A former child preacher once known as “Wonderboy,” Rev. Al Sharpton has patterned much of his adult career as a political activist after Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
From Sharpton’s New York City-based organization to his bombastic oratory, from his choreographed street protests to his penchant for getting arrested on live television, the beefy Baptist from Brooklyn has faithfully followed in Jackson’s footsteps.
But now, it appears “Wonderboy” wants to be “Supreme Man.”
In the six months since the married Jackson admitted he fathered a child with the former bureau chief of his Washington, D.C., office, there have been hawkish rumors flying in from the East Coast that Sharpton is trying to seize the title of America’s preeminent civil rights leader by taking advantage of Jackson’s public and private woes.
Officially, Sharpton’s camp denies it, insisting that “privately” there is a great deal of camaraderie, mutual respect and Christmas cards going back and forth between the two men and their families.
“You would be amazed,” a Sharpton aide said.
Just a few platitudes later, however, another Sharpton aide rips off the lace gloves, revealing what amounts to a shiny pair of brass knuckles.
“Rev. Jackson’s not the fact of life he was 18 months ago,” said Jacques DeGraff, president of the New York chapter of Sharpton’s National Action Network.
“He’s occupied a place in black leadership that was singular and now it’s going to open up to more voices. Al Sharpton has clearly filled a vacuum in the national black leadership community. His arc is ascending because of all the good work he’s done. Now his task is to institutionalize it around the country.”
Jackson, of course, made his own bed of nails.
Neither Sharpton nor Jackson’s conservative enemies forced him to betray his marriage vows.
But, as is his wont, Sharpton has been talking, making Jackson’s comeback harder and making civil rights insiders nervous that an unseemly power struggle is brewing.
During an interview with Fox News, which no one would mistake for a liberal media outlet, Sharpton brought up the story that has haunted Jackson since 1968.
“Did I take the blood of a guy I loved and put it on my shirt?” he said, referring to the story that when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at a Memphis hotel, Jackson supposedly ran up to the balcony and smeared King’s blood on his clothes and then wore the stained sweater for several days afterward.
Sharpton brought the story up while he was trying to duck a tough question about his own past, his role in spreading the discredited rape allegations of Tawana Brawley in upstate New York in the late 1980’s.
Sharpton later sent Jackson a letter of apology. But after that, anyone could see there clearly is a rivalry going on, and, at least on Sharpton’s part, it is heating up, fueled by Empire State-sized ambition and disagreements over strategy.
Sharpton, for example, says Jackson has gotten much too cozy with the movers and shakers of Wall Street and the Democratic Party at the expense of the ordinary people Jackson has traditionally championed.
Jackson says after a nearly 40-year career, both he and “The Movement” have evolved. He says he hasn’t forsaken anyone. He is including more people and issues.
“As long as Sharpton was the faithful protege and did exactly what Jackson said, everything was fine,” said a longtime civil rights advocate. “Now Sharpton is all grown up and Jesse has been wounded by the baby thing and there are some problems. The irony of this is they are like identical twins. Both brilliant. Both insecure. Both don’t share the stage well. They’re also both intelligent enough to know this could be harmful. At least I hope they are.”
Subterranean struggle
Up until the bloody shirt remark, it had been largely a subterranean struggle. And that’s exactly where movement insiders want it to return–buried below ground, out of sight.
They are worried that if it breaks through the surface for long it will stir up dissension and sidetrack attention from vital issues at a time when all hands are needed on deck, a time when Jackson says more young black men are in prison than in college, when 1 in 5 American children live in poverty and when AIDS is running rampant through the inner city.
“There’s enough room and issues for 10 Jesse Jacksons and 10 Al Sharptons and a lot of other people,” said Robert T. Starks, associate professor of political science and director of the Harold Washington Institute at Northeastern Illinois University.
And that’s what makes some observers such as Starks laugh and others cry. The winner of this undeclared cold war will take home a tarnished trophy. After all, more than three decades after the passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts, the ranks of black leadership have exploded in power and prominence, making the notion of the black leader seem quaint or even worse.
The insiders say the white media, too lazy or too ignorant to know any better, might still think there is a supreme black leader out there, a president of black America. But almost no one else does.
“Nobody goes around asking white people who their leader is,” said Joe Madison, a popular Washington, D.C., radio talk-show host and civil rights advocate. “You could get away with that in the `60s. We were breaking down barriers then. But those doors have been opened.”
In other ways, however, the title still carries weight, precisely because the media says it does. And so the struggle continues.
Jackson insists “there’s no tension,” adding, “We don’t have time for that.”
No tension? What about the vows?
Shortly after Jackson’s confession in January of infidelity, Sharpton announced he and his wife of 21 years were going to renew their wedding vows.
Invitations were sent out. The media was alerted. The only thing missing was Sharpton. He was in jail for a protest. The ceremony was postponed, but the buzz lived on. The gossip was Sharpton, a master of off-Broadway street theater, was trying to show Jackson up.
Sharpton’s camp denies that too.
“That would be too cynical,” a laughing DeGraff said. “But you’re not the first person to ask.”
No tension? What about the “Dear Jesse” letter?
It was a sharply critical, supposedly private letter written to Jackson in February, accusing him, among other sins, of “using people for your advantage and personal aggrandizement.” Somehow the letter made it’s way into the Village Voice weekly newspaper in New York months later as Jackson was trying to regain his footing.
Sharpton didn’t write it. It was penned by a legend of the civil rights movement, Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, 73, who said in an interview he “has known Jesse since he was a lad” and was a supporter when Jackson ran for president.
