The Strange Career of Dr. Lenora Fulani

Ron Daniels <rdaniel@ccr-ny.org>, 23 December 1999

Dr. Lenora Fulani, former presidential candidate of the now defunct New Alliance Party, and "critic" of the two party monopoly on politics in this country, recently stunned many observers by endorsing Pat Buchanan's campaign to become the Reform Party's candidate for President in the 2000 election. In rationalizing her decision to endorse one of the most rabid, racist, sexist, homophobic, right wing political figures on the political scene today, Dr. Fulani suggested that Buchanan's candidacy would be good for "independent" politics and the political fortunes of Black people. Indeed, Dr. Fulani promised to bring Pat Buchanan to the heart of Harlem, the Capital of Black America, to dine at Sylvia's restaurant and speak at the House of Justice, the headquarter of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. How could Dr. Fulani who claims to be a Marxist and a champion of Black causes endorse an arch adversary of Black people? From my vantage point no one should be surprised that Dr. Fulani could commit such a deplorable act. For some time, at the direction of her mentor and master Dr. Fred Newman, it appears that Dr. Fulani's services as a political operative have been for sale to the highest bidder.

As a veteran of the progressive independent political movement, when I ran for President in 1992, 1 did so in part to protect the Black community against political interlopers and pretenders like Dr. Lenora Fulani. A cursory examination of the principal Black independent political movements in the last quarter century reveal that Dr. Lenora Fulani was nowhere to be found in any of them. From the National Black Political Assembly, the National Black Independent Political Party to the National Black United Fund, there is no evidence that Dr. Fulani played any significant role in the independent Black political movement. So how did Dr. Lenora Fulani become a "prominent" Black political leader purporting to represent the interests of Black people? The Fulani phenomenon is but the latest example of a predominantly White organization utilizing a Black face, and in this instance a Black female face, to establish a base in the Black community to carry out its own political agenda.

This scheme has been aided and abetted by well meaning but gullible Black people who arc understandably so fed up with many of the current crowd of Black "leaders" and the two establishment parties that they will give an audience to anyone who offers the appearance of an alternative. Many Black women are also understandably eager to see Black women break out of the mold of simply being followers in male dominated organizations and movements to becoming leaders in political organizations and movements. Dr. Fred Newman has cleverly attempted to exploit these legitimate aspirations within the Black community.

Most knowledgeable activists have always known that Dr. Fulani's claim that the New Alliance Party (the political formation Newman created to carry out his machinations) was a Black led party was a fraudulent assertion. Fred Newman, a one-time associate of Lyndon LaRouche, has always been the headmaster of a predominantly White cult like operation, which included the New Alliance Party (NAP). Using a concept called "social therapy," which essentially proclaims that people with mental disorders can be cured through service to the movement," many of the patients of Newman's social therapy clinics became the foot soldiers of NAP. It was these foot soldiers who largely comprised the army of volunteers who successfully labored to get NAP on the ballot in all fifty states during Fulani's presidential campaigns; campaigns which may have been calculated to raise money for Newman's operations by exploiting the matching fund provisions of the federal election laws more than to promote the interests of Black people and the oppressed.

Through it all, Fulani has never been the leader of anything. She has functioned as a devout servant of Fred Newman, who once said something to the effect that, "I made her, she is my proudest accomplishment." For her part, Fulani is so mesmerized by Newman that she has praised him as a leader "who has done more for Black people than any Black leader alive." Together this odd couple has been pimping and prostituting Black folks to promote their own agenda, which mostly appears to be enriching Newman and his associates. A few years ago, Newman abruptly declared that NAP had outlived its usefulness and disbanded it. If NAP was so successful then why did Newman shut it down? Shortly after the demise NAP Fulani popped up in the camp of the billionaire right wing populist Ross Perot. Apparently Perot was eager to use Newman's foot soldiers to secure ballot status for his presidential campaign. Since that time Fulani has been deployed to mind the right wing independent movement founded by Perot. It was out of this movement and Perot's presidential campaigns that the Reform Party was founded.

Noticeably quiet for the past few years, now Newman and Fulani have resurfaced as allies and co-partners of the right wing demagogue Patrick Buchanan, political bounty hunters whose only leverage is their purported ability to field an army of foot soldiers and the claim that they can deliver Black folks to the Reform Party and Buchanan. Such is the strange career of one Lenora Fulani. Now that we know the real deal, the sham, there is no reason for Black folks to be duped by Fred Newman and his "proudest accomplishment."