Center for New Black Leadership

Washington, DC 20005

From their (now defunct) web site:

The Center for New Black Leadership is a Minnesota non-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation. We commenced operation in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 1995.

The Center for New Black Leadership was apparently started by the Center of the American Experiment, a think tank based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and at least two of its principals -- Mitch Pearlstein, and Peter Bell, who the web site now identifies as a founding member and its current Vice Chairman. Bell delivers a message to web site visitors (Editor's note: Since the CNBL website is no longer operating, we are publishing this former page from it). Bell is also a founder of the Center of The American Experiment, being one of its important Black members.

According to Pearlstein, the Black Leadership center has now been spun off to be its own entity.

STLtoday.com
July 28, 2001

A questionable nominee

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/News/Editorial/673819D05458E41286256A98003E250C?OpenDocument&Headline=A%20questionable%20nominee

"It is unfortunate that Mr. Bush chose someone so blatently hostile to respected African-American groups laboring in the trenches longer than Mr. Reynolds has been alive."

President George W. Bush is nominating the president of the Center for New Black Leadership, Gerald Reynolds, a "38-year-old lawyer with no background in educacation" to be the new head of the U.S. Education Department's office of civil rights.

Reynolds, who is simultaneously the top regulatory attorney for Kansas City Power and Light Co., "doesn't just oppose affirmative action; he abhors it:" Reynolds has written that:

"...affirmative action is "the Big Lie." It is, he writes, "a corrupt system of preferences, set-asides and quotas ... a concept invented by regulators and reinvented by political interest groups seeking money and power." Furthermore, "many of the problems devastating low income black communities are the result of a spiritual decay." Mr. Reynolds would remedy that through school choice programs, faith based institutions, "replacing self-defeating values with middle class values," urban economic development and "opposing the use of racial preferences in education and the workplace."

The Center for New Black Leadership was created as a project of the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiement (CAE), a Republican think tank. It has since been spun off as its own entity, according to CAE boss Mitch Pearlstein. The Republicans think the country needs "new Black leadership" because most blacks - usually 80 percent + - don't vote for them.