Al Sharpton, reconsidered
NEW YORK — “When I was born,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said, “you had all these movements. You had the anti-Vietnam War movement, you had the Panthers, you had King’s nonviolent movement, you had NAACP, you had black power — all this flurry of activity. Then Dr. King gets killed. And what happened? Who won the election in ’68? Richard Nixon.”
“Fast-forward 40 years later,” he continued. “Black president. Black-on-black violence, Black Lives Matter, this, that and the other. All this fussing: Who’s going to do this, and who’s going to do that? Young, old, blah, blah, blah. Who wins? Donald Trump.”
It’s easy for Sharpton to draw a line connecting the two eras: He met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. way back when, and he’s known Trump for more than 30 years. America’s present resembles its past — and that’s why, Sharpton argues, he’s uniquely positioned to take on Trump, whom he considers as great a danger to civil rights as any he’s fought against in his years as an activist.
Sharpton has doggedly agitated for social justice for more than 50 years, organizing, marching and fighting for black people. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown have fueled the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Their cases are in the mainstream partly because their families picked up the phone and called Sharpton.
But these aren’t the things that readily come to mind when people, particularly white people, think of him. He is known best for the worst thing he’s done: His loud support of Tawana Brawley, an African-American teenager whose claims of abuse and rape by a gang of white men turned out to be a hoax.
Sharpton is many things to many people — a freedom fighter, a boogeyman, a racial opportunist, an aging man just hanging on. But he has used his entire career to tell America a story about itself that it does not want to hear: that racism exists today, and is pervasive outside of the Deep South. And he has worked ceaselessly toward two intertwined, impossible goals. First, the demand for equal rights for all. The second is about securing his legacy as the Martin Luther King of the North.
“What I want it to be is I helped urbanize the King movement,” Sharpton said. “I was the one that could bring the King movement into the Northern, urban centers.” But where King’s activism led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Sharpton’s efforts haven’t amounted to national reform.
Sharpton, 63, figured he’d be retired by now. He thought he’d keep his Sunday-morning MSNBC program, “Politics Nation,” and his daily radio show, “Keepin’ It Real.” He said he was ready to name a successor to his civil rights organization, the National Action Network, and the marching, strategizing and agitating that came with it. All that was left to do was build a civil rights museum in Harlem. But riding off into a life of punditry isn’t an option with Trump in office.
“You’ve got to preserve what you’ve got done,” he said. “It will not matter if he revokes the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act of Dr. King. You need to preserve the racial profiling laws, and police reform like stop and frisk,” he continued. “Otherwise, it’ll be a bygone era.”
Now 133 pounds, Sharpton is less than half the man he was for much of his life. His flamboyant conk is now steely gray, slicked back over his thinning crown. He has long since replaced his sweats with bespoke suits.
But the new Al Sharpton is the same person he always was.
Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. was born in 1954 to a middle-class family who had a house in a nice neighborhood in Queens. At 4, before he even knew how to read, young Al began preaching. When he was just a boy, his mother connected Al with two pastors, Bishop F.D. Washington and the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. They called him Boy Wonder, and he toured the country preaching before he was even a teenager. In 1967, Jones introduced the young preacher to a 26-year-old civil-rights activist named Jesse Jackson. Jackson took him under his wing, and Al decided he wanted to spend his life like the men who looked after him, fighting for civil rights in the prophetic tradition of King, who was assassinated when Sharpton was 13.
In 1971, when he was 16, Sharpton founded his first civil rights organization, the National Youth Movement. He met James Brown, who adopted him as his godson in 1973; for most of the next decade, Sharpton was always at the singer’s side. If Jesse Jackson taught Sharpton how to organize, it was James Brown who taught him how to perform.
“I would watch what moves and what songs excited people, and I would take notes,” Sharpton said. “Because you’ve got to keep people’s attention.”
In 1980, Sharpton married Kathy Jordan, one of James Brown’s backup singers. They had two daughters, and he spent much of the 1980s scraping together a living in New York as a minister and civil rights activist.
In the late 1980s, Don King brokered a meeting between Sharpton and Trump with the idea that Sharpton could get James Brown to play one of Trump’s casinos. They boarded Trump’s helicopter, and the three flew to Atlantic City, N.J. “It was probably the most surreal 45 minutes of my life,” Sharpton remembered. “Just two guys talking nonstop, not listening to a word each other said.”
Then came the event that sealed Sharpton’s future. On the night of Dec. 19, 1986, four black men were stranded in Queens when their car broke down. Three of them went looking for help. They stopped at New Park Pizzeria, in Howard Beach, an all-white neighborhood. As they ate, they encountered and argued with some white teenagers, who left and returned with a mob, some wielding baseball bats, who attacked them. One of them, Michael Griffith, was beaten badly and chased out onto the Belt Parkway, where he was struck by a car and killed. White New Yorkers, blind to the city’s racism, were stunned. Mayor Edward Koch called it a lynching.
The next weekend, more than 1,000 protesters marched through Howard Beach. Once the progression made it to New Park Pizzeria, a 32-year-old Sharpton, rotund, with a track suit and a perm, went in and ordered a slice.
“In the biggest metropolis in the world, a black kid is dead because of the color of his skin,” Sharpton said at the time.
In the end, a special prosecutor was assigned to the case, and three white attackers were convicted of second-degree manslaughter.
“Howard Beach was the first public awakening of Northern racism,” Sharpton asserted. “People were in denial before that.”
Just as quickly came Sharpton’s disaster.
In November 1987, a 15-year-old black girl who had been missing for four days was found in a trash bag near her family’s old apartment building in Wappingers Falls. She said she’d been kidnapped, tortured and raped by six white men and left for dead. Her name was Tawana Brawley.
The charges were absolutely shocking, and in the end, they were not true. Sharpton and Brawley’s lawyers were successfully sued for defamation. It could have been the end of Sharpton as a public figure, but he survived.
“Why did I get involved with Brawley?” Sharpton asked rhetorically. “Because I believe the criminal justice system is unfair.”
In 1989, Sharpton was indicted on a charge of stealing a quarter-million dollars from the National Youth Movement. He was acquitted of all charges, but the organization folded. He went on to launch the National Action Network in 1991.
Far from retreating, Sharpton raised his profile. He ran for New York state Senate in 1988. He didn’t even slow much when, in 1991 while leading protests in Brooklyn after a young black man named Yusuf Hawkins had been murdered by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Sharpton was stabbed in the chest. He ran for state Senate again in 1992 and 1994. He ran for New York City mayor in 1997. In 2004, he ran for president. He lost every race.
In August 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Brown’s grandfather called Sharpton.
“What I always say when they say I’m an ambulance-chaser,” Sharpton said, “is that I’m the ambulance. They knew that I would come.”
Trump and Sharpton are linked. They’re both outsiders, New York creations who could not and would not exist anywhere else.
Trump cut the ribbon at Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in 2002, and he attended the convention again in 2006. “We were all right,” Sharpton allowed. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. And now he sees Trump as the threat to not only King’s legacy, but to his as well.
“Fifty years after King was killed, Trump is president,” Sharpton said. “I really am scared that Trump’s going to dismantle all the things we did.”
Regardless of what Trump does, Sharpton will spend the final chapter of his life building a civil rights museum in Harlem.
“There’s a whole lot of civil rights history in the North across the board, black, Latino, LGBTQ , that has not been told,” Sharpton said. There isn’t anywhere for people to visit to learn about the fight for Northern civil rights. “I want to build that landmark and say this has been the struggle in the North. I’m going to build that before I die.”