The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has asked Elliot Richardson, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, to reexamine and “take appropriate action” in the case of a $523,000 federal grant to a paramilitary-type group headed by a man the League charges with “professional anti-Semitism” and seeking to establish “a guerrilla army.” Seymour Graubard, national chairman of the League, spelled out the details of the case in a letter to Richardson, the fourth protest made by the League to the department but the first to Richardson himself. The League contends that it is “counter to public policy for government to function through bigots.” The HEW grant was made last January to the Blackman’s Development Center in Washington, D.C. for a remedial education and occupational training program for the disadvantaged–including narcotics addicts. The center is part of a complicated mare of operations, including a “Blackman’s Volunteer Army of Liberation,” directed by Col. Hassan Jeru-Ahmed. The League said the “Army” is in Virginia.
According to the League, Hassan, a 46-year-old black nationalist, who was born Albert Ray Osborne, and is “Minister-General” of an organization he calls the “Provisional Government of the United Moorish Republic,” has a long record of anti-Semitism. He has boasted of “heartening” support from the late George Lincoln Rockwell and the Ku Klux Klan. He has also collaborated with Willis Carto, a known anti-Semite who is leader of Liberty Lobby, a far-right Washington-based propaganda apparatus. Hassan was listed as an “Afro-Adviser” in literature of Carto’s American Colonization Society, a white
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
