Why Did the Congressional Black Caucus Condemn William Lawrence?

Short answer: The Congressional Black Caucus's affiliated PAC condemned Michigan congressional candidate William Lawrence over resurfaced 2024 podcast remarks calling some older Black Democratic leaders "a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power" whose loyalty to the party "defangs the white left." The twist: Black leaders and voters in his own district backed him anyway — which is why the real question isn't about one white progressive. It's about who speaks for Black folks, the institution or the people.

• Read the transcript

  But when a white boy says loyalty is a scam, suddenly it's a conversation. So we're going to jump into this next segment, this news segment that we're calling In The Streets, which is essentially what you guys are talking about - politics and news that we're covering. So we've got a letter here that's actually a very interesting one and I want to make sure to get my brothers' input on it. All right. What's good, fellas? First off, I'm probably not your typical write-in. I'm 41. I run my own logistics company outside of Charlotte. I go to church and I voted Republican in three of the last four elections. I still ride with y'all because you're the only show that'll actually sit in the discomfort instead of running from it. So sit in this with me. There's a white boy running for Congress in Michigan named William Lawrence. Progressive, Sunrise Movement co-founder, the whole Bernie starter pack. Back in 2024, a tape came out of him on his own podcast saying older Black Democratic leaders are, quote, a pillar for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power, and that our leaders backing the Democratic machine defangs the white left. Then he says it gets us every single time. That's what this dude William Lawrence said. Now watch what happened next, because this is the part I can't stop chewing on. The Congressional Black Caucus condemned him, but then a bunch of actual Black leaders and voters in Michigan turned around and said he had a point - even cut ads defending him. Same week, AOC shows up at a rally in Lansing and pointedly leaves him off the stage. Here's where I'm going to lose half of your audience. I think the man is right. I think it took a white progressive with nothing to lose to say the quiet part out loud. Our leadership has been renting us out to the party for 50 years for community seats and a good speech at the convention. And what did the district get? I left that plantation and everybody acts like I lost my mind. But when a white boy says loyalty is a scam, suddenly it's a conversation. So let me put it to all three of y'all, because I trust you three to go back and forth on it. Is Lawrence telling a truth our own leaders won't? Or is it just easier to swallow the critique when it's not coming from inside the family? If Black voters in his district are defending him while the CBC torches him, who actually speaks for Black folks - the institution or the people? And the one I really want all three of you to sit with: is a party taking a bloc of voters for granted the same thing as that bloc having leverage, or have we confused being needed with being valued? I already know at least one of y'all is going to be ready to call me a sellout. Whichever one it is, tell them the drive-thru is still open. Marcus from Charlotte. Well, Concord, but nobody knows where that is. So, does Marcus have a point? Is the Black political leadership class selling out the Black voting bloc? I'ma let Krush go first and then I'ma throw it to El. I mean, no leader is above critique. And it is hard not to see Mr. Lawrence's point to a certain extent historically and looking at the results. And in regard to the voters in Michigan, they're more than tied to their voice, and their perspective is for me more valuable in this situation. I would say yes, in general there has been a selling out of sorts, without any true material change. Go ahead, El. First off, to my guy - Marcus, I don't think you're a sellout. I don't think you're a sellout because you're a Republican. I don't think Black Republicans are sellouts. I don't think your political party is a designator of whether you are an ancestral traitor or not. I don't want to give you that impression. Also, I want to correct you on one thing. Black leftists have been calling out the Black Democrats and the Democratic Party for years. That's one of the reasons why on this particular show many people have often called me a sellout, because of how hard I go against the Democratic Party. And particularly when I go at the CBC, people really get upset. So I think there is critique taking place within the Black community even more now, my guy - even more now against the Democratic Party than ever before. I have never seen this much criticism toward the Democratic Party. And I'm talking about from that older generation. We're starting to see more criticism from the older generation of Black Democrats. And I think it has a lot to do with the echoes of young people screaming about Israel rising up, and they're starting to hear that. So I don't have an issue per se about what Lawrence said, but I think within our community what you're seeing with the CBC and others is that white people are not allowed to speak bad about Black Democrats. If you do that, that's supposed to be a strike against you, a mark against you. I have been paying attention to what Lawrence has been doing in Michigan. I got some folks out there who have been paying attention to him. I think the criticism, while it is fair, I think they're turning it into something bigger. Criticism is not something that leaders should avoid. He's faced the criticism. He said it. He said that his progressive politics came from the Black liberation struggle. He did say that. So I don't have an issue per se about him criticizing the Black Democratic Party. I think the Black Democratic Party should be criticized. And let me be clear - not just the Black Democratic Party. The Democrats in general should be criticized. I don't want to say just the Black Democrats, because it's not a Black party. Democrats in general should be criticized for a host of things. We can go from how they handled COVID, to the election, to their messaging, to how they've supported some of their own more progressive candidates, to how they've begun to speak out against some of the DSA-led candidates like they're some of the biggest opponents of these DSA progressive candidates. So I think it's fair to do that. So I am in large support of the criticism toward the Democratic Party, and I think what Lawrence is trying to do is great there in Michigan, a state that has largely been fighting over who's going to be dominant there, which party. So I think it's great and I'm with you. I think it should be fair to criticize him. And I don't care about you being a Republican, my guy. At least in the letter, he ain't saying anything wrong. We are in need of political refinement. There are political conversations that need to be had. For the longest time, the church and the Democratic Party were two entities that you were not allowed publicly to criticize. And that's where we find ourselves. And I think often enough, especially on this show, because we don't typically - though we may align more left - we don't fall in line with the typical or stereotypical belief of what a Black voting person should think, say, or look like, because there's no clear line. There can't be. But at the same time, when you start to put these constraints on what a Black voter should be thinking and doing and the line they should be toeing, you're just looking at machines, and you're taking the willpower, the will, away from the voters. Every single politician - their number one job is not to be a celebrity. They're not beyond critique. The responsibility of any politician is to manage our rights and resources. Period. Point blank. End of story. There's nothing else to that. And if you're going to put your faith in someone to manage your rights and resources, they shouldn't be above critique, especially the Black leadership class whose primary job it is to galvanize Black voters when the time comes to vote, to say that these are the issues of import. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges that we have. Far too often in this political sphere, we allow the Black leadership class in the Democratic Party, or anywhere for that matter, to tell us what the issues of importance are instead of us telling them what the issues of importance are to us. It's one of the reasons why somebody like Hakeem Jeffries can go out there and say, as a representative of the Black leadership class, that he's still going to continue to support sending money to Israel. It's one of the reasons why you have people like Van Jones going out there talking about DSA and progressive Blacks and all these other things, because they're not hearing that the people are saying something different, and I think some of the gripes that we have are getting lost in the echo chamber. El did say something very poignant though. Far too often - and I think it's because of our elders in the Black Democratic Party, and I say Black Democratic Party specifically - is why we are so closely aligned with some of these white neoliberal talking points and beliefs, because they've found a home in it. They found camaraderie, and they believe that these people are genuine in the belief of the movement, and in many instances they are not. So I don't know how we battle showing reverence for the elders that are currently still in the political system and at the same time get them to recognize that the wave is changing, and that these white neoliberals don't have all of the answers, and we need to start figuring out ways to disalign ourselves from some of these viewpoints that they keep showing up with. And there's a romanticizing that takes place of the Democratic Party from our civil rights generation Democratic Party members. And I think that's the part that is really a struggle. It's difficult for folks who are in a perpetual state of survival mode to let go of the thing that helped them survive in tumultuous times. And during the civil rights movement, there was a Democratic Party that was wildly different than the Democratic Party that we have today. The Democratic Party that we have today largely is pro-capitalist, pro-imperialism, pro-Israel - pro all of the things that young people, and not even young people anymore, are against. As I stated earlier - the CNN report we saw the other day, where they were talking about the number of people who said they were against the United States giving Israel aid, wanting to reduce the aid or end the aid. The numbers were so large. It was across age. It was across college graduation. It was larger than anything they had seen in years. And I think that's what we're beginning to see. And I struggle with understanding why the Democratic Party has not capitalized off of these things that they're seeing. They're not listening right now. The messaging could not be clearer. I want to also say that the numbers that we're seeing now, that increase - somebody can correct me if I'm wrong - but they seem to also parallel the number of Black people that are leaving the church as well. That's a whole other conversation. I just want to make sure it's noted that it's not just Black men now. We're talking about Black people in general leaving in record numbers. And they also have a marketing problem. For the longest time the marketing was "Jesus saves." Well, there are a lot of people still saying they're waiting to be saved. The Democratic Party is not in alignment. The church has bad marketing too. Hell is not the thing that's driving people into church anymore. It's not fire and brimstone, and the prosperity gospel - people heard too much about that when they saw all these pastors and the Rolls-Royces. That was bound to run out.

