The Clueless Conservative
Answering the Questions You Can't Ask
Clueless Conservative
Last Updated: 6/23/06 Section: Opinion
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While at college, though, you still need to know about these things. But all your friends already know, so you do not want to ask them for fear of looking stupid. And asking the shouting feminist down the hall just does not seem like a good idea. So for you, there is the Clueless Conservative.
Greetings once again, gentle reader. Please forgive my long absence from these hallowed pages, but even I find myself at a loss for a topic sometimes. The intervening months have provided so many curious events that require annotation, explication, and contextualization that I fear I shall not be able to touch on one-tenth of them. A reverse order, I have been told, is often helpful when reviewing information so it was strangely fitting when my esteemed editor requested some context for Claremont McKenna's most recent esteemed guest, Rev. Al Sharpton.
By all accounts, Rev. Sharpton was born to a middle-class family in Queens, N.Y. in 1954. His father was, according to the son, a "slumlord" who owned a few buildings. At age 4, Sharpton began preaching. Ordained and licensed as a Pentecostal minister at age 10, he began touring with gospel great Mahalia Jackson as the "Wonderboy Preacher."
Forty years of experience as a preacher have given Sharpton a remarkable gift for timing and public speaking. He is able to establish an almost-instant rapport with his audience. Any speech that he makes adapts the forms of a sermon to his present context. He takes a central text and rolls through a meandering course of human experience, but always manages to come back to his basic message. His vocal style, a wave-like pattern of swells and troughs, compels attention regardless of his text.
Sharpton's preaching seems to have been his key into politics. It got him noticed. At age 14 (1968), shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, he began working with Operation Breadbasket, an offshoot of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that sought to improve the economic situation for blacks through a combination of food distribution and boycotts. In 1969, Jesse Jackson appointed him Breadbasket's youth director for New York. Three years later, Jackson took Sharpton to the National Black Political Convention, a gathering of activists seeking to create a national black agenda.
Jesse Jackson's arrival in Sharpton's chronicle was the beginning of his career as a powerbroker. According to some, it represented the continuation of a line of leadership in black political action. Jackson had spent three years working under King, learning how to lead people and movements. Sharpton's appointment marked the beginning of his apprenticeship to Jackson, and the two men developed a firm friendship.
Following the National Black Political Convention, Sharpton's political career fell by the wayside for a few years. The New York Times only reports a few stories involving him from 1971 - 1980. They are minor occurrences in light of what comes after: two protests of "racist" events and Sharpton's co-founding of, and almost immediate resignation from, the Congress of Humanities, a group that tried to improve Black/Jewish relations in the United States. During this period, he took up with Soul legend James Brown as a business agent.
By 1984, Sharpton had acquired clout on a national level. The Jackson 5 delayed their 1984 "Victory" Tour because the tour's promoter, Don King, had not used local black promoters for booking the tour. That was March. By September, the tour was on and Sharpton had parlayed his role as the boycott's spokesman into a position as the tour's national community relations director.
A far more serious event soon put Sharpton front and center. In 1985, Bernhard Goetz, a white man, admitted to shooting and seriously wounding four black teenagers. Dubbed the "Death Wish vigilante" by New York's tabloids, Goetz claimed that the four youths had tried to rob him. When a New York grand jury did not indict Goetz for attempted murder, Sharpton met with then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani to discuss bringing federal charges against him. Sharpton also led a very loud protest outside Goetz's apartment.
In 1987, the Reverend stumbled for possibly the first time on his road to power. When 15-year-old Tawana Brawley, discovered in a plastic bag and covered in feces and racial slurs, claimed to have been raped by five white law enforcement officers, Sharpton raced to her side. Without physical proof or evidence, Sharpton accused Stephen Pagones, an obscure county prosecutor, of being the perpetrator on 33 different occasions. New York launched a seven month investigation into Brawley's charge. The investigation yielded no evidence of rape and concluded that Brawley had fabricated the rape claim.
Ten years later, in 1997, Pagones sued Sharpton and two of his associates for defamation. The court awarded Pagones $345,000 for damages. He had spent nearly $300,000 on his case against Sharpton. The Reverend, moreover, despite his loss in the defamation suit, has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. His star has continued to rise, while Stephen Pagones, the scapegoat, gave up his law career and became a private investigator.
More recently, Sharpton's oratorical skill has inspired the destruction of life and property. In 1995, Sharpton got involved in a neighborhood problem of "discrimination" in Harlem. When a record store, the Record Shack, recognized as a Harlem institution, was faced with the loss of its lease, Sharpton organized a boycott of the offending store, a Jewish-owned business called Freddy's Fashion Mart. The owner of Freddy's had also acquired some control over the Record Shack's lease. At a rally supporting the Record Shack, Sharpton said that he would not stand by and let some "white interloper" force "a brother" out of business.
In the months following the interloper remark, Freddy's owner reported that the protesters became increasingly threatening. Finally in December 1995, Roland Smith, a street vendor, walked into Freddy's with a can of flammable liquid, a gun, and a book of matches. Pouring the liquid onto a pile of jeans, he shouted "it's on now" and "all blacks out." He then shot up the store and tossed the lit matches onto the jeans. Eight people, including Smith, died in the ensuing conflagration. Most of them were black or Latino.
Anyone would be hard pressed to link Sharpton directly to this massacre, as the papers put it. At the same time, the clear hatred that Smith felt for Freddy's owner was very likely legitimated by comments like Sharpton's.
The last few years have seen the Reverend come into his own as a powerbroker, one of the influential people in politics who never hold political office. Jesse Jackson's recurrent scandals have deprived him and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition of much of the influence they once held. Sharpton's National Action Network, patterned heavily on RPC, has picked up much of the slack. Where once Jackson raced around the world to help resolve international crises, now Sharpton holds the meetings with prime ministers and dictators.
Whether Sharpton wields his influence for weal or woe is not my place to say, gentle reader. Although it is true that he is one of the few serious champions of many of America's forgotten, I do not need to point out that he seems to prefer scapegoats to solutions. After all, if he actually solved a problem, his career as an influence peddler would quickly take the form of elder statesmanship, which doesn't bring nearly as many cameras.
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