And if nothing else, the BLSA boycott has led Dean Vorenherg to announce, in the unusual forum of the summer letter to law students that he has offered faculty positions to two Blacks. Neither Vorenberg nor other Law School officials will reveal the names of these two people, although they say one of the two has accepted the offer.
He says the liberal civil rights establishment--and he counts Chambers and Greenberg among its members--is pushing busing policies on whites and Blacks that neither of them want. "It we could get the civil rights establishment to pay as much attention to getting quality education for everyone as it has paid to these elaborate and unsuccessful busing plans, I think it would be a step forward for everybody," Kenyatta says.
This extreme distrust of liberals may have been the reason Kenyatta ran for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Philadelphia in 1975. At the time, Frank L. Rizzo--whom Kenyatta calls "the George Wallace of the North"--was up for reelection and being challenged by a white liberal state senator, Louis G. Hill, for the party's nomination. Hill was counting on support from the city's Black population to beat Rizzo, and most of the city's Black leaders gave it to him.
Kenyatta did not support Hill, however: he ran for the Democratic nomination himself. The Philadelphia media paid a great deal of attention to his candidacy, in part because he had just completed a highly-publicized citizens' campaign against a "Black Matia" drug ring in the city. Although Kenyatta says he entered the race because he did not think. Hill was really any better than Rizzo, critics have accused him of deliberately splitting the Black vote so Rizzo would win. But Kenyatta denied and continues to deny that he made any deals with Rizzo in exchange for his protest candidacy. Party leaders passed up many good Black candidates for Hill, he says.
One reason for this accusation of collusion lies in the fact that two of Kenyatta's friends were given city jobs by Rizzo. Wycliffe Jangdharrie was appointed to a $19,500-a-year patronage job and Wilmer B. Woodland became a $21,500-a-year special assistant to a gang control program. Personnel records on Woodland are not available, but Jangdharrie was appointed just two months before Kenyatta decided to run for mayor and terminated within a year of the primary. Kenyatta says Woodland was appointed at the beginning of Rizzo's term and adds that Jangdharrie counseled him against running in the primary.
Hill remains bitter towards Kenyatta even seven years after the campaign He notes that, though he has run against many candidates, he felt that in particular he could not trust Kenyatta. Now a judge on the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. Hill says that during the campaign he felt that his opponent was running simply to help Rizzo, who was later implicated in an anti-Black police brutality scandal, win. Today, Hill feels Kenyatta ran because "he is interested in promoting himself, however the chips may fall."
Whatever his reasons for running, Kenyatta did not have much of an effect on the race in the end. Except for his influence on the Hill campaign, which spent a great deal of time trying to discredit his candidacy, he left little mark on the election. Even in Black wards, Kenyatta picked up so few Black votes that the Philadelphia Inquirer termed his candidacy "inconsequential" and Rizzo easily won more votes than all his opponents.
Although some Philadelphia political leaders may doubt Kenyatta's dedication to civil rights, at least the FBI did not doubt his potential for causing racial trouble in 1969. In April of that year, three FBI agents sent a phony threat letter to Kenyatta while he was at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, working with the Jackson Human Rights project. The letter--which was signed by the "Tougaloo College Defense Committee" and approved by FBI headquarters under the bureau's Counter-Intelligence Program against "Black nationalist" groups--stated that the group disapproved of Kenyatta's activities at Tougaloo. "You are directed to remain away from this campus," it told him.
It also warned Kenyatta that, if he did not take the group's advice, they might "take other measures available to us which would have a more direct effect and which would not be as cordial as this note."
The FBI memorandum asking for approval of this letter speculates that the letter would give Kenyatta, then Donald Jackson, the impression he had been discredited on the campus. The memo adds that it might also cause him to return to Pennsylvania, which he did within a month of receiving it. Now, he is suing the three FBI agents responsible.
The government claims that the letter was not the reason Kenyatta left Tougaloo. Gordon W. Daiger, the Justice Department attorney who is representing the three agents, contends Kenyatta left Tougaloo for other reasons, including the opportunity to work with a new civil rights group in Philadelphia. According to lawyers on both sides of the ease, the suit, which was filed in 1977 should come to trial within six months.
Kenyatta is sure he is as dedicated to civil rights now as he was when he was a student at Tougaloo. Although others may think differently, he does not think anything in his past or present is inconsistent with his support for minority issues.
"For some people, the issue regarding Black oppression in this country is an issue of finding a good master versus a bad master," he says. "My perspective is that... it doesn't matter whether [the master] is Simon Legree or James Vorenberg.... I want to be the master... I want our people to be the masters of their own fate."