The Reverend James Bevel accused of raping daughter as part of “religious training”
The Reverend James Bevel, a confidante of Martin Luther http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4080 theorist Lyndon LaRouche, has gone on trial on a charge of incest involving his daughter, one of the 17 children, nine of them female, he has by four wives.
The most serious abuse allegedly occurred between 1992 and 1994 when the victim was 13, 14 and 15 years of age. The alleged victim testified that her father molested her about ten times per year, and that sexual contact had begun when she was six. She also allegedly witnessed widespread sexual activity in the Bevel household, which was run along http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4107 lines.
Three other daughters also allege that Bevel, who insisted on being called either “Rev” or “James” by his children, molested them. Prosecutors claim that they have a tape of Bevel admitting to the crimes, but his court appointed lawyer alleges that the 2005 recording actually exculpates his client. Bevel himself vehemently denies the charges, saying that “if I did any of these things she says I did I’d walk up to the prison door, knock on it, and demand to be let in.” At 71, Bevel faces an effective life sentence of twenty years in prison if he is convicted.James Bevel has been hailed as a “civil rights icon” for his lifelong career in the movement. He was an early organizer of the “Freedom Riders” movement, as well as the “Children’s Crusade” and other stunts abetted by the mass media and designed to garner sympathy from liberals and Northern whites. Bevel’s organizing was often deliberately provocative in the hopes of provoking Southern whites into violence. In 1965 Bevel arranged two funerals for black rioter http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4081, who was killed when he attempted to seize a law enforcement officer’s sidearm. The funeral led to the “Bloody Sunday” march that ended in violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, an event that received widespread, one sided media coverage. (An officer involved in the Jackson killing, James Fowler, is now being retroactively prosecuted by a grandstanding local black DA.)
Bevel was also present at the scene when Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, but subsequently lost out in the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4079 groups, to which he would lend his name in exchange for recognition.
One such group was the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1653 Sun Myung Moon, who claims to be the Messiah, and whose wealth helped him to forge important connections in Washington.
But Bevel is probably best known for his connections to Lyndon LaRouche, a former http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=655 to battle Reconstruction. In LaRouche’s strange world view, the KKK is a front for forces behind the Anti-Defamation League of today, which LaRouche claims plots to exterminate Jews and blacks. LaRouche’s complicated conspiratological calculus puts the ADL in bed with “white supremacists,” marijuana legalization advocates, ecologists, vegetarians, Stalinists, Papal factions and rock stars against LaRouche’s “humanist” coalition of “Golden Souls.”
That same year, Bevel ran for Vice President on the LaRouche ticket, a campaign LaRouche carried out from behind bars. LaRouche had drawn the attention of the ADL, who called him an “anti-Semite” despite his large number of Jewish followers, and he claims that the ADL engineered his imprisonment for white collar “boiler room” crimes, involving unethical fundraising techniques. In fact, Bevel’s ally Moon (described by LaRouche as a “sex cultist” because of the weird sexual teachings of the cult) was also jailed on similar financial charges in a case denounced as political even by US politicians. No doubt a similar line of thinking is at work concerning the Bevel prosecution among his allies. Certainly a man with allies like ex-cons Sun Myung Moon, Lyndon LaRouche and Louis Farrakhan has a lot of enemies.
Considering Bevel’s recent charge, a column he penned for Farrakhan’s Final Call newspaper sounds prophetic: “No Black man wants to acknowledge sexual addiction. In fact, a few years ago no Black man wanted to acknowledge that the disenfranchisement of Black people was due to the sins of the Black man.”