Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  At rallies and picnics Sharpton will stick to his own small entourage—usually Marjorie Harris-Smikle, the head of his National Action Network; Eddie Harris, a filmmaker (and Marjorie’s brother); and one or two local contacts. No socializing, no pressing the flesh, no dialogue with actual voters. His campaign workers have asked him if he’s afraid of people, or whether he even likes them. Sharpton dismisses such questions as criticism, which he does not take well. A veil of scorn descends over his face, and he turns away.

  “It’s just not in my personality construct to worry about others’ reactions,” he told The Christian Science Monitor last year. “It’s kind of hard when you’ve been marching to your own drummer all your life, to start listening to other beats now.”

  Sharpton has been somebody since he was a child. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, he earned small-time fame as a wunderkind preacher. After his father, Alfred Sr., walked out on the family that same year, Sharpton started aggressively seeking father figures or mentors—some of whom, including Jesse Jackson, have on occasion resisted his embrace. On the list are his childhood pastor, Bishop Frederick Douglass Washington; the soul singer James Brown (whose hair inspired Sharpton’s startling do); the boxing promoter Don King; and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a skirt-chasing, high-living former Harlem minister and Democratic congressman—who, Sharpton says admiringly, once told the interviewer David Frost, “I’m the only man in America, black or white, who doesn’t give a damn about what people think.” Of all his acknowledged role models, Powell is the one about whom Sharpton is most enthusiastic.

  It’s an old loyalty, and reveals Sharpton as what few people recognize him to be: an anachronism. Powell was one himself. Even at his height, during the 1950s and 1960s, he was more like a character from the glamorous Harlem Renaissance of the Roaring Twenties, with his fine suits and immaculately groomed straightened hair. He certainly did his part for racial empowerment and social reform, but with Powell there was always the sense—which he encouraged—that ultimately he was in the game for himself. He was slick in an era of moral piety, an individualist during a broad awakening of racial identity, an establishment figure (albeit a rakish one) at a time of social rebellion. Sharpton attached himself to Powell when other young black men were drawn to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

  “Adam had a defiance and self-confidence that were very appealing,” Sharpton told me that day in June, before launching happily into the story of how, as a boy, he had gone with his sister to hear Powell preach. He was so taken with Powell that he dragged his sister with him back to the pastor’s office, and demanded to be seen.

  “Who should I tell the pastor is calling?” Powell’s secretary asked.

  “Reverend Alfred Sharpton,” the boy said.

  It turned out that Powell had heard about the World’s Fair boy preacher. “He said, ‘Let the kid ride with us,’” Sharpton recalled. “We went to Times Square and Sardi’s Restaurant. I remember sitting at Sardi’s with Lucille Ball at the next table. I felt like I was in a different world.”

  Latching on to Powell may have been a bold political move for Sharpton (his first mentor, Bishop Washington, was a Republican), but to the budding black revolutionaries in the schoolyard, Sharpton was a joke.

  “This was in the days of the Black Panthers,” he said. “We would have debates over tactics for the movement. I was always into nonviolence and integration. They used to call me Booker T. Bellbottoms.”

  His schoolmates saw him as a throwback then—and despite all the changes in the world and in him since then, he remains one today. He is a man with a megaphone, standing on a street corner trying to whip up enthusiasm for a protest march that ended thirty years ago. His pitch is pure nostalgia. His campaigns against police brutality have scored some important points in the struggle against the abuse of power, and have illuminated the risks inherent in arming some men and giving them the right to arrest and subdue others; but they no longer strike a deep racial chord in a country where the police chiefs of major cities are as likely to be black as white, and where the officers accused are often the same color as their victims. In 2003 Sharpton embarked on an ultimately futile “mission” to war-torn Liberia that echoed the naively romantic pan-African dreams of the sixties; he got only as far as Ghana before belatedly (and wisely) realizing how dangerous Monrovia was (and besides, no pilot would take him). His goal of uniting the fractious leftist fragments of social discontent in this country into a coherent political movement is the old pipe dream of post-Vietnam social revolutionaries, abandoned as impractical by the Democratic Party twenty years ago. Sharpton’s political program is a fairly straightforward call for the redistribution of wealth, right out of the socialist movements of the early twentieth century. His five-year, $250 billion federal plan to “rebuild the nation’s infrastructure,” and his national health-care system, ignore ballooning deficits and widespread public disenchantment with huge federal spending programs—not to mention the disastrous history of such socialist schemes worldwide.

