Season 5, Episode 10: Cornel West on Julian Assange

In this episode, we continue our focus on the ominous, Kafkaesque US legal onslaught on journalist Julian Assange with the nation's foremost civil rights leader/activist, author Dr. Cornel West. The Union Theological Seminary Professor West lauds Mr Assange as a courageous revolutionary truth-teller and places his daring, explosive revelations in an historical context.

Mr West draws a compelling comparison between the vicious persecution of Assange to past journalists of conscience who risked their freedom and lives for simply exposing crimes and corruption committed by the powers that be. Most notably, West recounts the murders of abolitionist writers Elijah Lovejoy and David Walker.

Professor West ponders the long suppressed true story of the 1921 massacre of 1000s of black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, commonly referred to as Black Wall Street, and what might have happened if a Julian Assange type had been around at the time to dig through the rubble and make make the info available to the public.

Dr. West visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2013 and fondly recalls their conversations on history and politics and the life and of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Professor West laments Black leaders and media personalities who have turned their backs on the Wikileaks founder, comparing them to many prominent Black liberals in the 1950s who ignominiously lent their voices in support of the Cold War and US imperialism.

In addition Professor West walks us through his early years as a young high school activist in his hometown city of Sacramento California, his admiration of civil rights attorney William Kunstler, and on 20th century leading Black leaders and activists such as W.E.B Dubois, James Baldwin and Paul Robeson. Throughout this fast-paced 40-minute interview, Dr West, as usual, is powerful, profound, proactive, persuasive and poetic.