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'The greens want to do right, but they are so wrong'
Meet the Sixties black civil rights activist who now thinks that environmentalism is one of the greatest threats to Africa.

‘We are fighting the same battle, for the liberation of black people. In the past that meant taking on old racists and colonialists – now it means challenging environmentalists too.’

Roy Innis doesn’t mince words. As national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the New York-based black civil rights group founded in the Forties, he has caused a mighty stink with his attacks on greens. Innis thinks that environmentalist thinking is helping to ‘strangle Africa’. He argues that European Union restrictions on the use of the pesticide DDT to combat malaria are ‘killing black babies’; that Western liberals’ handwringing over genetically modified crops and food is ‘holding Africa back’; and that ideas of sustainable development are causing a ‘stagnation in African development’. As you can imagine, he hasn’t made himself especially popular in the process – he’s even earned the tag ‘Uncle Tom’, a stooge for Big (White) Business, from some of the more intemperate greens.

‘Yeah, I’ve heard that one’, he says. ‘I’d like to know where these people were in the Fifties and Sixties when my organisation provided the shock troops on the civil rights battlefield. Look at my work on civil rights and you’ll see I’m the opposite of an Uncle Tom.’

How has the chairman of an organisation whose members confronted the racist cops and KKK members of the American Deep South in the heady summer of ’64 ended up eye-balling greens, those usually well-meaning young trendies, in 2006?...