Sunday’s Washington Post devoted a front-page article that extended an eye-opening three whole pages to Rev. Al Sharpton, the "carefully cultivated leader of the civil rights movement," and his “private doubts,” mostly about his own legacy, as he ponders the creation of a museum to promote his significance.
Post reporter Eli Saslow chronicled how a haunted Sharpton wonders if he’ll ever measure up to Martin Luther King. This is a little like Pee Wee Herman wondering if he’ll ever be Clint Eastwood.
Except Pee Wee Herman never caused racial riots or foisted racial hoaxes on America. The Post turned to Saslow, the same poet who lovingly described Obama and how "The sun glistened off his chiseled pectorals” on the beach. The beginning was evocative of someone convinced of his own greatness:
Al Sharpton had not made news for 13 hours, and this was cause for serious concern. He climbed into the back seat of his luxury SUV, told his driver to take him four blocks to Times Square and refreshed the news feed on his cellphone. “Seriously? Nothing on Ferguson?” he said. “Nothing about my statement on good policing?” His power depended in part on publicity; the civil rights movement depended in part on his power. He ran a comb through his hair and dialed one of his assistants. “If we lose this spotlight, then our whole opportunity here, our historic moment — it’s dead,” he said.
The car pulled up to a hotel, where a security team greeted Sharpton and hurried him upstairs to a private meeting. The conference room had been arranged to his exact specifications: thermostat cranked high to help loosen his voice, hot tea waiting on the table, Dominican cigars stashed nearby in case there was time for a break. His audience was already seated, and Sharpton took his place at the front of the room. An assistant introduced him as though welcoming a prizefighter.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the leader of our movement, the reason we are all here, a champion of justice, the people’s preacher, the Reverend Doctor Al Sharpton!”
Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a single Sharpton critic quoted in this enormous article, and here is the entire passage of obligatory throat-clearing about his scandalous career, about 20 paragraphs in:
Gone were the sweatsuits, the big hair, the extra pounds and the golden medallion that had been his trademark when he first grandstanded his way into the nation’s consciousness in the early 1980s. He had been so intent on finding a righteous cause during those early years that he had sometimes acted as the agitator, railing against “white interlopers” and Jewish “diamond merchants,” and spending months demanding justice for Tawana Brawley only to have her allegations of gang rape by a mob of white attackers turn out to be a hoax. To much of America, he had seemed nothing like the civil rights giants he often quoted in his speeches — not a King or a Ralph Abernathy or a Malcolm X — but an opportunist who would do whatever was necessary to assemble a crowd.
Oh, and a few paragraphs later, a quick reference (and somewhat dishonest in its quickness) to his massive and chronic problem of paying his taxes:
He built up his National Action Network by soliciting corporate donations from companies such as Wal-Mart, Anheuser-Busch and Macy’s, raising $5 million a year. He decided he needed to connect better with white audiences and studied Bill Clinton and Jerry Falwell. He and the National Action Network began paying down hundreds of thousands of dollars in overdue taxes.
Saslow built him up as a media sensation and “civil rights” powerhouse, never questioning the dealmaking that brought Sharpton to MSNBC (like the Comcast-NBC merger, ahem):
He had always needed an audience — had built one on the streets of New York and grown it over four decades, until finally he had become a fixture of the American news cycle. He had a national radio program, a nightly TV show, a nonprofit social justice organization with active chapters in 38 states and a dozen visits each year to the White House. Now he believed the country was facing a racial crisis of unjust policing, and once again the leader of the civil rights movement had called upon himself to respond. The audience had assembled as his muse. Sharpton alone would decide. The next move was his.
“We are going to be judged by how we respond in this moment,” he told them. “What happened in the era of ‘I can’t breathe’? What happened with Trayvon Martin? I ain’t getting any more famous. I’m in the history books now. Question is, when my moment came, could I get real change? Is my chapter good or bad?”
Most outrageously, as Saslow acknowledged Sharpton had critics – without actually talking to any of them for the record – he somehow conflated Fox News and 1960s segregationists:
“Do you know what time it is? It’s Al Sharpton’s time,” he said, because in fact it was always his time — seven days a week on the radio and the past 850 weeknights on MSNBC, during which time he had never once missed his show, broadcasting it live from 31 cities.
It had been one of the riskiest decisions of his career, joining a media establishment he had long demonized, and even allies such as Jesse Jackson and Cornel West had called him an opportunist and a sellout. But Sharpton considered his evolution toward the mainstream to be a move of strategic genius. “Our adversaries aren’t waiting at the end of the bridge with billy clubs anymore,” he said. “They’re not beating kids in Birmingham. They are firing at us on cable TV.” Fox News had mentioned his name 682 times in December alone, or about 22 times each day, usually preceded by “race hustler” or “racial arsonist.” Now he was equipped with the guaranteed airtime to fire back. Now, when nobody else wanted to cover Al Sharpton’s America, Al Sharpton could....
The radio show was his “unofficial poll on race in America,” he said, which also meant it was often a poll about him. A recent survey had found that 81 percent of Republicans considered him a “negative force,” and Sharpton delighted in repeating the uglier terms they used for him: race baiter, hatemonger, charlatan. But to his radio audience, he was the leader who saw beyond the facade of a colorblind nation to recognize injustice in black and white.
There was in Saslow’s article this whole idea of Sharpton, haunted he wasn’t MLK, and that today’s racism is so much more elusive and “opaque” and harder to protest. Sharpton nursed his "private doubts" as at exclusive cigar bar for rich folk, where an assistant brings him toast from down the street:
Now, by deliberateness or default, he was that guy, the one in front of every march. But Sharpton wasn’t King, and these weren’t the civil rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s. There were no more buses to desegregate, no more Jim Crow laws to defeat. Sharpton’s ascension had come at a time of incremental battles against more subtle and persistent strands of societal racism. The enemy was more opaque, as were the goals, so instead of achieving broad cultural change and earning his own place among the giants of civil rights, he had spent 40 years grinding out the strategy, attempting to bring awareness to one issue after another, from one march to the next....
“We come after a generation that was movement motivated,” Sharpton said. “They started with nothing and took down apartheid, and what have we done so far that compares to that? That bothers me. That haunts me.”
There will be no huge marble statue on the Washington Mall to remember Al Sharpton, and the Post thinks there’s something surprising or lamentable about that. It leaves the odd aftertaste of Sharpton collecting his own mementos for a Sharpton Museum:
Here he was on the cover of the New York Post embracing Obama. Here he was hosting “Saturday Night Live,” eulogizing Michael Jackson and marching with Beyoncé. One day, he wanted to collect some of his mementos into a museum he hoped to build in Harlem, which would tell the story of the civil rights movement after King.
Why would the Post so denigrate the entire “civil rights movement” from 1968 to 2015 by suggesting Sharpton is in any plausible way the most notable leader of that period?
