The Reinvention of the Reverend

ALLISON SAMUELS & JERRY ADLER

If the Rev. Al Sharpton didn't exist, he would have had to be invented. In fact, the novelist Tom Wolfe has claimed he did invent him, in the character of the Reverend Bacon, a supporting figure in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Each generation of black America gives birth to its own incarnation of the charismatic preacher-activist who confronts the white power structure in the streets and talks circles around it on Meet the Press. Just a few months after the fictional Bacon made his appearance in 1987, the real Sharpton burst onto the national stage as the fiery advocate for Tawana Brawley, a New York teenager who claimed to have been raped by a gang of white men, including a policeman. In that incarnation he still haunts the popular imagination: a bulky, bullhorn-toting figure in a neon-hued tracksuit, topped by a preposterously high, wavy pompadour. About all that remains today is a bare suggestion of the pompadour and roughly two thirds of the 300-pound 1980s-vintage Sharpton himself, now typically clad in an impeccable custom-tailored suit. His erstwhile ally, rival, and adversary, former New York City mayor David Dinkins, maintains that of course Sharpton has "grown up and matured, as most people do if they live long enough."

But the interesting question is whether his role is still needed in an era when the man atop the national power structure himself is black, and Sharpton now regularly meets with him--issuing not just demands but advice. If you asked Sharpton himself, he'd undoubtedly reply, are you serious? Blacks still have twice the unemployment rate of Americans overall, and young black men are still being shot by cops under circumstances that range from tragic to suspicious. The election of Barack Obama has provoked an almost hysterical reaction from the far-right media, which last week claimed as its latest victim an obscure African-American official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Relaxing with a thick Ashton Churchill in a plush midtown cigar lounge, the once-and-still Reverend Al scoffs at the idea that there is, or ever has been, a new Sharpton. "My mission, my message, and everything else about me is the same as always," he says. "The country may have changed, but I haven't."

So, taking him at his word, Sharpton--at 55, a half-generation younger than Jesse Jackson and seven years older than Obama--can serve as a marker against which to gauge the shifting river of American race relations. Contacted in May by the family of a 7-year-old girl accidentally killed by Detroit police, Sharpton called no angry press conference and declined to get himself arrested. Instead, he preached an impassioned, but hardly inflammatory, sermon whose message--"we are all responsible for our children's safety"--could have offended no one except Mike Cox, a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan, who pronounced himself "disgusted" that Sharpton would come to his state to preach at a child's funeral.

What has changed, though, is the center of gravity of political anger in America. Sharpton's next big project is a march on Washington planned for Aug. 28, the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Sharpton's "Reclaim the Dream" rally will coincide with a speech by Glenn Beck near the Lincoln Memorial. Sharpton is especially cutting about Beck's "Take Back America" tour with Sarah Palin earlier this year. "The nerve and gall," he expostulates. "Who are they taking America back from, and who are they giving it to?" Reclaim the Dream versus Take Back America.

And if Sharpton's "mission" and "message" haven't changed, his approach surely has. From last week's fast-moving events in Washington--which found Sharpton in Hawaii, delivering a speech to a convention of dentists--the lesson he drew was about the danger of leaping to conclusions, as both the NAACP and the administration did in disowning Shirley Sherrod, Georgia's director of rural development for the USDA, after a right-wing Web site and Fox News denounced her as a racist based on an excerpt from a months-old speech. So outrageous was this charge--in context, her point was clearly about her successful struggle to overcome prejudice--that even Beck came to her defense. But Sharpton knows all too well the temptation to seize the news cycle at its peak and check the facts later; thinking back 25 years, and with the circumstances reversed, it's easy to picture him grabbing a bullhorn and leading a march on the USDA. He regards that sort of thing now as not just irresponsible but counterproductive. "Shirley Sherrod is an example of what happens when we play the right wing's game: they win. We have to choose our battles wisely."

And Sharpton also symbolizes what hasn't changed in America, the ways in which the respective histories of black and white give rise to unsettlingly divergent world views. To this day he refuses to repudiate Brawley--long after a grand jury concluded that she had invented the rape charge, and after a local prosecutor whose name was dragged into the case won a defamation suit against Sharpton. Sharpton has been right much more often than wrong in his choice of causes, dating back at least to the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager who paid with his life for the mistake of walking down the wrong block in Brooklyn. Many African-Americans will be forever grateful to Sharpton for taking on the thankless task of defending the victims of Bernhard Goetz, who opened fire on four unarmed black teenagers in the subway. But he has also made some grave missteps. In 1991, during a tense confrontation between blacks and Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, he notably failed to calm tensions with a remark about "the diamond merchants in Crown Heights." In 1995 his reference to "white interlopers," at a protest against the eviction of a popular Harlem music store, was followed by a fatal arson attack on the white-owned business that held the lease. It is his refusal to apologize over Brawley--or to pay the defamation judgment, which was eventually settled by donations from wealthy friends--that still haunts his reputation among white Americans of a certain age. Tempting as it must be to put the matter behind him, Sharpton still answers questions the same way, without apology, but artfully framing the issue in the way most favorable to him. "I listened to the child, and I believed her," he says. "When I hear that people are still mad at me about this case, I want to ask them, 'Have you ever been asked to help a child that's been hurt?' I don't apologize for anything I did to help her. Judge me the way you will."

Although Sharpton can give the impression he sprang fully formed from the teeming streets of Brooklyn, he spent his early years in a middle-class neighborhood, the son of a prosperous contractor who deserted the family when Sharpton was 10. Overnight, Sharpton moved with his mother, Ada, and older sister, Cheryl, onto welfare and into a housing project. There he was sustained by his memory of life on the other side of the tracks. His first experience of advocacy was in agitating to improve the dismal conditions prevailing in public housing in minority neighborhoods. "I was the only kid who'd lived somewhere else," he says. "I knew the trash was supposed to be picked up. I had to explain to my friends that this was not the way other people lived." His other sustenance was preaching; he was a mesmerizing speaker from the age of 4, when he gave his first sermon. (He rehearsed before his sister's dolls, gowned in one of his mother's housedresses.) By 7, he was touring with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson; by 10, he'd been ordained in the Pentecostal Church. (He now identifies as a Baptist.) This gave him a unique perspective on outsiderness: preaching the Gospel wasn't exactly a route to peer acceptance for a black teenager in the 1960s.

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