Lenora Fulani

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Lenora Branch Fulani (b. April 25, 1950, birth name Lenora Branch) is a developmental psychologist, psychotherapist, and political activist in the United States. She is best known for her presidential campaigns[[1]] and for her work in developing a network of youth programs serving minority communties in the New York City area and other parts of the U.S.[[2]] In the United States presidential election, 1988, she became the first woman and the first African American to achieve ballot access in all fifty states.[3]

The website of Fulani's Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP) describes her as "the nation's leading African-American political independent...a pioneer of left/center/right coalitions and a longtime agitator for black political independence." [4] Her most strongly emphasized political concerns include racial equality, gay rights and for the past decade, political reform. To this effect she has been active both as an independent party leader and as a coalitional partner in a wide array of often stormy attempts at establishing statewide and national third parties.

Fulani's career has worked closely since 1980 with Fred Newman, a New York-based psychotherapist, political activist, and philosopher[5] who has often served as her campaign manager and chief tactician for her numerous independent electoral campaigns. Social Therapy was first developed in the 1970s by Newman, who founded the New York Institute for Social therapy in 1977. Along with fellow psychologist Lois Holzman, Fulani has worked for the past 15 years to incorporate the social therapeutic approach to learning and development into a variety of youth-oriented programs and educational settings, most notably the New York City-based All Stars Project, which she co-founded in 1981.[6][7][8] She currently serves in a volunteer capacity as an advisor to the program.

In 1993, Fulani joined activists who supported Ross Perot for President in the United States presidential election, 1992, in a nationwide effort to create a new pro-reform party, which she has characterizes as both "populist" and one "that could provide African-Americans with an electoral alternative." [9] In 1994 this evolved into CUIP.

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[edit] Early life

The youngest daughter of a registered nurse and a railway baggage handler, Fulani was born in Lenora Branch in 1950. In a 1994 interview with the New York Times, Fulani recounted the loss of her father from pneumonia when she was 12, a death she attributed to a white-owned ambulance refusing to enter the segregated city's African American community. "I grew up in about two hours," she told the New York Times. "I didn't even know the word racism." [10] As a teenager in Chester in the 1960s, Fulani was active in her local Baptists church, playing piano for the chior. In 1967, she received a scholarship to study at Hofstra University in New York, graduating in 1971, and went on to receive a master's degree from Columbia University's Teacher's College and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the City University of New York (CUNY), which she attended in the late 1970s. She was a guest researcher at Rockefeller University from 1973-1977, with a focus on how social environment and learning interact in the educational development of African American young people. While in college, she became involved in Black nationalist politics, along with her then-husband Richard. Both had adopted the African name Fulani at the time of their marriage in a traditional West African wedding ceremony. During her time at City University, she became interested in the work of Newman and Holzman, who had recently formed the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research. Fulani trained at the Institute in the early 1980s, and became active as well in the Newman-founded independent New Alliance Party(NAP). Within a few years, Fulani would emerge on the national scene as the party's most prominent, and often controversial, spokesperson.

Fulani ran for Lt. Governor of New York in 1982 on the NAP ballot line.

[edit] Electoral politics

After running in various New York state elections in the 1980s, she helped to recruit Fred Newman's 1984 presidential candidate, Dennis L. Serrette. Serrette, an African American trade union activist, eventually had a bitter falling out with Fulani, and left the group shortly after the 1984 campaign.[11].

Fulani ran for President in 1988 as the candidate of the New Alliance Party. She received 0.2% of the vote, or almost a quarter of a million votes, and was the first African American independent on the ballot in all 50 states.

Fulani ran as a New York gubernatorial candidate in 1990. She was endorsed by that year by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Both Farrakhan and Fulani have criticized the view that the Democratic Party is the only appropriate political party for Blacks in the United States.

Fulani again ran as the New Alliance candidate for President in the 1992 election, this time receiving 0.07% of the vote. She chose former Peace and Freedom Party activist Maria Elizabeth Munoz as her vice-presidential running mate. Munoz previously ran for the offices of U.S. Senator and governor in California. It was also in 1992 that Fulani released her autobiography, The Making of a Fringe Candidate.

In 1994, Fulani and Newman became affiliated with the Patriot Party, one of many groups that would later compete for control of the Reform Party founded by Ross Perot. She also joined with Jacqueline Salit to start the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, an organization dedicated to bringing various independent groups together to challenge the bipartisan hegemony in American politics. During the 2000 election, Fulani endorsed Pat Buchanan, then running on the Reform Party ticket, and served briefly as a campaign advisor. Fulani later withdrew her endorsement of the Buchanan campaign on the grounds that it had "hijacked" the Reform movement in order to further Buchanan's own right wing agenda. [12] Fulani and Newman then endorsed the Presidential candidacy of Natural Law Party leader John Hagelin, a close associate of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Later, Fulani unsuccessfully sought the Vice Presidential nomination at the national convention organized by a faction of the Reform Party.

In the 2001 election for Mayor of New York City, Fulani and the Independence Party of New York endorsed the Republican candidate, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, once elected, approved an $8.7 million municipal bond to provide financing for Fulani and Newman to build a new headquarters for their youth program, theatre and telemarketing center.

The Bloomberg alliance with the Independence Party in part was the result of New York's fusion rule, which allowed Bloomberg to aggregate his votes on all ballot lines. The 59,000 votes that Bloomberg received on the Independence Party ballot line exceeded his margin of victory over the Democratic (and Working Families Party) candidate, Mark J. Green. In the municipal election of 2003, Bloomberg and Fulani were among those endorsing a proposed amendment to the New York City Charter to establish non-partisan elections. Although Bloomberg spent $7 million of his own money on the project, it was rejected by the voters.

In September 2005 Fulani and other Independence Party members from the New York City chapter were removed from the State Executive Committee of the New York Independence Party. The party's state chairman, Frank MacKay, who had been a long-time ally of Fulani, claimed that the reason was that they had become an embarrassment to the party because of Fulani's public refusal on NY 1 (cable news channel) to repudiate an earlier statement in which she is alleged to have called Jews "mass murderers of people of color." [13] In subsequent interviews, MacKay admitted that he had been aware of the Fulani's statements for many years, but took no action during the time he was closely allied with Fulani.

In the following months, New York Independence Party State Chairman Frank MacKay, citing the "anti-Semitism" allegations, initiated proceedings to have close to 200 Independence Party members in New York City disenrolled from the party. Each case MacKay brought before the New York State Supreme Court was dismissed. In one instance, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman, in dismissing the case, wrote that the charges were "more political than philosophical."[14] Albany Times-Union reporter Elizabeth Benjamin noted that the failed attempt by MacKay likely had the "at least tacit support" of Senator Clinton and New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, who had both accepted nomination to the IPNY ballot line. [15]

Despite the extended media attention given to the above charges, Fulani continued to broaden her grassroots base of support in the African American community in 2005, forming what she described as a "coalition of outsiders" to organize Independence Party support support for the re-election campaign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The coalition was described in local press coverage as consisting of "union officials, clergy, sanitation workers, police officers, firefighters, district leaders and others who work at the grassroots level."[16]. Vocal defenses of Fulani also appeared in the city's Black press; writing in the Amsterdam News, columnist Richard Carter wrote "there is little doubt that the main reason for the negative press, which, by the way, is not unusual for this brilliant, outspoken political strategist, is because she is a strong, no-nonsense Black woman. So strong she makes the city’s political establishment and lockstep white news media nervous."[17]

[edit] Community work

Fulani has worked on a number of community outreach and youth recruitment projects. In 1984, she helped found the Castillo Cultural Center in New York City, which produces plays written mostly by Newman, who describes himself as a "postmodern" playwright. In 1998, Castillo merged with Newman's All Stars Project youth charity. The All Stars/Castillo theater troupe came under fire in 2004 from the Anti-Defamation League for a play entitled Crown Heights, a dramatization of the events surrounding the 1991 riots in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn that occurred after a motorcade of the Brooklyn based Lubavitcher rabbi accidentally killed a 7-year-old Caribbean American child, Gavin Cato. The accident ignited long-standing tensions and feelings of mutual mistrust in the racially polarized community; [18] in the subsequent street violence, an Australian visiting rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed to death by Lemrick Nelson, a 16-year-old Crown Heights youth. Although the fictionalized theatrical production, which featured young African american and Jewish performers, presents both sides of the opposing views within the Crown Heights neighborhood, the ADL charged that the play blamed the riots on the Jewish community.[19][20] Newman has claimed that the production, which featured Fulani in an introductory video segment, is an exploration of the possibilities of transcending the long-standing tensions between Black and Jewish communities in Brooklyn and elsewhere.

The Social Therapy practice undertaken by Fulani and Newman was part of the focus of an extended series on New York City's Time-Warner-owned NY1 News channel that ran during the final days of the 2005 New York City mayoral election.[21]. The report focused on Newman's challenges to American Psychological Association's (APA) guidelines on dual relationships in the therapeutic context, including the those prohibiting therapists entering into sexual relationships with patients or clients, or accepting sexual partners as patients or clients.[22]

In a July 2000 New York Times interview, Fulani was asked to comment on the contention that Newman sees "nothing wrong in sleeping with patients." Fulani replied:

"What he's challenging there is the traditional assumption of how therapy works, that there has to be some distance in order for it to be helpful. And we disagree with that, not just from the vantage point of whether or not you can sleep with somebody you're doing therapy with, but also just in how close and how open you can be. It just gets sensationalized." (Mim Udovitch, "Odd Bedfellows," New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 9, 2000.

There was no mention in any of these reports of any complaints or charges of sexual impropriety ever being filed or alleged in the 30 years social therapy has existed as a therapeutic modality.[citation needed]

In 1987 Fulani and Newman began an alliance with Al Sharpton, marching with him and supporting his position in the famous Tawana Brawley case. For several years, Sharpton and Fulani publicly backed each other on some issues, but Fulani felt betrayed when in 1992 Sharpton ran for the U.S. Senate from New York as a Democrat rather than as an independent. Since then, Sharpton has kept his distance from Fulani and Newman.

[edit] External links


Preceded by
Dennis L. Serrette		 New Alliance Party Presidential candidate
1988 (lost), 1992 (lost)		 Succeeded by
—
Preceded by
Nancy Ross		 New Alliance Party New York Gubernatorial candidate
1986 (lost), 1990 (lost)		 Succeeded by
—
Preceded by
—		 New Alliance Party New York Lieutenant Gubernatorial candidate
1982 (lost)		 Succeeded by
Rafael Mendez
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