History lesson: Clinton was a terrible president for black people

Pushback with Aaron Maté

At the funeral for John Lewis, former president Bill Clinton disparaged Stokely Carmichael's (later Kwame Ture) leadership role in the black freedom struggle of the 1960s. "There were two or three years there where the movement went a little bit too far towards Stokely," Clinton said, "But in the end, John Lewis prevailed."

Dr. Peniel Joseph, professor at University of Texas at Austin and author of "Stokely: A Life", responds to Clinton's comments and discusses Carmichael/Ture's legacy as a black power revolutionary.

"Bill Clinton was a terrible president for black people," Dr. Jospeh says. "So the disparaging of Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael is really just another example of this kind of racism and patronizing attitude coming from the forces of political reaction that people like Bill Clinton represent." Carmichael meanwhile "exposed the depths of state-sanctioned violence against black bodies in the context of the 1960s, and exposed the moral and political hypocrisy of American democracy and fantasies of  American exceptionalism."

Guest: Dr. Peniel Joseph, Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of "Stokely: A Life" and his latest, "The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr."