print: Brawley’s story was a big lie. Sharpton does a masterful job of tap dancing around questions about his role. He points out that he joined the Brawley team a couple of months after the lawyers involved had shaped the narrative. “The media says I believed in one case that became a hoax – obviously I wasn’t there when it started so I couldn’t have created it because I wasn’t even there when it was told – but I’m judged by that one case. Well, that’s media bias.”
He also insists his role was merely that of a hired spokesman – something those who knew him back then
would dispute. “Once you become the spokesman for the victim,” he said, “you are wedded to what the victim says. You don’t have your personal take on that. I was her spokesperson. I went by what her and her lawyers said,
‘This is what we represent. This is what we believe.’… anybody – you’re responsible for getting her message out and I did.”
Does he now doubt that message? “I would be betraying what I did to express that. I did what I was supposed to as her spokesman – and that’s all I’m ever going to say on that.”
Sharpton has admitted to having been irresponsible in some regards in those days when he still sought validation as an antidote to the low self-esteem that he said stemmed from his father’s abandonment of the family. Al Sr. ran off with Sharpton’s half-sister. The rest of the family was humiliated, and Sharpton’s mother was reduced to working as a cleaning woman. During the Brawley period, he found a measure of validation in an outpouring of support from the likes of Bill Cosby and in 24/7 media coverage that even attracted Phil Donahue – the most prominent liberal empathizer on daytime television in an era before Oprah.
Sharpton was angry at the world, he told Oprah in an episode of Oprah’s Next Chapter that aired in November on OWN; and that unresolved anger – at his father and at some of his mentors – animated some of his protests, which included, he wrote in his book, “a whole lot of name-calling.” He wrote: “I used to go on talk shows and argue, fight, cuss, whatever. But at some point, you realize that always engaging in the fight doesn’t help your cause.” Ultimately, he asked: “Are you about the issues and getting justice, or are you about the sound bite and the name-calling?”
Sharpton wants to move on from Brawley, to be judged by his body of work. “The one thing that I think is missing from the narrative is whether you’re dealing with the brash, name-calling Al Sharpton or Sharpton of today,” he said in the MGJR interview, “the one thread is that I always fought for civil rights, human rights. I never left that kind of struggle.”
He compared his treatment with that of a New York contemporary in the urban guerilla antics of the 70s and 80s, Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels crime-fighting group. Sliwa has admitted that to attract media attention he pulled stunts where the Angels swooped in to rescue New Yorkers from fake muggings and fake assaults in the subways. Sliwa even staged his own kidnapping. The stunts worked, and 35 years after its founding, Sliwa’s organization claims members in more than a dozen countries. His past does not perpetually cloud his position as a popular conservative talk radio host who says he earned more than $500,000 annually in recent years.
“This is the kind of media bias that I’m talking about,” Sharpton says. “They never stop and say, ‘No matter what you say, for four decades this guy stayed on the same general thrust.’…I lead National Action Network now, but I don’t have to. I could just sit back and do radio and TV and make a lot of money. But you never get credit in this media world that I say is still to some degree biased. You never get credit for having a life mission of being sincere. You are always on trial. And when you don’t care about being on their trial, then you’re just arrogant.”
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Tawana Brawley's story, which turned out to be a hoax, continues to taint Al Sharpton's record as an advocate for justice.
Photo courtesy of USBACKLASH.org