Ryan Lochte, the Leo Frank of Rio?

By Dr. Ridgely A. Mu’min Muhammad

Rich little white boy goes down South, commits a crime, then tries to frame the locals. The Northern press jumps to his defense in spite of his guilt and smears the South and its locals, which causes the Southern communities to lose money. This story of Ryan Lochte’s “white lie,” which adversely affected the local economy of Brazil’s Rio during the 31st Olympics, is well described in Tingba Muhammad’s article “How much has Ryan Lochte’s Big White Lie Cost Brazil?” He astutely points out how the negative publicity produced by Lochte’s lie about being robbed at gun point by men dressed as police may have caused many tourists and athletes to stay inside the Olympic Village instead of going out and spending their money and boosting the local economy of Rio.

Remarkably, there are parallels between what happened in South America at the 2016 Olympics and what happened 100 years ago in another “South”—Atlanta, Ga.—when in 1913 a 29-year-old Northern Jewish man, Leo Frank, raped and murdered a 13-year-old white girl and then lied about it and framed two Black men for this “negro crime.” Even after he was duly convicted and sentenced to death, rich Jewish bankers and lawyers from the North used Northern newspapers owned by Jews, such as Adolph Ochs’s New York Times, not only to smear Black men as rapists, killers, and liars, but also to “manufacture” the first case of “Anti-Semitism” in the American South after 300 years of Philo-Semitism, or pro-Jewish attitudes, in the South.

The Jewish people were loved and respected in the South from the beginnings of Black slavery through the Civil War and right on through sharecropping and Jim Crow. In fact The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, volume 1, reveals the Jewish hidden hand behind the slave trade in both South America and North America. Volume 2 exposes the little-known facts that it was the Jews who became the “heirs to the slave barons” of the South after the Civil War, having financed both sides, and that they then set up both the debt-slavery system of sharecropping and the dehumanizing system of the “Black Codes,” known popularly as Jim Crow.

Volume 3 reveals that Jewish bankers, like Jacob Schiff, lawyers like Louis Marshall, and leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise used all types of slander against the primary Black victim of Leo Frank’s frame-up attempt by calling the rape of a white girl a “negro crime,” a crime that could not have been committed by any white man, particularly a “Jew.” Furthermore, they argued, it was blatant anti-Semitism for an all-white jury and judge to accept the testimony of a “negro” against a Jewish white man. There were many other Northern Jews that came to Leo Frank’s defense; however, we draw out these three because at the same time they were arguing that a “negro” down South should not be able to testify against a white man, they were sitting on the board of the NAACP in New York, an organization set up to ostensibly fight for the “social” rights of Negroes. So while they were arguing for the racist status quo in the South, they were luring Blacks to make an exodus from the South to work for white merchants up North, where they could freely and safely fraternize with white people.

29 Black men set up the Niagara Movement in 1905 and stated in their 1905 Declaration of Principles that they “especially complain against the denial of equal opportunities to us in economic life; in the rural districts of the South this amounts to peonage and virtual slavery; all over the South it tends to crush labor and small business enterprises…” These Black men were concerned about and were working on strategies to improve the economic and political life of Blacks in the South. However, one of their founding members, W. E. B. Du Bois, was lured away from the Niagara Movement by a white woman, Mary White Ovington, to join with 300 white “liberals” in New York City to start the NAACP in 1909.

Du Bois was the only member of the original 29 founders of the Niagara Movement to join the white-dominated NAACP. Those early white leaders of the NAACP included wealthy Jewish merchants, rabbis, economists, scholars, and journalists, such as Jacob Schiff, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Julius Rosenwald and Joel Spingarn, who all hypocritically pushed “non-economic liberalism.” Imagine that: wealthy bankers and businessmen set up an organization to help Blacks fit into a “liberal white” environment up North, but not to help them or show them how to establish an economy and make money. At least three of those same white, rich and powerful Jews—Schiff, Marshall, and Wise—petitioned President Woodrow Wilson to sign the Federal Reserve Bill in 1913, using the guilty verdict of Leo Frank in 1913 as a bludgeon. Invigorated by the Frank case, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 1913 until now has used the term “Anti-Semitic” to smear any lawmaker who questioned the legitimacy or efficacy of the Federal Reserve and any Black leader who dared direct his Black people to economic empowerment.

