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Last year Republican Party activist Niger Innis, son of Roy Innis, the chair of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), appeared on the MSNBC cable news network. He had been invited to discuss the Enron scandal. Viewers were appalled when a graphic containing a typographical error appeared below his image on the television screen that read, "Nigger Innis." Roy Innis would not have been surprised by this racial slur. Innis Sr. has long maintained that as far as white America is concerned, "there are two kinds of black people, the field hands and the `house niggers.' We of CORE, the nationalists, are the field hand blacks. The integrationists are the house niggers."
Roy Innis, a leading figure in the civil rights movement, has come full circle. Once considered a radical leftist in the Black Power movement of the 1960s, he now is a member of the Libertarian Party, supports conservative white politicians, and believes that attempts to foster racial integration in the United States have failed miserably. "White folks don't want integration and black folks don't want it either," Innis maintains.
In the early 1960s Innis' Congress of Racial Equality, under the direction of James Farmer, was a key part of the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins, the 1963 March on Washington, and the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. As a member of CORE's Harlem chapter, Roy Innis concentrated his efforts on reforming the public schools and in increasing economic opportunities for blacks. He became increasingly radicalized by the lack of black progress...