Students For Academic Freedom

Horowitz Returns to Emory · 16 April 2004

By William T. Corbin--Emory Wheel, 04/16/04

" Malcolm X was a racist," conservative pundit David Horowitz said in an interview with the Wheel Wednesday. "I should've stayed with Martin Luther King."

The one-time Black Panther, whose speech in Glenn Memorial Auditorium yesterday was sponsored by the College Republicans, has spent considerable time on each end of the American political spectrum - but rarely has he staked out a stance in the middle ground. Whether hollering for former President Truman to integrate the military at nine years old in 1948 or speaking against reparations on Emory's campus last year, Horowitz has made his indelible mark on politics as a diehard contrarian.

In recent years, overturning "liberal bias" on college campuses has topped Horowitz's agenda. He stirred up a storm of controversy last year when he and then-President of Emory's Black Student Alliance Candace Bacchus argued over his opposition to slave reparations and his calling Emory students "half-educated" during in the question-and-answer session of a speech and then on his Web site and in the Wheel.

In February, the College Council voted against funding a return visit because the majority of its members felt he had a divisive effect on the campus community. The College Republicans independently raised the money for yesterday's speech.

But Horowitz - one of the most sought-after Republican speakers in America - has an unlikely background for a conservative.

He was born to two high school teachers in New York City in 1939. According to Horowitz, his parents were card-carrying Communists, and he attended "Commie-Camp" during his younger years. His father was fired from his job for maintaining Communist political ties.

Horowitz graduated from Columbia University (N.Y.) in 1959 and went on to live in Berkeley, Calif., where he became one of the founders of the New Left Movement of the 1960s. He described the movement as an anti-Vietnam youth movement against corporatism and the established political system.

In Berkeley, he became the editor of Ramparts, the largest magazine of the New Left. He stayed at Ramparts until 1973, when he met Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panther Party, a progressive, leftist organization of the late 1960s and 1970s with militant tendencies.

Horowitz said he was very taken with Newton and decided to open the Oakland Community Learning Center, an inner-city school for disadvantaged children that was run by the Black Panthers.

But Horowitz broke with the Black Panthers when Elaine Brown took over as their leader in 1974.

"Elaine was crazy," Horowitz said.

Horowitz said he stopped believing in the radical leftist cause when Betty Van Patter, the bookkeeper for Ramparts, showed up dead. He said he still believes Brown killed Van Patter because she "knew too much" about the Black Panthers' activities.

"I lost my leftist faith because I saw that the left were gangsters, and they were killing people," Horowitz said.

This incident marked the beginning of his transition towards conservatism. After retreating into nonpolitical writing for several years, he returned a staunch conservative during Ronald Reagan's 1984 bid for the presidency.

Horowitz reflects on his former liberalism with a mixture of regret and gratefulness for the perspective it later gave him.

"At the time, I thought the more radical, the better," he said. "In retrospect, I regret that."

Horowitz said he believes that his former idols such as Malcolm X were too full of hate and that working for the left exposed him to unnecessary danger.

"I felt I got a woman killed," Horowitz said, referring to Van Patter.

Horowitz's current tour of American colleges resembles, in many ways, the activism of his former protest days. He said continues to rally youth to his cause by taking unpopular stances. Though on the opposite end of the political spectrum for the crowd of activists Horowitz ran with during the '60s and '70s, his current supporters also feel persecuted by others.

Though Chair of the College Republicans Edward Thayer called Horowitz a "real grass-roots activist," critics accuse him of intentionally inviting criticism.

"He inspires and stirs thought," Thayer said. "He's always got something provocative to say."

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