The roster of “black anti-Semites” includes such eminent historical figures as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus M. Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, President Nelson Mandela, and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Booker T. Washington always taught self-reliance, so he was labeled an “anti-Semite.” As long as W.E.B. Du Bois stayed at his desk at the Crisis magazine and just eloquently described the horrors of being Black in America, he was loved by his Jewish handlers. However, when he woke up and questioned the efficacy of “social integration” without economic remuneration, he was labeled an “anti-Semite.” Of course, Marcus M. Garvey, Malcolm X, and The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad were labeled “anti-Semites” from the very start, because they were dedicated to Black economic empowerment. And as long as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was “dreaming” about little Black boys and little white girls holding hands, he was the darling of Jewish philanthropy. However, when he began preaching against economic injustice, then promoted economic boycotts and threatened to bring thousands of people to Washington, DC, in 1968 to get “our check,” he was labeled an “anti-Semite” and white philanthropic money dried up—and he was assassinated.

But now let us explore the biggest and best continuous “anti-Semitic” smear campaign of all time: the ADL’s fight with the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan in the court of public opinion. Whenever Minister Farrakhan would put forward an effort to bring wealth and security to the Black community, the Jews would use the false “anti-Semitic” label to thwart The Minister’s efforts and even get the U.S. government to bow to their wishes. In 1972 the Nation of Islam (NOI) was in Peru bringing millions of pounds of fish from the unpolluted waters of Peru into the United States, and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had warehouses at key points in the country, cold-storage warehouses, where we stored millions of pounds of fish. New York City under the leadership of Min. Farrakhan was the major distributor of the fish. The first year the Nation of Islam was in business, it made a profit of over $22 million, and it got so successful that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a so-called Jew, wrote to the president of Peru and told him that the U.S. government did not want the Peruvians selling fish to the NOI. 

Over the years Minister Farrakhan has established many initiatives that have been sabotaged by members of the Jewish community using this false charge of anti-Semitism. For instance:

• A pact initiated by The Minister and then-NAACP leader Benjamin Chavis between Black organizations and political leaders folded because the NAACP’s funding was threatened by Jewish leaders.
• The $5 million P.O.W.E.R. program loan from Libyan President Muammar al-Qaddafi was deposited in a “BLACK” bank; but the president of the Black bank actually asked The Minister to close out his $5 million account, because it felt threatened by the powerful Jewish banking network.
• The business arrangement The Minister made with Johnson Products to manufacture the NOI’s P.O.W.E.R. personal care products was canceled because Mr. Johnson was threatened with losing access to the Jewish distribution networks for his Ultra Sheen line.
• Candidate Barack Obama—who attended the Million Man March—had to publicly repudiate The Minister in order to be elected.
• Min. Farrakhan is not invited to national Black roundtable events because of fear generated by the false charge of “anti-Semitism,” denying our people true and necessary guidance.
• NOI ministers, for all intents and purposes, are barred from speaking at our universities, disconnecting our youth from the power of the Messenger’s program. “Anti-Semitism” is the motive.
• The highly effective anti-drug “Dope Busters” were denied contracts for security at America’s Black ghetto projects as a direct result of Jewish pressure on Congress.

Even though Black leadership knew the effectiveness of all of the NOI’s programs, they did not say a mumbling word for fear of being labeled as “anti-Semitic.” So this false charge manufactured by the Jewish spin doctors—that originated from their defense of a liar and convicted murderer—has stood in the way of Black economic progress for 100 years. We hope that Ryan Lochte’s lie does not adversely affect the country of Brazil and city of Rio for that length of time.