Franklin Thomas

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Person.png Franklin Thomas   SourcewatchRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(businessman)
Franklin Thomas Ford Foundation.jpg
BornMay 27, 1934
Brooklyn, New York City
DiedDecember 22, 2021 (Age 87)
NationalityUS
EthnicityAfro-American
Alma materColumbia Law School
Member ofCouncil on Foreign Relations/Members 3
Afro-American manager and likely CIA operative. Attended the 1980 and 1990 Bilderbergs as Ford Foundation President. Rockefeller Foundation.

Franklin Thomas was president and CEO of the Ford Foundation[1] from 1979 until 1996.[2] He attended the 1980 and 1990 Bilderberg meetings.

CIA operative

He is mentioned in relation to the suppression of the exposure of Gloria Steinem as a CIA operative;

Gloria Steinem, Clay Felker (publisher of Esquire), and Ford Foundation president Franklin Thomas were among those who threatened to sue for libel if Random House allowed the CIA chapters to be published in the Random edition of Redstockings' Feminist Revolution. At the same time, Newsweek/Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and Warner Communications-a major Ms. stockholder-also complained. The offending chapters were deleted. Thus, Steinem and her powerful supporters successfully used the threat of litigation to exercise prior restraint over publication.[3]

In 1975 Redstocking magazine wrote on his involvement in a false flag/agent provocateur sting operation

Franklin A. Thomas, board member of the Women's Action Alliance and president of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, made his career by preparing the case which led to the conviction in May, 1965, of three men on charges of trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Thomas, a little known U.S. Attorney at the time, was appointed Deputy Police Commissioner in New York City the following October. The Statue of Liberty case was a classic example of a violent action allegedly planned by radicals, but actually conceived and promoted by a police agent provocateur.
James Forman, Liberation Will Come from a Black (11/23/67) stated that "I know this is what happened with the Statue of Liberty case because Policeman Woods was the man who conceived the idea, pushed the brothers into it by making them feel guilty because they weren't militant enough, arranged for the dynamite, took a brother to pick it up, and then testified against them in court. The result was: They served three and a half years, and Woods is still free.[4]

The Ford Foundation, where he was president from 1979 until 1996, has a long history of collaboration with the CIA, including as a cut-out for funding without alerting the recipients to their source.[5]

Early life and education

Franklin Augustine Thomas was born on May 27, 1934, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.[6] After the death of his father, his mother, Viola, an immigrant from Barbados, headed the household, where he was the youngest of six children, as a housekeeper and waitress.[7] Thomas attended the Franklin K. Lane High School. He then graduated from Columbia College in 1956, where he was a star basketball player and the first African-American captain of an Ivy League team. He later graduated from the Columbia Law School in 1963 after serving as a navigator in the Strategic Air Command.[6][8]

Career

Thomas worked as an attorney for the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency (now HUD) in 1963. Thomas was named Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1964.[9] He later was Deputy Police Commissioner in Charge of Legal Matters for the New York City Police Department for two years, starting in 1965;[9] he was the first African-American to hold the position.[10]

Thomas was the first president and chief executive officer of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), a non-profit community development corporation, from 1967 to 1977.[11] His successes at BSRC raised his profile nationally.[12]

After leaving the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, Thomas headed a study of US policy toward South Africa for the Rockefeller Foundation recommending peaceful change. Alan J. Pifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, considered Thomas's direction of the study "brilliant."[8] In 1979, Thomas became the first African-American to head a major foundation when he became president of the Ford Foundation, succeeding McGeorge Bundy.[13] He was chosen out of 300 candidates; he had been a member of the Ford Foundation's board of trustees since 1977.[14] His role came at a time when the foundation had been exposed as a CIA cut-out.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag In 1996, he left the Ford Foundation to concentrate on the problems and opportunities of South Africa as a consultant to the TFF Study Group, which built on his anti-apartheid efforts at the Ford Foundation.[15][12][16]

Other positions

In October 2001, Thomas was appointed the Chairman of the September 11 Fund, which was formed to support the victims, families, and communities affected by the September 11 attacks.[17][18] He held the position until 2004, overseeing the collection of $534 million and awarding 559 grants totaling $528 million.[18]

Thomas was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006.[19]

In their article published in the Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, Fowler, Fronmueller and Schifferdecker argued that Thomas was one of eight Citigroup Inc.[20] directors who was part of interlocking directorates.[21]

Thomas sat on the board of directors of Cummins, Inc., Lucent Technologies, Inc., Alcoa[20] CBS, and PepsiCo, Inc.[22]


 

Events Participated in

EventStartEndLocation(s)Description
Bilderberg/198018 April 198020 April 1980Germany
Aachen		The 28th Bilderberg, held in West Germany, unusually exposed by the Daily Mirror
Bilderberg/199010 May 199013 May 1990New York
US
Glen Cove		38th Bilderberg meeting, 119 guests
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References

  1. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/nyregion/ucla-center-on-police-community-ties-will-move-to-john-jay-college.html
  2. ↑ Joan Potter, African American Firsts: Famous Little-Known and Unsung Triumphs of Blacks in America https://books.google.com/books?id=YcGvB-9FALgC&pg=PA104
  3. ↑ https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00845R000100150006-5.pdf
  4. ↑ Off Our Backs, Vol. 5, No. 6 (July 1975) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25772264
  5. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named petras
  6. ↑ a b https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/30/archives/from-brooklyn-restoration-to-ford-foundation-man-in-the-news.html
  7. ↑ https://people.com/archive/born-in-a-brooklyn-slum-frank-thomas-discovers-you-can-go-home-again-and-fix-it-up-vol-7-no-19/
  8. ↑ a b https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/10/magazine/streamlining-the-ford-foundation.html
  9. ↑ a b https://web.archive.org/web/20151031192810/http://www.un.org/unop/YABFranklinThomas.htm
  10. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/nyregion/ucla-center-on-police-community-ties-will-move-to-john-jay-college.html
  11. ↑ http://www.brownstoner.com/history/walkabout-savin-
  12. ↑ a b https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/us/franklin-a-thomas-dead.html
  13. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/07/04/a-troubled-ford-foundation/7c4fb00d-c50b-47a3-86f8-767dd130c286
  14. ↑ "Heads Ford Foundation".[1] University of Massachusetts at Boston, the Spectator. II (6): 4. February 19, 1979.
  15. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named LAT-Goldman
  16. ↑ https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/franklin-thomas-63-lifetime-leading-change
  17. ↑ http://foundationcenter.org/gainknowledge/research/pdf/911book3.pd
  18. ↑ a b http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/september-11-fund-to-close
  19. ↑ https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Franklin+A.+Thomas&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced
  20. ↑ a b https://books.google.com/books?id=YcGvB-9FALgC&pg=PA104
  21. ↑ http://m.www.na-businesspress.com/JLAE/FowlerKL_Web11_1_.pdf page 26–33.
  22. ↑ {https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/77476/000007747602000026/proxystatement2002.htm
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