Walker said he regretted the letter becoming public, did not know how it happened, and “whatever differences” between him and Jackson were resolved months ago. As for the rumors that Sharpton is trying to kick Jackson while he’s down, Walker said, “Mr. Jackson’s difficulties are of his own making and it’s up to the public to decide if he remains credible and trustworthy.”
Walker is the chairman of Sharpton’s organization.
`Voice of the voiceless’
Among African-Americans, Jackson continues to dominate the top spot in public-opinion polls. Laura Washington, editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter, a newsletter primarily devoted to issues of race, said she does not see that changing anytime soon.
“He’s been the voice of the voiceless for 40 years,” she said. “People aren’t going to turn their backs on him. He’s human. He’s flawed. But he’s one of the most respected leaders in the country.”
To quiet the talk of trouble, Jackson went to visit Sharpton in May in a federal lockup in New York City where he is still locked up. It was a very public show of support. Sharpton is serving a 90-day sentence for trespassing during a peaceful protest against the United States Navy’s use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for bombing practice. Jackson also visited three elected officials of Puerto Rican descent from New York who were jailed along with Sharpton.
It was the kind of civil disobedience Jackson used to lead all the time back when he wore a defiant Afro and his marching boots were worn through the sole.
Jackson still has his battered brogans in the closet, but about 10 days ago his wife, Jackie, put them on, flew down to Vieques and got herself arrested just like Sharpton.
Refusing to post a $3,000 bail, Jackie Jackson spent nine days in jail and was released Wednesday night.
But more often than not, the almost 60-year-old Jesse Jackson slips into a pair of expensive loafers and marches from the “streets to the suites” of corporate America, taking “the struggle” to what he calls the “fourth phase of the civil rights movement”: economic fairness for women, African-Americans and other minorities.
“We must fight for fair trade in the marketplace,” he bellowed at a recent Saturday morning meeting of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Chicago.
Some critics complain that like the bank robber Willie Sutton, Jackson is just going where the money is, contending that he uses the threat of boycotts and charges of racism to arm-twist corporations into making hefty donations to PUSH and its sister organizations.
Ronald Walters, professor of politics and government at the University of Maryland, dismisses such talk. After all, since the baby bombshell blew up in Jackson’s face, he has been subjected to scathing scrutiny of everything from his faith to his finances. And yet no one has been able to uncover any financial wrongdoing or any proof of anything more sinister than sloppy bookkeeping.
Still, Walters is leery of Jackson’s corporate campaign–not its motives, but its effectiveness. “It limits the extent to which you can fight corporations on the one hand and ask for their support on the other,” he said.
Harold Doley, a Republican and the first African-American to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, helped Jackson structure his Wall Street Project, which tries to match minority businesses with corporate America. Since then, he and Jackson have had a parting of the ways, to say the least.
“Jesse is a chameleon,” Doley said. “Jesse is a civil rights entrepreneur. Rainbow/PUSH will not survive after Jesse Jackson; it may not even survive with him.”
Doley is now a Sharpton fan
“He is a family man,” Doley explained.
Big Apple powerbroker
At 46, Sharpton is seen as more militant–the Jesse Jackson of 30 years ago. As Jackson implores audiences to “Keep hope alive,” Sharpton declares, “No justice, no peace.”
Sharpton raised eyebrows when he compared Jackson to a proud boxing champion, still full of dignity and courage but too old and tired to deliver a knockout punch.
“What was up with that?” said Bill Lynch, the vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a former top aide to New York City’s first black mayor, David N. Dinkins. “This is bad. We’re trying to build a progressive coalition and this sends a very confusing signal to the forces that Jesse’s finished and Al’s on the rise. One, I don’t believe Jesse’s finished. I know he’s not. Two, look at what Jesse’s done and what Al’s done and there’s no comparison.
“I don’t want to take nothing away from Al. He put racial profiling on the front burner. But I don’t like what I’m hearing. I think there are some people trying to get him to make hay out of all this with Jesse and Al’s playing along. But I think it’s mostly a New York phenomenon. Around the country, I don’t think it’s affecting Jesse at all.”
Sharpton has become something of a powerbroker in the Big Apple. Hillary Rodham Clinton sought his help to rally black voters for her United States Senate campaign in New York last year. He did not go to her. She went to him, traveling uptown to his Harlem headquarters.
Four years ago, Sharpton was the candidate, making a surprisingly strong run for mayor of New York, where he grew up in housing projects and began preaching at age 4. By age 10 he was known as the “wonderboy” preacher.
He and Jackson have a long and close history. In 1969, Jackson named the then 14-year-old Sharpton the New York youth director of Operation Breadbasket, a predecessor to PUSH. Jackson, who is 13 years older, was the national director.
And now Sharpton threatens to copy another page from Jackson’s guidebook. Sharpton wants to make his own bid for the White House in 2004, a trail blazed twice by Jackson in the 1980’s that garnered him millions of votes and shored up his credibility among mainstream Democrats.
Sharpton has other shadows besides Jackson’s to escape. Sharpton has been called everything from a racial arsonist to “Al Charlatan.”
Outside New York, Sharpton probably still is better known for his processed hair than for his history. That history includes a murky stint as a federal informant and his unwavering support of Brawley.
“It will take a long time for someone like Sharpton to come close to equaling Jesse Jackson’s 40 years of work,” said Ron Daniels, who, as executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, has worked with both men. “Jesse’s an international presence. At the end of the day, the talk of Jesse Jackson’s decline is premature.”
Hollywood once made a classic movie about what appears to be brewing between Sharpton and Jackson.
It was about an aging, self-absorbed star and the star’s scheming but talented understudy, fighting for the lead role.
The movie was “All About Eve.”
Hollywood loves sequels. Call this one “All About Al.”
