Cesar Chavez is Not the Only ’60s Leftist Sex Criminal
In recent weeks, another ’60s hero bit the dust. Cesar Chavez, the celebrated labor activist of the National Farm Workers Association, is now being canceled—his name erased from streets, statues removed, and marches in his name called off. Of course, there is a compelling reason for this change, however late it may be in coming and whatever the motives. Being a serial sexual abuser and rapist of underage girls is not a good look for someone purportedly on the side of the powerless.
His fans, however, might wonder why Chavez has been singled out. Particularly when he is hardly the only leftist icon of the ’60s to have had a track record of this kind of criminality and moral turpitude. Even so, those other figures are still recognized as heroes—their biographies taught in the schools without criticism or question. Indeed, at least one of them even has streets, monuments, and a national holiday—his legacy in no danger of being memory-holed anytime soon.
Martin Luther King, of course, tops the list of these offenders. The god of the multiculturalist American left apparently declined to intervene when one of his pals decided to rape a woman. He not only watched and failed to report it to police, but laughed as the crime was being committed. One would think more people on the left would at least be capable of hearing about this without immediately accusing the person mentioning it of being a racist, but that has not been the case. King also reportedly engaged in days-long orgies with prostitutes—at events he organized for African-American preachers—that included perverse sex shows.
But King’s record here is completely eclipsed by that of another black civil rights hero: Eldridge Cleaver of Black Panther fame. Cleaver did a stint in prison for rape before he became a hero on the left. Many on the contemporary left would prefer to hide this fact of his history, but some embrace it as a perhaps unpleasant yet perfectly consistent element of his ideological coming to consciousness. Those who take this position argue Cleaver raped white women as an explicit “political act.” And, in fact, that was his own accounting of his actions in Soul on Ice, a book you can still find on the syllabi of Black Studies courses today. See page 14 in that text:
Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women… I felt I was getting revenge… I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.
(I note as an aside you might be surprised to know how many courses on the Black Panthers are still being taught these days at American universities).
In truth, it should not strike anyone as odd that figures on the radical left, allegedly committed to radical liberation, were capable of committing horrible sex crimes. After all, what is the limiting principle for someone committed to doing whatever feels good to them? Sexual liberation was widely embraced on the radical left in that period, and it should come as no surprise that some took it as far as rape.
Incidentally, it was not just the left’s street activists who were perpetrating such crimes in the 1960s. There were sex criminals among the radical scholars of that era, too. The communist historian Herbert Aptheker, who was invited on a “friendly” visit to North Vietnam in 1965 along with the leftist activists Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, is still lauded on the left, despite the fact that his daughter Bettina revealed at his funeral, and then in more depth in her autobiography, that her father had sexually molested her routinely from the age of about three or four all the way up until she was 13. Roger Wilkins, the civil rights activist who was LBJ’s attorney general, spoke for many on the left when he said of Aptheker: “I hate that it happened, to both of them. But I don’t see Herbert as a monster.”
Condoning such conduct was not confined to American radicals. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the loud-mouthed “Danny the Red” of the May 1968 near-revolution in France who later became a Green Party leader in Germany, openly admitted in his own writing that he sexually abused children in his classroom during his time as a kindergarten teacher. Nothing was ever done to ostracize or punish Cohn-Bendit, and his reputation remains largely untarnished among the European left.
Perhaps it is still early for Chavez. There may yet emerge voices on the left asking us to remember “all the good he did,” as happened for the others I have mentioned here. It is possible that we will be asked to ignore these unfortunate but, as the left often characterizes them, comparatively unimportant crimes he committed. But then again, Chavez had views on immigration that—although not unusual on the left of the 1960s—are now more in line with those of President Trump and, therefore, obviously considered racist. That may be Chavez’s true unforgiveable sin. One could imagine Chavez might be a candidate for rehabilitation and declared “not a monster” were it not for his opposition to illegal immigrants who displaced farm workers. But the left needs illegals now more than it needs women, so this is unlikely.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/cesar-chavez-is-not-the-only-60s-leftist-sex-criminal