Lenora Fulani: Difference between revisions

Lenora Branch Fulani (b. April 25, 1950, birth name Lenora Branch) is a developmental psychologist, psychotherapist and political activist in the United States. She is best known for her role as the leading public figure of a network of political and charitable organizations controlled by her mentor and fellow psychotherapist, Fred Newman; and for her presidential campaigns. Her claim of achieving 50-State ballot status in 1988 is incorrect.

The website of Fulani's Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP) describes her as "the nation's leading African-American political independent...a pioneer of left/center/right coalitions and a longtime agitator for black political independence." [1] Her most strongly emphasized political concerns include racial equality, gay rights and crusading to replace the Democratic Party's role in American politics with that of what she calls the "Independent" movement.

Fulani's career is very closely connected with Newman, a controversial psychotherapist and philosopher formerly associated with Lyndon LaRouche. Newman's "social therapy" group sessions link emotional problems to social problems and seek to undermine the "bourgeois ego" of the client so that he or she will work for a Marxist revolution. Several former clients of social therapy say they were recruited into Newman and Fulani's secretive International Workers Party (IWP) and pressured to work full-time for little pay, mostly raising money. Various statements by ex-members, with details of Fulani's alleged role, can be found in the "ex-files" at the website [2].

In a July 2000 New York Times interview, Fulani appeared to give her approval to Newman's theory that there's nothing wrong with therapists sleeping with their patients. Asked about this opinion of Newman's, she said:

"What he's challenging there is the traditional assumption of how therapy works, that there has to be some distance in order for it to be helpful. And we disagree with that, not just from the vantage point of whether or not you can sleep with somebody you're doing therapy with, but also just in how close and how open you can be." (Mim Udovitch, "Odd Bedfellows," New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 9, 2000.

Fulani is a cofounder and co-executive producer of the youth program All Stars Talent Show Network, and is the co-director of The Development School for Youth, a supplementary training and career education program that offers internships at corporations and banks. She writes a nationally syndicated column and hosts a weekly public affairs cable television show, Fulani!.

In 1993, Fulani joined activists who supported Ross Perot for President in 1992, in a nationwide effort to create a new pro-reform party, which she has characterizes as both "populist" and one "that could provide African-Americans with an electoral alternative." [3] In 1994 this evolved into CUIP.

Early life and association with Fred Newman

Lenora Branch grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania in a working class household. She later took the name "Fulani", which is the name of a nomadic population in West Africa. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the City University of New York (CUNY), which she attended in the late 1970s. While there she became interested in Fred Newman's ideas. She underwent training at Newman's New York Institute for Social Therapy and would become his most famous disciple.

Newman's therapy clients make up a large portion of the members in the IWP and in the various electoral political groups controlled by the IWP over the years. Fulani began as a political volunteer, and ran for Lt. Governor of New York in 1982. She helped to recruit Newman's 1984 presidential candidate, Dennis Serrette. Serrette, a well-known trade union activist, left the group shortly after the 1984 campaign and publicly denounced it as a cult in court testimony, news interviews and his own writings.[4]

Electoral politics and the politics of personality

After running in various New York state elections in the 1980s, Fulani ran for President in 1988 as a member of the New Alliance Party, the public electoral arm of the IWP. She received 0.2% of the vote, or almost a quarter of a million votes, and was the first African American independent on the ballot in all 50 states.

Fulani ran unsuccessfully as a New York gubernatorial candidate in 1990. She was endorsed by Louis Farrakhan, who had been politically involved with Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign (but who had been dropped at the recommendation of Jackson's campaign advisors). Both Farrakhan and Fulani have criticized the view that the Democratic Party is the only appropriate political party for Blacks in the United States.

Fulani again ran as the New Alliance candidate for President in the 1992 election, this time receiving 0.07% of the vote. She chose former Peace and Freedom Party activist Maria Elizabeth Munoz as her vice-presidential running mate. Munoz previously ran for the offices of U.S. Senator and governor in California. It was also in 1992 that Fulani released her autobiography, Making of a Fringe Candidate.

Former campaign workers on Fulani's 1992 campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charging serious improprieties in the campaign's finances. After Newman and the campaign treasurer of the Fulani campaign both refused to answers questions from the FEC on Fifth Amendment grounds, the FEC in 1995 ordered Fulani to pay back $612,557 in Federal matching funds. Fulani appealed and the amount to be paid back was reduced to $117,000. Fulani then petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for review of the FEC's final order, but her appeal was denied, with Judge Charles Silberman chiding her for seeking to "frustrate and delay a government investigation." (See Federal Election Commission RECORD, April 1996; Bruce Shapiro, "Buchanan-Fulani: New Team?" The Nation, Nov. 1, 1999.)

In 1994, Fulani and Newman became affiliated with the Patriot Party, one of many groups that would later compete for control of the Reform Party founded by Ross Perot. She also joined with Jacqueline Salit to start the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, an organization dedicated to bringing various independent groups together to challenge the bipartisan hegemony in American politics. In 2000, Fulani and Newman first endorsed -- then later broke with -- conservative Pat Buchanan's Presidential campaign in the Reform Party of the United States. Fulani and Newman then endorsed the Presidential candidacy of Natural Law Party leader John Hagelin, a close associate of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Later, Fulani unsuccessfully sought the Vice Presidential nomination at the national convention organized by a splinter faction of the Reform Party.

In the 2001 election for Mayor of New York City, Fulani and the Independence Party of New York endorsed the Republican candidate, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, once elected, approved an $8.7 million municipal bond to provide financing for Fulani and Newman to build a new headquarters for their youth program, theatre and telemarketing center.

The Bloomberg alliance with Fulani and her associates in part was the result of New York's fusion rule, which allowed Bloomberg to aggregate his votes on all ballot lines. The 59,000 votes that Bloomberg received on the Independence Party ballot line exceeded his margin of victory over the Democratic (and Working Families Party) candidate, Mark J. Green. In the municipal election of 2003, Bloomberg and Fulani were among those endorsing a proposed amendment to the New York City Charter to establish non-partisan elections. Although Bloomberg spent $7 million of his own money on this pet project of Fulani and Newman, it was rejected by the voters.

In September 2005 Fulani and other Newman followers were expelled from the State Executive Committee of the New York Independence Party were expelled. The reason given by state chairman Frank MacKay was that they had become an embarrassment to the party because of Fulani's public refusal on NY 1 (cable news channel) to repudiate an earlier statement in which she had called Jews "mass murderers of people of color." [5]

Buchanan controversy

During the 2000 election, Fulani shocked many when she endorsed Pat Buchanan, then running on the Reform Party ticket. Some papers incorrectly reported that Fulani was Buchanan's running mate, but this position actually belonged to Ezola Foster. Fulani did, however, serve for a time as a campaign advisor. This was seen as a strange meeting of two ends of the political spectrum who had very little in common, though both candidates had previously been accused of anti-semitism. However, both Buchanan and Fulani related in populist language that they represented marginalized groups who were fed up with the two-party system. Fulani later withdrew her endorsement of the Buchanan campaign on the grounds that it had "hijacked" the Reform movement in order to further Buchanan's own right wing agenda. [6] Foster responded by claiming that Fulani was quite clear on Buchanan's objectives both before and while she worked with him. [7]

Community work

Fulani has worked on a number of community outreach and youth recruitment projects. In 1984, she helped found the Castillo Cultural Center in New York City, which produces plays written mostly by Newman, who calls himself a "post-modern" playwright. In 1998, Castillo merged with Newman's All Stars Project youth charity. The All Stars/Castillo theater troupe came under fire in 2004 from the Anti-Defamation League for a play entitled Crown Heights, a dramatization of the events surrounding the 1991 riots in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn. The ADL accused the play of blaming the riots on the Jews. [8]

In January 2005, All Stars and Fulani were the target of a complaint by Molly Hardy, a former theater project director for one of the youth charities they control. Hardy told the New York State Attorney General's office that she had witnessed emotional abuse of teenagers by Fulani and that All Stars was making false claims about how many young people it worked with. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced an investigation in July 2005. In September 2005, a city contract with All Stars to run an afterschool program for the city's Department of Youth and Community Development was put on hold until the completion of the state investigation, which the city's Department of Investigation and Agency for Children's Services had also joined.

Hardy gave interviews to the Village Voice and to NY1 News describing what she regarded as bizarre interactions with young people by Fulani and other All Stars staff. The Voice described Hardy's account of a youth development conference:

"Fulani, introduced to the kids as 'one of the most important women in the world,' told the puzzled youths about Newman, whom she called 'the most influential person in my life,' according to Hardy. Fulani said Newman changed her life when she was a young graduate student. He had asked her if she wanted 'to end up just another poor black woman' in the field of education.

"How did she feel about a white man telling her that? one teen asked. 'Well, first of all, if any of you think that white people care about you, think again. They don't,' Fulani said, according to Hardy.

"The teens had arrived the day before on a red-eye flight, so one girl began to doze. Fulani snapped at her: 'You're performing tired. Get up and go put some water on your face and get back here and perform differently.' When the embarrassed teen returned, Fulani insisted that she ask her a question. 'The poor girl didn't know what to say,' said Hardy. 'She looked like she was going to cry.' Fulani then turned to Hardy, 'How about you? Do you have any questions?' Hardy said she just smiled and said, 'No, no questions.' I was thinking, 'Wow, I am so out of here.'" (Tom Robbins, "Tough talk from party boss," The Village Voice, June 22, 2005.)

In 1987 Fulani and Newman began an alliance with Al Sharpton, marching with him and supporting his position in the famous Tawana Brawley case. For several years, Sharpton and Fulani publicly backed each other on some issues, but Fulani felt betrayed when in 1992 Sharpton ran for the U.S. Senate from New York as a Democrat rather than as an independent. Since then, Sharpton has kept his distance from Fulani and Newman.

External links

• http://www.cuip.org/ Committee for Unified Independent Party official home page
• WorldNet Daily articles by Lenora Fulani
• Fulani writes about her political history with Al Sharpton
• interview with Fulani
• Ex-iwp.org's archive of articles about Fulani; the site considers the IWP a "cult", but they appear to be attempting a comprehensive collection of articles.
• "179 Questions for Lenora Fulani" from journalist Dennis King, who is critical of Fulani.