  Rip van Sharpton is fighting wars already won. He said that he was running so that the voices of black Americans would be heard; but today—compared with 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed—there are four times as many African-Americans in Congress, three times as many in state offices, and twice as many in local positions. And those numbers don’t include blacks in appointive office. When Sharpton piously hopes that his candidacy will show black children that they can imagine themselves in the White House someday, he forgets that black candidates have been running for president in every election cycle for the past twenty years; that the secretary of state, fourth in line for succession to the Oval Office, is Colin Powell, a black man; and that President Bush’s national security adviser, one of the most influential figures in America, is Condoleezza Rice, a black woman. America has a long way to go before it is color-blind, but some of the important battles have been won.

  As Sharpton hurried away from his rousing speech at the Take Back America conference that day last June, I tried to put my finger on what impression he had made. The words that came to mind were “blast from the past.”

  THE RACE MAN

  Lloyd Hart, the spellbound Martha’s Vineyard activist, had a good idea for how to raise campaign funds. He knew that among the well-to-do who summer on Martha’s Vineyard are a substantial number of successful African-Americans from all walks of life, including the film director Spike Lee, the Harvard professor and author Henry Louis Gates Jr., the NAACP chairman Julian Bond, and Dave Mays, the CEO of the hip-hop magazine

  The Source.

  On August 8, Hart threw a party for Sharpton at Spike Lee’s summer house and invited all the prominent black vacationers on the island.

  “I mean, I figured if Al could crack this nut, it could be huge,” Hart said. “This group that summers here is significant. They have the means, and the clout. So I approached Spike, and he agreed to host it.” But the plan proved harder than Hart had imagined.

  “Getting these people to turn out for Al was like pulling teeth,” he said. “People were very skeptical about his run.”

  Among those who attended that evening was Elijah Anderson, a noted sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Streetwise and other books about black urban culture. “I had never met Sharpton before that night,” Anderson told me. “Previously I was not a fan, but I went because I was curious. Cornel West was supposed to be there, and a lot of other interesting people. They asked me to go on TV, to in effect be one of his sponsors, but I declined. I went because I wanted to see who else would turn up and support him. It was a mixed crowd, mainly white liberals, but there were a significant number of black people…people who were down with the community, but well-heeled.”

  Sharpton had high hopes for the party. These were people with deep pockets. Even if they gave only halfheartedly, he figured, it ought to add up to as much as $50,000, which his already debt-ridden campaign badly needed. After Sharpton gave
his pitch on the lawn outside Lee’s house, arguing that he could inject issues into the 2004 campaign that white candidates would not, people did pull out their checkbooks and wallets.

  “This guy was not going to get a lot of support,” Anderson said. “But most of us there decided he deserved to get some. I was surprised at how articulate he was, and who else was going to raise issues of importance to black Americans, such as the overwhelming number of young blacks in prison? This was an argument even those uncomfortable with Sharpton could buy—that and the fact that he was not going to be even close to a serious candidate. So most people kicked in something for his campaign.”

  Hart considered the party a rousing success. Watkins was disappointed. They’d raised a total of $8,000.

  Sharpton’s fatal problems as a presidential candidate, which became more apparent in the following months, are both general and specific. The general problem is that he is seeking a role in American life that is long gone; call it the Negro Spokesman—about which more in a moment. The specific problem boils down to the sad case of Tawana Brawley.

  This is the incident that first gave Sharpton notoriety as an adult, and one that he will never live down. Brawley was a fifteen-year-old girl who in 1987 was found smeared with dog feces and wrapped in a garbage bag. She claimed that she had been kidnapped by a group of two to six white men, who tortured and raped her for four days in the woods near her home in Wappingers Falls, New York. She said that one of the men had worn a badge, which seemed to implicate local law enforcement. Sharpton embraced Brawley’s case, and even as evidence mounted that her story was a hoax, his accusations on her behalf grew more and more grandiose, until he had accused virtually the entire state law enforcement system of complicity. He specifically named Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County assistant district attorney, as one of the rapists.

  The charges quickly fell apart in every detail. There was no physical evidence to support them; in fact, the evidence painted a pointedly clear contradictory account of Brawley’s lost four days. As for Pagones, there was no evidence that he had been involved in an assault, and (as one might expect of a man with a very public job) he could account for his whereabouts on the days in question very nearly minute by minute, with scores of witnesses, documents, and even photographs. A grand jury carefully weighed the evidence in the case and issued a report debunking Brawley’s story so convincingly that a civil jury subsequently assessed a $345,000 defamation judgment against those who had publicly accused Pagones. Nevertheless, Sharpton has steadfastly refused to back down from his support of Brawley or to pay his $65,000 share of the judgment. Reportedly it was paid off in 2001 by a group of wealthy supporters. But the issue hasn’t been defused; Sharpton is asked about the Brawley case everywhere, and every time he gives basically the same answer.

  “I stood up on her behalf,” Sharpton told an interviewer at the Washington radio station WTOP last June. “I stand up for people all the time. I disagreed with that jury…You take a position based on your firm beliefs and the evidence presented to you. We do believe that young lady, and I have a right to believe the young lady.”

  This puts a noble spin on the episode, but Sharpton did considerably more than “stand up” for Brawley. Without his intervention the case would most likely have been examined and quietly dismissed. Sharpton trumpeted the grotesque charges worldwide and enlarged the incident into a bruising racial issue that harmed everyone involved—particularly the innocent accused. He did this apparently without subjecting Brawley’s story to the slightest scrutiny. And he refuses to admit he was wrong. He often says, “I will not say something just to please somebody else,” which makes him sound like a man of unswerving conviction, admirable and true. When he says he “disagrees” with the grand jury, that, too, sounds reasonable enough. Sharpton points out that he was ultimately vindicated in his support for the young men accused in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, who, years after a jury declared them guilty of rape and battery, were found to be innocent. He cleverly turns doubts about O. J. Simpson’s famous acquittal against his critics, asking why, if they feel free to disagree with a jury, isn’t he entitled to do the same in Tawana Brawley’s case?

  All this makes it sound as though the Brawley matter is one over which reasonable people still differ. It isn’t. To anyone who has read the grand jury’s calm, devastatingly thorough report, believing Brawley is like believing that the moon is made of cheese. Sharpton has flailed around in his efforts to explain himself, at one point telling a reporter from The Nation that he often refuses to back down because he found it so humiliating when his father backed down before a white restaurateur who refused to serve the family—as though stubbornness when wronged, which we admire, somehow equates with stubbornness when wronging someone else. Sharpton’s posture is more than stubborn; it is arrogant. It speaks to both his judgment and his intentions.

