At a small restaurant near where I work a young cashier was excited, as if she had just seen a rock star. She told another cashier that she had just seen the Rev. Al Sharpton getting into a limousine. “You know what?” said the other cashier, who sounded less impressed. “It’s a shame that we don’t have any real leaders any more.”
Her friend agreed. Both of them were young, female and black. As I paid for my cup of coffee I wanted to correct the young women. It is not true that we African-Americans don’t have any “real leaders” anymore, I was about to say. Unlike the 1960s, we have an abundance of blacks in top management and leading positions in corporations, universities, foundations and other institutions where we could barely have gotten jobs above the shoe-shining and floor-polishing level in the 1960s. We don’t need to wait for a black Moses to lead us to the Promised Land. We’re already getting there.
But I shut my mouth and put my big ears on. Instead of hearing only what she was saying, I listened to what she meant. She meant to say that it’s too bad African-Americans don’t have enough leaders who are less problematic than Al Sharpton.
Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr., with his famously processed mullet-style hair draped around his neck, is many things to many people.
To many, he is the black activist who has never apologized for his racially divisive involvement in the case of Tawana Brawley, a teenager from New York who in 1988 told of a gang rape that later proved to be untrue.
Many also remember how he urged Harlem blacks in 1995 to protest against the “white interloper” who owned a clothing store on 125th Street and had threatened to evict a black sub-tenant. Days after one of Sharpton’s supporters said “We are going to see that this cracker suffers,” a black man set fire to the store, killing seven employees and himself. Sharpton was not present and denies any responsibility for the tragedy.
To Democratic politicians like presidential candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley and New York senatorial candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sharpton’s “House of Justice” has become an obligatory stop on the campaign trail to build support among black voters. Confronted with Sharpton’s mixed record, the candidates insist Sharpton has evolved and matured from his wilder early days.
Yet to leading Republicans, Sharpton is a “wedge issue” that will divide Democratic candidates from mostly white swing voters. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, for example, called Sharpton one of the nation’s “agents of intolerance” on the “outer reaches of American politics.”
To many rank-and-file black Americans who work hard every day, Sharpton is no Martin Luther King Jr. But when some new offense has been leveled against the race, Sharpton often appears to be the best they are going to get. To see why Bradley, Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton were reluctant to denounce Sharpton, look at what happened to John McCain after he denounced Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. McCain said he wants everyone to be held to a high moral compass, but McCain, in his zeal, violated the 1st Commandment of politics: Thou shalt not divide thy base.
Bill Clinton knows that. He criticized Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in 1992 for including Sister Souljah as a speaker despite her inflammatory remarks about the Los Angeles riots. With that, Clinton distanced himself from the extremists in his party’s base without offending its sensible majority.
McCain tried to do that with Robertson and Falwell but overdid it. His comparison of the two to Sharpton and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan sparked a backlash even among some of McCain’s strongest fans.
Americans of all colors want to see if leaders of both parties can distance themselves from the excesses of their followers or if the leaders will only point fingers at the excesses of their rivals’ parties. If so, we may see Sharpton become this year’s version of the attack ads that spotlighted former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis for giving a prison furlough to Willie Horton, a black man who later raped and murdered.
Politics can unite or they can divide. If principled leaders duck and hide, Americans do not have only a black leadership shortage but we have a leadership shortage–period!
When principled leaders fail to rise, no one should be surprised that imperfect leaders fill the gap. Sharpton’s no dummy.
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E-mail: cptime@aol.com