What Lawrence actually said — and where

William Lawrence is a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement running as a Democrat in Michigan's 7th District, a genuine toss-up currently held by Republican Tom Barrett and one of the party's best pickup chances in 2026. This summer HuffPost surfaced audio from a 2024 podcast conversation with a Black anti-war organizer in which Lawrence described some Black political leaders as "a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power" that "defangs the white left." Lawrence says the clip misrepresents his position, apologized for how he put it, and has pointed out that his own politics came out of the Black liberation struggle.

Why the CBC came down on him

The CBC's PAC called Lawrence a national disgrace and told anyone supporting him to denounce the remarks and withdraw. A CBC-aligned group, the Rolling Sea Action Fund, put the quote in radio ads and tied him to Trump's 2024 win in Michigan. Then follow the money: Democratic Majority for Israel is behind a roughly million-dollar push against him, routed through that same PAC. So the "he disrespected Black leaders" story and the "he calls Gaza a genocide" story are riding the same rails. For a primer on how outside money reshapes a race that was never about you, see the billionaires buying Texas elections.

Black voters in his district didn't flinch

Here's the part most national coverage skips. While the CBC condemned him, local Black leaders in Michigan publicly backed him up, and Black residents in the district largely agreed with the underlying complaint — that some of their representatives are more loyal to the establishment than to the people who send them there. Krush put it plainly on the show: no leader is above critique, and the voters closest to the seat have the most standing to judge it. The institution issued a statement. The people issued a rebuttal.

Criticizing Black Democrats is not a white invention

Big El's correction matters here. Black leftists have been making this exact argument for decades and catching hell for it — he's been called a sellout on this very show for how hard he goes at the Democratic Party. What changed isn't the critique, it's the messenger. And be precise about the target: there is no "Black Democratic Party." The Democratic Party as a whole earned this — on COVID, on messaging, on how it treats its own progressive candidates.

A politician's job is to manage your rights and resources

Big O's frame is the useful one. A politician's number one job is not to be a celebrity. It's to manage our rights and our resources. If you hand someone that, they cannot be above critique — least of all the leadership class whose whole function is to tell Black voters which issues matter at election time. Too often it runs one direction: they tell us what the issues are instead of us telling them.

Is being needed the same as having leverage?

That was the sharpest question in the letter, and it's the one worth sitting with. A voting bloc a party can't win without is not automatically a bloc with power. Being needed and being valued are different things — one gets you a speech at the convention, the other gets you policy. The hosts pointed to recent national polling on U.S. aid to Israel where opposition has climbed across age and education while leadership hasn't moved. When the numbers shift and the leadership doesn't, that's not a messaging problem. That's a leverage problem. It's the same question we asked in Black and Latino tensions and in Would You Erase Obama to Stop Trump?

So who speaks for Black folks?

Nobody — and that's the honest answer. There is no single Black political line, and the moment you insist there is one, you've turned voters into a machine. The steelman for the CBC is real: a white candidate generalizing about Black elected officials while asking Black voters to send him to Congress is a fair thing to object to, and in a toss-up seat a fractured party can hand the seat right back. But condemnation is not a substitute for the conversation. Critique is not betrayal — not from a Black Republican in Concord, not from a white progressive in Michigan, and not from you.

Watch the full conversation above — the debut of our new In The Streets segment — and if this is the kind of talk you want more of, become family.

Informed. Intelligent. In The Black.