Calvin Butts: Extended Profile

By DiscoverTheNetworks.org
2006

Among his admirers, the Baptist minister Calvin Butts enjoys a reputation as a “moderate.” One of the most prominent figures in New York’s black clergy, he is also the president of the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury on Long Island. Butts earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Morehouse College; a Master of Divinity Degree in Church History from Union Theological Seminary; and a Doctor of Ministry in Church and Public Policy from Drew University. He has taught Black Church History at Fordham University and was an adjunct professor in City College of New York’s African Studies Department.

Butts is frequently described as a sensible contrast to polarizing racial provocateurs like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. A trip through Butts’ past, however, suggests that he is hardly an enemy of racial politics, but rather is one of its most consistent, aggressive, and unscrupulous practitioners.

Before finding his calling in the church, Butts, who was born in July 1949, worshipped at the altar of black radicalism. Following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Butts joined several students from his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, in taking to the city’s streets, wherethey firebombed a local business. Today, Butts has restyled himself as a crusader against violence, voicing his opposition to what he denounces as the “offensive” lyrics of rap music. In 1993 Butts even expressed his desire to crush a pile of rap CD’s, music videos, and audiotapes with a steamroller. But while he assails the violence that is glorified in rap music, he remains an unrepentant admirer of militant black leaders like Malcolm X, whom Butts hails as an “inspiring figure.” In February 2005 the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a historic black church of which Butts is the current head, held a special ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination. The host of the occasion, which paid tribute to “Our Black Shining Prince,” was Rev. Calvin Butts.

If this background casts doubt on Butts’ oft-touted credentials as a “moderate,” his long history of indulging in racial politics, precisely of the variety he is said to oppose, does little to redeem it. Since emerging as a leading spokesman for New York’s black community in the 1980s, Butts has seldom hesitated to ascribe racist motivations to his political adversaries. For instance, in 1983, when then-mayor Ed Koch raised doubts about an alleged instance of police harassment in the news, he drew the wrath of the black leadership upon his head. At the front lines of the assault on Koch was Butts, who charged, on no specific evidence, that the mayor was “worse than a racist.” In 1990, during a visit to New York by Nelson Mandela, the city itself was the object of Butts’ scorn, as he pronounced it “one of the most racially divided cities in the world.” Koreans were his targets in 1992. Asked by Essence magazine to articulate his vision for the “collective progress” of the black community, Butts called for “massive civil disobedience,” insisting that “we certainly have to disrupt business as usual.” Venting his anger over the fact that blacks patronized Korean businesses, Butts fumed, “You know black people raise hell and stomp and blow and then three days later they go back to those same Korean stores, go back to the same stores and shop.”

Three years later, Butts directed his ire at Justice Clarence Thomas. As Butts saw it, Thomas, by favoring the conservative politics of the Republican Party, had betrayed the goals of the black community. Thus, in the course of vilifying Republicans on NBC News, Butts directed these words at Thomas: “Yes, Clarence Thomas, you poor confused fellow, you are the enemy, and we are determined to turn you around, and if we don’t, you are leading our country to a racial confrontation that we will all be the poorer for.” But Butts’ dislike of Clarence Thomas was mild in comparison to his loathing of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 1998, Butts not only smeared Giuliani as a “racist,” but also accused him of moving New York “toward [being] a fascist state.”

Butts’s racial mudslinging took a turn for the shrill in 2000, on the heels of several high-profile allegations of racially motivated brutality on the part of the New York Police Department. Among the more notorious remarks made by Butts at the time was his intemperate reaction to the acquittal of the New York police officers who had gunned down an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo. Lawyers for the officers had succeeded in proving that the shooting was the consequence of a tragic misunderstanding. But such a verdict was intolerable for racism-obsessed black leaders like Calvin Butts, who were out to indict the city’s police department for what they claimed was its pervasive bigotry, specifically toward the black community—a charge that was itself unsupported by the empirical evidence, which indicated a precipitous drop-off in the number of police brutality incidents throughout the 1990s.

Butts wasted no time annexing the officers’ acquittal into his self-invented narrative about the racist practices of the New York police. Speaking before his Abyssinian Baptist Church just two days after the verdict, Butts sought to inflame the passions of his congregants. To this end, Butts claimed that he had received a call from a “substantial figure” in the New York business community. That individual, according to Butts, had urged him “to understand that it was a fair trial,” telling him that “most crime is black-on-black crime, and the police have done a lot of good.” Capitalizing on the divisive post-trial atmosphere, Butts said, “At that point, I told him: ‘Go to hell, white man.’” Unwilling to leave it at that, Butts also called for a consumer boycott of white businesses.

