MGJR Volume 2 2014 | Page 21

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King to lead the fight to exonerate her and to challenge local segregation laws. What took place in Montgomery launched a modern-day civil rights movement in the age of television.

Sharpton has never been elected to public office, though he has run for a U. S. Senate seat from New York and for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States – both calculated efforts by the activist Sharpton to catapult his agenda onto a national political stage. For much of his adult life Sharpton was an actual Fat Albert with straightened hair, those running suits, an oversized pre-Flavor Flav medallion and a loud mouth – attributes that did not sit well with middle class blacks who prefer their leaders, self-appointed or otherwise, more suave and less cartoonish. Many of them fail to see the humor in his being lampooned even now on “Saturday Night Live,” as in December when Sharpton’s difficulties with camera angles and teleprompters, as well as his support for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, were fair game. “Some of it is just funny and you laugh,” he says.

In his recounting in The Rejected Stone, Sharpton’s education and his legitimacy have been earned through unconventional means – starting with his recognition as a “boy wonder preacher” at the age of 4, acclaimed among influential church leaders in Brooklyn, N.Y., and presented to a broader public at the 1964 World’s Fair and on other stages as part of the gospel extravaganza of the renowned singer Mahalia Jackson. From Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the dapper preacher and Congressional leader from Harlem who called Sharpton “kid,” he learned a devil-may-care attitude. Jesse Jackson, with whom he worked as a teenager as the youth director of Operation Breadbasket, a spinoff of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was another mentor. From him, Sharpton learned to “knock heads” with an older, more rigid generation of civil rights leaders, a sense of style and, he adds, “I definitely learned the importance of the media from Jesse.”

From James Brown, for whom he was a surrogate son and at times a personal assistant, he learned showmanship and the value of being “the hardest working man in show business.” From Muhammad Ali, whose now-legendary Rumble in the Jungle world heavyweight title fight he witnessed in Zaire in 1974 as part of Brown’s entourage, Sharpton learned to appreciate, if not immediately practice, discipline. The list goes on so that, quite apart from the TV and tabloid Sharpton, there was an alternative universe where he began rubbing elbows with, and hanging onto the coattails of, the relatively rich and famous in the worlds of church, the music industry and professional boxing long before mainstream – aka white – media zeroed in on him.

This was long before Bernhard Goetz gunned down four

black teenagers he said were menacing him on a New York

subway train, before a white mob chased a black man to his death on a busy freeway in mobster John Gotti’s part of New York, before a black teenager named Tawana Brawley accused a gang of white men of kidnapping and sexually assaulting her, before a white mob killed a black teenager who naively ventured into a largely Italian neighborhood in search of a good deal on a used car. Those were the 1980s.

Back in the 1970s, when he was 16, after leaving the SCLC at the same time Jesse Jackson did, Sharpton founded the National Youth Movement with David Dinkins, the future mayor of New York City, as his lawyer, and Bayard Rustin, the chief strategist for the 1963 March on Washington, as an early financial supporter. How national the movement ever was is debatable, but people with money and media access helped the young man from Brooklyn with the big Afro and even bigger voice as he led voter registration drives and economic boycotts and goaded the police to shut down crack houses in black neighborhoods.

For some of the celebrated class, he has been a conduit for acknowledging their roots and giving back to the community, sometimes when to do so in more public ways was neither good publicity nor good politics. His role as a spiritual advisor has been evident in one conspicuous way: funeral services. He preached at services for Johnnie Cochran, James Brown (three of them!) and the singers Isaac Hayes and Etta James. He preached at the private entombment for Michael Jackson. He delivered remarks at Rosa Parks’s funeral and, after attending Whitney Houston’s, shared his insights with CNN.

The Case That Lives in Infamy

Still, no matter how valuable he has been as a spiritual guide and no matter how many injustices he has helped to right – the Abner Louima police brutality case comes to mind – Sharpton will forever be associated with the Tawana Brawley fiasco. It is his albatross, and he treads gingerly when asked about it.

Tawana Brawley, then a 15-year-old black girl living in upstate New York, claimed to have been kidnapped, sexually assaulted over several days and left for dead by a group of white men. The story burst onto television screens across the nation on Thanksgiving weekend in 1987 and dominated headlines and racial discourse for months after. So many years later, it seems more bizarre than it was in real time amid wild allegations of who might have kidnapped her and why and just as much speculation about what she was really doing while voluntarily AWOL. Sharpton and the lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, were right there stoking the flames.

Sharpton will never concede what a grand jury said and what my colleagues and I said in our exhaustive reporting for The New York Times in 1988 and later in Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, a book long out of