Wilbert Tatum’s War on the ADL
The Jewish Attack on Wilbert Tatum and the New York Amsterdam News
In March 1993, news broke that the 80-year-old Jewish “civil rights” organization Anti-Defamation League was actually a den of spies and not a “civil rights” organization at all. Under its leader Abraham Foxman the ADL had spied on some 12,000 or more individuals and 950 organizations and it sold that illegally gathered information to the apartheid government of South Africa, among others. Organizations targeted by the ADL included Arab-American, Palestinian, Native American groups; African National Congress (of South Africa), NAACP, the Nation of Islam; Black Student Organizations, American Muslim Mission, and Black Studies Departments; even Jewish Defense League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Greenpeace were on Foxman’s secret spy lists.
Most major news outlets tried to bury the shocking reality that this illustrious Jewish institution was actually in the business of destroying civil rights. It had made itself a more efficient FBI and clandestinely continued J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious COINTELPRO operation. Only one major newspaper took the ADL and its enablers to task—the New York Amsterdam News. The Amsterdam News was founded in 1909 as a Black-owned and -operated institution, covering news of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and the emerging NAACP. By the 1960s, it had become the premier newspaper covering progressive Black movements, including those led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. In 1996, Mr. Wilbert Arnold “Bill” Tatum (23 January 1933 – 26 February 2009) became its sole owner and publisher.
The ADL spy revelation in April of 1993 happened at a time when several major issues concerning Blacks and Jews were exploding. Black academics Drs. Leonard Jeffries and Tony Martin came under Jewish attack for revealing the extensive Jewish role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The ADL was holding secret celebrations with its employees and supporters, where “blue-eyed teenagers” in white gloves were “suddenly transformed into Black-faced modern minstrels.” Dr. Khallid Muhammad’s Kean College lecture on the same topic created a firestorm. A major protest in Crown Heights in Brooklyn ensued after a Jewish driver struck and killed a young Black boy. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan organized the largest gathering in the history of America, the 1995 Million Man March. All these BLACK issues drew extreme negativity from white Jews—and all of it was covered in the pages of the Amsterdam News.
Throughout the 1990s Mr. Tatum and the Amsterdam News were attacked for effectively covering these and many other Black issues and ideas, some of which conflicted with the “Jewish” point of view. The corrupt Jewish mayor of New York Ed Koch labeled the paper “an anti-Semitic rag,” before his defeat by David Dinkins in 1989. There was a concerted and scurrilous effort on the part of New York’s Jewish-dominated news media outlets to target and destroy the Amsterdam News.
In true Hooveresque fashion Anti-Defamation League leader Abraham Foxman often coordinated the “Jewish” sniper attacks, but Tatum continued to boldly cover the ADL espionage story extensively with a series of front-page editorials. He characterized the Jewish attacks: “[T] he two most prominent Black media outlets in New York, if not in the country…were systematically demonized and ‘anti-Semitized’ by virtually all of the important electronic and print media in town. It happened because we had recognized a truth, had begun to tell it, and thus had to be destroyed.”
Wilbert A. Tatum died, age 76, on 26 February 2009 from multiple organ failure while traveling with his wife in Croatia. This is a collection of Wilbert Tatum’s key editorials and other coverage of the Amsterdam News’ War on the ADL.