Indeed, all throughout 2000, Butts devoted his energies to convincing the black community that it was under siege by racist authorities. “The rope around our necks is gone, but the lynching continues,” went one his more memorably scandalous observations. (Oddly, given his active disdain for New York’s police, in the late 1990s Butts had volunteered to assist in teaching diversity and cultural sensitivity to cadets and officers. Even in this ostensibly well-intentioned venture, however, Butts found a way to stoke racial antagonisms. At one New York hearing on police conduct, he claimed that when he attempted to instruct police officers in the virtues of “sensitivity training,” he was forced to suffer the “abuse of the police officers sitting in front of us who would go to sleep, who would throw things at us, who would laugh, who would say, ‘Yeah, you need to come on patrol with us,’ who would just dismiss it altogether.”)

Nothing in Butts’ recent past indicates that he has moved past his inflammatory approach to race relations. To the contrary, he continues to invoke racism as a means of quashing serious debate. One recent instance was noted by Alexander Joffe in a report for Front Page Magazine. Appearing at a December 2004 seminar called “Confronting Islamophobia,” sponsored by the United Nations Department of Public Information, Butts effectively put an end to any legitimate discussion of militant Islam by asserting that the “racist U.S.” views all Muslims as enemies. As Butts saw it, “whether Muslims like it or not, Muslims are labeled people of color in the racist U.S… . . . they won't label you by calling you a nigger but they'll call you a terrorist.” To be sure, Butts was not wholly silent on the subject of religious radicalism. “I am very aware of Christian extremism,” he stressed at the seminar.

Seen against this background, Butts’ response to the April 2005 death of Johnnie Cochran, the celebrity lawyer notorious for deploying charges of racism as a legal strategy, should come as no surprise. While delivering a eulogy for Cochran, who was one of Butts’ parishioners at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Butts insisted that the deceased attorney “deserves a standing ovation from everybody in this house.”

Butts’ panegyric to Cochran, however, would hardly qualify as his most controversial endorsement. That would be the reverend’s longstanding reverence for the high priest of latter-day communism, and the world’s longest surviving dictator, Fidel Castro. During a 1995 visit by Castro to New York, politicians on both sides of the political aisle, from Bill Clinton to Rudy Giuliani, spurned the Cuban strongman. To remedy what he perceived as the injustice of the snub, Butts hosted Castro at his Abyssinian Baptist Church. Then, in front of a crowd of 1,300—among whose number were several Democratic New York politicians, such as representatives Charles Rangel, José Serrano, and Nydia Velazquez—Butts lavished praise on the honored guest. “It is in our tradition to welcome all who are visionaries, revolutionaries and who seek the liberation of all people,” he gushed.

Unlike many on the political left, Butts’ sympathy for dictators did not extend to Saddam Hussein. All the same, in declaring against the U.S.-led regime change in Iraq (which he insisted was “a question of oil and control of oil”), Butts argued that the United States was not appreciably better than Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Asked during a January 2004 interview whether he agreed that “Saddam [was] a ruthless dictator who murdered his own people,” Butts gave a telling answer. Acknowledging that he did not approve of Saddam Hussein, Butts could not resist adding, “But then we will let our own people die at home because they can’t get decent health care; our own children go uneducated; we’ll keep pushing the tuition for public education higher and higher and higher; we won’t build new schools.” Butts had sung from the same anti-war hymnal in July of 2003, while delivering an address to the Community Development Society at Cornell University. “There are billions and billions of dollars that should be available for community development, but every day there are more Americans dying [in Iraq] and they still haven’t caught Saddam,” Butts raged.

Butts’ solution to the War on Terror, which he outlined during an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, was for Americans to understand that there was “hate at the root of what took place [on 9-11]” and “to fight that hate with love.” Noting that “It may be unpopular to say, ‘let’s love our enemies,’” Butts exhorted Americans to do just that.

Famously well-connected in the worlds of business and politics, Butts has leveraged his influence in the service SUNY Old Westbury since being named the university’s president in 1999. In 2002, Butts invited George Herrera, President and CEO of the United States Hispanic Chambers, for a special “Diversity Conference.” More recently, Butts brought Charles Rangel, the Democratic congressman from New York, to deliver the commencement speech at Old Westbury in May 2005.

In April 2001, Butts had managed to lure a leftwing voice of particular distinction to the Old Westbury campus: President Bill Clinton. Praising the ex-president for consenting to speak, free of charge, at a university fundraiser, Butts underscored what he measured to be Clinton’s accomplishment on the issue of race relations. “Through both his efforts during his presidency and the work of his current foundation,” Butts said, “President Clinton has shown an ongoing commitment to leadership development and citizen service, and to bridging those gaps that divide people from different backgrounds.” It was an achievement of which Butts, with his decades-long history of fomenting interracial friction under cover of “moderate” leadership, had consistently fallen short.

On December 15, 2006, in the wake of a November police shooting that killed a black suspect in New York City, Butts demanded that the city deal harshly with members of the Police Department who he described as "ignorant savages who continue to prey upon our people as if we have no respect by virtue of our humanity or our citizenship." "There are police officers who must be dealt with," added Butts. "They are culturally ignorant and racially insensitive."