Photojournalist Askia Muhammad released a photo this week showing
Obama and the controversial Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan,
from Obama’s years as a state senator and the photographer revealed
Thursday that the Congressional Black Caucus had pressured him for more
than a decade to keep it hidden.
Muhammad told the Trice Edney News Wire last week that he believed that
the image “absolutely would have made a difference” in the 2008
presidential campaign had it been made public. .
The image taken in 2005 at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting on
Capitol Hill showed then-Senator Obama, a young Democrat from Illinois,
smiling side-by-side with Farrakhan. Muhammad told Fox News’ Tucker
Carlson that the same day he snapped the photo, the CBC contacted him. .
“A staff member from the black caucus called me and said ‘we have to
have the picture back,’ and I was kind of taken aback. And we talked a
couple of times on the phone after that, and I said ‘Okay, I will give
the picture back to Minister Farrakhan’s chief of staff,’” he said on
“Tucker Carlson Tonight.” .
He added that after he gave the original copy to Farrakhan’s staff, he
kept his own copy but remained quiet. “I gave the original disk to him
and in a sense swore myself to secrecy because I had quietly made a copy
for myself,” Muhammad said.
“It’s my picture, it’s my art, and it’s my intellectual property. I
owned it and I wanted to keep it.” He said the CBC called him while he
was still on Capitol Hill and he believed that it was because “they
sensed the future. Minister Farrakhan and his reputation would hurt
someone trying to win acceptance in the broad cross-section,” he said,
referring to the possibility at the time that the young senator was
being considered for a presidential run. .
Muhammad also said that Obama had, at some point, people from the Nation of Islam working on his staff and in his offices.