  Debra J. Dickerson, the author of The End of Blackness (2004), a discussion of racism and stereotypes, thinks that Sharpton epitomizes a certain kind of black mind-set. “It believes Tawana Brawley, long past the point when any child gives up on Santa Claus,” she writes. “Why? Because she accused whites of hideous acts, the kind of thing they ‘would do.’…Anything ‘black,’ however odious, must be defended or denied, and anything ‘white’ attacked or dismissed. George Washington’s slave-mongering matters, but O. J. Simpson’s wife-beating doesn’t. David Duke’s racism signifies, but not the Nation of Islam’s. Racial profiling of blacks is wrong, but feel free to throw Arab Americans up against the wall. Tawana Brawley’s inconsistencies mean nothing, those of a testifying cop, everything. Why? Because whites got away with gang-raping and torturing nigger gals for centuries—big deal, they finally had to pay for one…It’s Kabuki. It’s a stylized acting out of unresolved trauma and revenge fantasies. It’s neurotic. It’s pointless. It’s counterproductive. It’s demeaning. It keeps blacks from looking in the mirror or finding better uses of their civic time.”

  So why would anyone—other than those so steeped in historical anger that they embrace this Kabuki—want to vote for Al Sharpton as president of the United States?

  This brings us to Sharpton’s broader problem: the death of the Negro Spokesman. I use this antiquated term because the concept itself is so dated. Throughout our history white America has recognized a certain few figures as “leaders” of the black community—a pattern that Michael Eric Dyson, a writer and a humanities professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has called “an old, abiding problem.” They alone were considered able to speak for the whole race. This was true on a local level and also nationally, as prominent African-Americans from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to serve as spokesmen for people otherwise excluded from public life. Sometimes, as with King, these figures had the enthusiastic support of black Americans; sometimes, as with Washington, they did not. In a country that increasingly accepts itself as multiracial, where blacks are no longer even the largest minority, the role of the Negro Spokesman is as outmoded as the Victrola. Most black intellectuals, particularly younger ones, are glad to be rid of it.

  With the success of the twentieth-century civil-rights movement and the rise of a strong black middle class, anyone looking for a “black leader” in this country needn’t look far: blacks in most states have elected representatives of their own race, and academia now boasts many black scholars. Jesse Jackson, who actively sought the mantle of the Negro Spokesman after King’s assassination (much as Sharpton is seeking it now), actually closed the door on this phenomenon himself by running for president in 1984 and 1988, and doing surprisingly well. In effect, Jackson’s candidacy carried the traditionally nonpolitical role of black leadership into electoral politics.

  Dickerson believes that Sharpton doesn’t get this. Although she feels that he deserves a lot of credit for some of the work he has done against police brutality in New York, she told me, “Reverend Al is not very visionary or forward-looking. His presid
ential run seems predicated on the proposition that the civil-rights movement wasn’t that successful. It was quite successful. Racism is still there, but it is much more subtle and organic; it plays itself out as interest-group politics today. The fight is no longer a fight for our race but a fight for justice…Black people are much more plugged in to the system today. The progress of the movement has made it very clear to all that it cannot be Us versus Them. Blacks today are more concerned about outcomes than color.”

  Mat Johnson, a novelist and a professor at Bard College, agrees. He told me, “Black people are way past the point where they think they will further their agenda just by voting for someone black. Voters today are more sophisticated than that. In that sense Sharpton is a dinosaur; he’s a white liberal’s idea of what a black leader is.”

  Civil-rights progress has desimplified black politics. African-American voters no longer come in one flavor. Today they find common cause in a yearning for continued racial progress, but they increasingly disagree—just as white voters disagree—over how to achieve it. There are still radical black activists, but there are also Clarence Thomas, the archconservative U.S. Supreme Court justice; J. C. Watts, the conservative congressman from Oklahoma; and many others who defy the old model of black leadership. There are similar divisions in the ranks of black intellectuals, who publicly debate the advantages and disadvantages of social-welfare programs and affirmative action, the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, the implications of gangsta rap, and the call for slavery reparations. The rise of an educated, ambitious black middle class has begun to alter the formerly predictable patterns of black voting. Young blacks are increasingly unimpressed by the choices the Democratic Party offers. A New York Times article by Lynette Clemetson last August reported that whereas 74 percent of African-Americans had called themselves Democrats four years ago, only 63 percent did so in 2003.