottle, ‘We’ve seen this before. This is the same page pulled from an over-20-year-old playbook.’
Several BALA leaders ’ Durant, Frank Morris, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, and T. Willard Fair ’ have worked for, lobbied with or supported the Federation for American Immigration Reform FAIR , a notoriously anti-Latino, pro-eugenics organization that the SPLC classifies as a hate group. FAIR was founded by John Tanton, who, in the late 1980s, was outed as a racist when portions of his private correspondence were made public ’ letters and memos in which he railed against the ‘Latin onslaught’ and said that society was doomed without a ‘a European-American majority ’ and a clear one at that.’
More: Tea Party Republicans Flocking to Appear Monday at White Nationalist-Connected March
The Shady Group Behind the African-American Anti-Immigration Rally
BALA isn’t your classic grassroots protest movement. Although it is technically a new player on the political scene—it popped up mid-May, with the launch of a Facebook page—its leaders are not. Among the group’s dozen or so members are several seasoned activists who have long been conducting this same anti-immigration crusade by means of an evolving series of similar groups. The organizations’ names change—BALA, the African American Leadership Council, Choose Black America, the Coalition for the Future American Worker—but the message remains constant: Immigration is killing the black community. It’s a simplistic, us-vs.-them argument that some black leaders find misleading, dangerously divisive, and sadly predictable. “We’ve seen this before,” says Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “This is the same page pulled from an over-20-year-old playbook.”
But questions regarding BALA go beyond the particulars of its current message. Several of the group’s leaders—Durant, Frank Morris, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, and T. Willard Fair—have longstanding ties with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and other controversial groups in the broader anti-immigration movement. Most of these groups emerged from a network created beginning in the late 1970s by John Tanton, the father of the modern anti-immigration movement, whose flirtations with white nationalism and eugenics (and whose enduring chumminess with devotees of both) have been documented at length by anti-extremist watchdog groups such as the ADL, the Chicago-based Center for New Community and others. The Southern Poverty Law Center has gone as far as to designate FAIR, the Tanton network’s mothership, a “hate group.” (FAIR unsurprisingly rejects this classification.) Among the group’s eyebrow-raising moves was accepting $1.2 million dollars in funding from the pro-eugenics, white-supremacist Pioneer Fund in the 1980s and ‘90s. (You can read more about the history of FAIR and Tanton’s related groups here (PDF), here, and here)
As a result of the many links between BALA’s leaders and the Tanton network, hate-group watchdogs have expressed concern that the organization is merely the latest in a series of minority front groups providing anti-immigration extremists cover from charges of racism. “It’s blatant tokenism,” says Aaron Flanagan of the Center for New Community. “And tokenism is not a word I use lightly.” Henderson is more diplomatic: “It’s troubling when opportunists use the economic challenges of the African-American community as cover for ideological and political extremism to align themselves with groups like FAIR, which had their own genesis in the eugenics movement.”