Leading black conservatives lay blame for black America's rampant poverty and other ills squarely at the feet of the socialist orientation of black leaders such as Al Sharpton.

They say the black intelligentsia’s rhetoric has created a defeatist and demoralizing climate that has robbed millions of black Americans of hope and has sentenced them to an impoverished existence.

“One of the tenets of the socialist ideology is to create a welfare state, and that’s exactly what has happened in the black community,” says Florida Rep. Allen West, the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “I like to say we have sort of a reverse plantation going on here where you have people like Sharpton and [Jesse] Jackson trying to make themselves into overseers.”

Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, says Marxists have worked hard to exploit blacks for the past century and divide them from the rest of society.

Socialism has been deeply ingrained in the black community since the NAACP’s founding in 1909 according to the Socialist Party USA.

And NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois later developed an admiration for Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin and even continued to apologize for him even after many other black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison had repudiated their support for the dictator. DuBois even received the 1959 "Lenin Peace Prize" and formally joined the Communist Party USA two years later in 1961.

An affection for socialism also permeated black American culture during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s when artists such as Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson flirted with Stalinism. Robeson won the 1952 "Stalin Peace Prize" and remained an unapologetic defender of the Soviet dictator throughout his life.

Not even legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. escaped being infected by the socialist virus, as evidenced by speeches he gave toward the end of his life. And the Black Panthers, including now-Congressman Bobby Rush looked to Mao for inspiration.

“The biggest tragedy in all of this is that the blacks did not know the poison of socialism and communism,” Innis says. “And they were led to believe it was the only alternative for fighting Jim Crow and pushing back against segregation.”

The black elites’ Marxist dialectic has pit white versus black and rich versus poor, and has disempowered countless black Americans in the process by promoting collective hatred and jealousy.

“It has really hurt the black community because the real uplift in this country is through individual initiative, activity and entrepreneurship,” says Bishop E.W. Jackson Sr., a prominent conservative black minister and Tea Partier. “This mindset that you are owed something and everything has to be the same for everybody is a very dangerous and insidious attitude that has crept into the black community.”

Barack Obama’s 1995 book “Dreams from My Father" illustrates this collectivistic and conformist mindset because the president relates that he chose to associate with “Marxist professors” and discuss the ideas of Marxist thinker Frantz Fanon to “avoid being mistaken for a sellout” while he was at Columbia University in the early 1980s.

Black individualists who resist the Marxist black intelligentsia’s demand for ideological purity face the sort of denunciations recently visited on potential GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain who recently was denounced by blogger Chauncey DeVega on AlterNet as "a monkey in a window".

Marxist dogma says blacks cannot be racists because they lack power; consequently, Sharpton, Jackson and others need to maintain a perception in the black community that they are powerless and and level the charge of racism against opponents because it enhances their power, according to Innis.

“The Marxists are guilty of the charge they often level against capitalists, pro-free market economies and countries, which is divide and conquer,” Innis says. “They are the dividers because through their philosophy and rhetoric they seek to segregate a particular group … and certainly throughout the 20th century, in our country, it was the African-Americans.

“The communists … took a movement that had its roots in pro-free market, free labor … capitalism and totally corrupted it and co-opted it into a communist agenda.”

Innis contends black Americans will find a way out of their current predicament by returning to the individualistic, pro-free market spirit of self-determination exemplified by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and non-Marxist black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington.