"The Long Sad Slide From Leading Civil Rights Organization to Anti-Black Lives Matter Group"

"In the years preceding Innis’ rise to leadership, CORE played an instrumental role in some of the most storied events in civil rights history. The group partnered with the NAACP to mobilize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, as well as the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi. Many members, both white and black, faced police and vigilante violence. Three young CORE members were murdered by Klan supporters in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Indeed, CORE has been in the news in recent months because of the interest in Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who was a leader of CORE in Chicago in the early 1960s, and was arrested in college for participating in a protest of segregation in Chicago public schools...

In June 1968, a slate of Black Nationalist leaders won election to the leadership of CORE with Innis as the new CORE chairman. Declaring the traditional civil rights era over, Innis changed the CORE constitution to ban white people from the organization, and explained that the change reflected “an era of Black Nationalism.” Innis also called for separate schools for African American children.

As Innis began to openly embrace Black Nationalism, he also began his pivot to the right. Just before he became the national CORE chair, Innis met covertly with Richard Nixon. Innis, according to an account from conservative journalist Robert Novak, worked to align community support for Nixon so he could one day serve as the “President’s man in the ghetto.” Nixon would go on to endorse a vision of “black capitalism.”...

As the years went on, Innis’ political agenda drifted to open support for the Republican Party, and he played a major role in the debates on crime and gun control. He openly campaigned for Ronald Reagan, and ran against New York Mayor David Dinkins for the mayoral Democratic primary in 1993. Also that year, CORE founder James Farmer declared, “CORE has no functioning chapters; it holds no conventions, no elections, no meetings, sets no policies, has no social programs and does no fund-raising. In my opinion, CORE is fraudulent.”...

Over the last 25 years, CORE has morphed almost completely into an organization that lends African-American support to causes linked to its corporate donors. As Mother Jones reported in 2005, CORE took money from Monsanto and mobilized opposition to regulations on Monsanto products. After receiving $40,000 in contributions from ExxonMobil, CORE organized protests in support of ExxonMobil at its shareholder meeting."

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/17/core-went-leading-civil-rights-movement-protesting-support-police-exxonmobil/

I don't know exactly what I learn from this story except to be super skeptical of CORE in the news.