Rep. Elijah Cummings Calls Steve Bannon A ‘White Supremacist Type’

Image by Getty Images

By Daniel J. Solomon April 4, 2017

Speaking on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings said that the slain civil rights leader would be dismayed to see a “white supremacist-type person” like Steve Bannon in the White House.

The black Democrat said that King would have been proud to see former President Barack Obama elected president. “But at the same time,” he told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “when we see a guy like Bannon, who is, as far as I’m concerned, a white supremacist-type person, sitting in the White House — sitting in the White House — and I’m paying his salary, I think he would be very disappointed.”

Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, has been linked to white supremacist and white nationalist movements thanks to his role as the former head of Breitbart News, which he once boasted was a “platform for the alt-right.” Recent news reports have also revealed that Bannon reads and admires far-right and fascist thinkers from Europe, including France’s Charles Maurras and Italy’s Julius Evola.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 by white supremacist James Earl Ray, while on a visit to Memphis, Tennessee, where he went to stand with striking sanitation workers.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO