By Lomin Saayman
FOXNews.com
A Florida woman who has been married to both the former head of the Ku Klux Klan and the creator of a notorious white supremacist Web site is working as a spokeswoman for a school that aims to lift underprivileged black and Hispanic children out of poverty.
An executive with an organization that tracks hate groups calls the employment of the woman, Chloe Black, an “untenable position” and “unbelievable.”
Black, the ex-wife of former KKK leader David Duke, is now married to Don Black, the creator of the white-power hate site Stormfront. Chloe Black is currently employed as an executive assistant at Florida Crystals, a sugar conglomerate whose owners, the Fanjul brothers, have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to help build a new campus for Glades Academy.
Glades is a charter school for the children of African-American and migrant workers in Pahokee, a rural town in Palm Beach County. Billionaire Jose “Pepe” Fanjul’s wife, Emilia, is chairman of the board of Glades Academy, and she hired Black to help promote the school.
Reports suggest that Black’s salary from the school may be going to support her husband’s activities on the hate site, as Don Black has had no clear source of income for some time.
Don Black, in an online appeal for contributions to his hate site, wrote that he does not receive a salary from the site. “Stormfront is an online community of White activists,” he wrote. “It’s not a business, no one receives a salary, and our work is supported by voluntary contributions.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based non-profit organization that tracks hate groups, Don Black has not had a regular job for “years and years,” though the SPLC could not prove that Chloe Black’s salary from Florida Crystals was going to support Stormfront.
When contacted by FOXNews.com, Chloe Black refused to discuss the allegations or her role in Glades Academy. She told the New York Post earlier this month that she hasn’t been involved with the white supremacy movement “in 30 years.”
But the SPLC, which has followed the Blacks as principal leaders of the white supremacist movement for decades, said that is not true.
Mark Potok, the SPLC’s intelligence project director, said Black in June attended a key conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that says on its Web site that it opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind” and once described black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.”
“The SPLC’s role is not to make demands of the Fanjuls. But they have put as a front woman on this very worthy philanthropic project a woman who represents everything that is antithetical to this project. This is an untenable position. She is not merely a woman who married white supremacist leaders; she has actively participated in white supremacist functions,” Potok said.
Potok said he found Black’s involvement with Glades Academy “unbelievable.”
There is no indication that the Fanjuls or Florida Crystals were aware of Chloe Black’s right-wing sympathies when she was appointed to speak on behalf of Glades Academy.
Gaston Cantens, Florida Crystals’ vice president of corporate relations, did not respond to repeated requests by FOXNews.com for comment but has been quoted as saying that the company does not “comment on the private lives of our employees.”
But a cursory look at Black’s resume would have revealed her connections to the Knights of the KKK and the National Party.
In 1972 the then Chloe Hardin married David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK who is described as a neo-Nazi by his critics. They divorced in 1984 but are reportedly still friendly and speak regularly. Black is the mother of Duke’s two daughters.
Four years later she married Don Black, Duke’s best friend and an ex-Klansman himself. Black is the founder and webmaster of Stormfront, the premier online location for white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe.
“Don Black and David Duke are not lightweight nationalists,” Potok said. “They are rabid white separatists. Duke is better described as a neo-Nazi more than anything else.”
The Black family residence in West Palm Beach has been registered in Chloe Black’s name since the year she separated from Duke.
According to the SPLC, 32 percent of Pahokee residents live in poverty. The Glades Academy project aims not only to educate the children in the area, but encourage graduates to give back to the community.
Florida’s politics never ceases to amaze:
@Pterrafractyl: I saw that on Democratic Underground, btw.......what was he thinking? :O
@Steven L.: I’m guessing his reasoning went as far as
“I bet this audience will think I’m cool if I talk about my biker days. Oh yeah they will...vrooom vroom vrooooom!”.
Useful idiocy is a double edged sword.
Just FYI, if you’re a far-right politician that would like to get the public to suddenly forget that you were photographed looking all chummy with neo-Nazis this isn’t how to do it:
In case you were curious, the mayor of Toronto is no longer coaching those “f—ing minorities” at the local Catholic school.
FIAT LUX?
*Adtendite a falsis lucem!
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/07/17/activist-son-of-key-racist-leader-renounces-white-nationalism/#more-11268
Activist Son of Key Racist Leader Renounces White Nationalism
Mark Potok on July 17, 2013,
Posted in Extremist Propaganda, White Nationalism
Derek Black, son of the former Alabama Klan leader who now runs the largest racist Web forum in the world, has renounced white nationalism, saying that he has been through “a gradual awakening process” and apologizing for his past activism.
In an E‑mail (pdf) to the editor of this blog earlier this week, Black, 24, wrote that he had come to see the arguments of white nationalism as “principally flawed,” adding that he had realized that American society is marked by an “overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else” and that white nationalism was really about “an entrenched desire to preserve white power at the expense of others.”
“Advocating for white nationalism means that we are opposed to minority attempts to elevate themselves to a position equal to our own,” wrote Black, who recently finished his third year at the elite New College of Florida. “It is an advocacy that I cannot support, having grown past my bubble, talked to the people I affected, read more widely, and realized the necessary impact my actions had on people I never wanted to harm.”
It was a remarkable statement for Black, whose father, Don Black, once served time in prison for plotting a racist invasion of a small Caribbean nation and founded and still runs Stormfront, a white supremacist Web forum. The younger Black was raised in the racist movement, had by age 12 created a racist children’s page on his father’s website, and until recently hosted a radio show featuring racist guests.
But it was also the latest step in a fairly clear evolution.
Already, at the tender age of 9, Derek Black was attending racist events like this Nov. 7, 1998, gathering in Jackson, Miss., of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” He is pictured here with then-Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice, one of few politicians who was then still willing to be seen at CCC events.
Last November, Derek Black posted a statement on a students-only forum at his college in which he explicitly said he was not a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or a Klansman, and revealing that he had some unexpected views, such as support for same-sex marriage, environmental regulation, and legal abortion. But he also said in the statement, which was made public on this blog in December, that he was not renouncing white nationalism and did not see it as incompatible with his other views.
In his E‑mail this week, Black said that he was already moving away from white nationalism at the time, but that “I was not prepared to risk driving any wedge” into his relationship with his family, “whom I respect greatly, particularly my father.” But, he added, “After a great deal of thought since then, I have resolved that it is in the best interests of everyone involved, directly or indirectly, to be honest about my slow but steady disaffiliation from white nationalism.” He described himself as having spent “the past few years … disentangling myself from white nationalism,” and added that he had closed down his radio show permanently this January. He said that he had not posted at all on Stormfront this year, and only once in 2012. He said he did attend a Stormfront conference in 2012, but would not do so again this year.
Black also directly confronted some of the main arguments of white nationalism, such as the idea that whites are being victimized by non-white immigration, mixed-race marriages and affirmative action — what amounts, in the arguments of white nationalists, to “genocide” aimed at destroying the white race. He also ridiculed many white nationalists’ “particularly bizarre” hatred of Jews.
“I now consider this belief system principally flawed,” he said. “Most arguments that racial equity programs disadvantage whites who would otherwise be hired or accepted to academic programs mask underlying anxieties about the growth of non-white social status. It is impossible to argue rationally that in our society, with its overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else, racial equity programs intended to affect the deep-rooted situation represent oppression of whites.” Indeed, Black added, “The advancement of minorities in the US is not insignificant, but has not ended (let alone reversed) their circumstances.”
Black was explicitly apologetic. “I acknowledge that things I have said as well as my actions have been harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent, activists striving for opportunity and fairness for all, and others affected.”
“I can’t support a movement that tells me I can’t be a friend to whomever I wish or that other people’s races requires me to think about them in a certain way or be suspicious of their advancements,” Black wrote toward the end of his four-page statement. “Minorities must have the ability to rise to positions of power, and many supposed ‘race’ issues are in fact issues of structural oppression, poor educational prospects, and limited opportunity. The differences I thought I observed didn’t go nearly as deeply as I imagined. I believe we can move beyond the sort of mind-boggling emphasis white nationalism puts on maintaining an oppressive, exclusive sense of identity — oppressive for others and stifling for our society.”
———
Perhaps this is all true and good?
Or a born and bred racist now attends an ‘elite’ college and ups his skills in rhetoric? Time will tell. So will actions.
(One wonders how this rhetoric plays to Ma an Pa and ‘Uncle’ plastic face?)
83 Comments
If anyone in Jefferson County, Colorado was inclined run for congress this year but missed the primary season there might be an opening...
White bean supremacists rejoice: there’s a GOP “bean feed” fundraiser coming up and you’re invited. White supremacists, on the other hand, are totally not invited. Apparently:
Ah. So the plan was apparently to lure people in to the fundraiser with hints that KKK secrets will be revealed, only to talk about the group’s history with Democrats? You have to wonder how that would have gone over with all the closet KKK members that the flier was clearly going to attract. It definitely could have gotten weird.
Someone on a Texas school board decided to share their holiday wishes on Facebook. It’s a dream of a Black Christmas. A ‘Don Black’ Christmas. Oops: