Later on we\u2019ll talk about Al Sharpton the bold political activist and brazen race baiter, the man who strives to build communities and the one who\u2019s addicted to public controversy.\u00a0 Right now it\u2019s Sunday morning and none of that matters.\u00a0 Reverend Al has come to Bakersfield and is somewhere in the church.\u00a0 The pews are full, the band\u2019s playing, singers are rocking, and the congregation\u2019s clapping as Sharpton walks out, bible in hand, and sits in an armchair on the pulpit, his home since age four when he became the Wonder Boy Preacher.\u00a0 He watches noncommittally while recent junior high, high school, and college graduates are introduced and their ambitious plans are presented.\u00a0 Then Pastor Martha Johnson rhapsodizes that Sharpton became a licensed minister at age 10, and motions for everyone to rise as the prodigy steps to center stage where he waits for another song to dissolve and says be seated.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Speaking slowly in a voice that\u2019s grown a little husky at age 52, Sharpton warms everyone up before he declares, \u201cAll of us have done enough wrong.\u00a0 If God just checked the record, none of us would see the next morning\u2026Every day is a gift\u2026Somehow while I slept last night a divine decision was made\u2026If my enemies had a vote, I wouldn\u2019t be here.\u00a0 If everybody likes you, something\u2019s wrong with you\u2026If everybody\u2019s on your side, you haven\u2019t taken a side\u2026People don\u2019t realize how despised Dr. King was when he was alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Al Sharpton has often alluded to his similarities with Martin Luther King.\u00a0 Even passing into eternity won\u2019t confer that much status on Sharpton, but, like King, he is an activist spawned by the church: \u201cAnybody can be holy two hours a week.\u00a0 You will be judged by what you do outside of here.\u00a0 You don\u2019t go to the gas station and fill up and then just sit there.\u00a0 You\u2019re supposed to do something\u2026You should have everything you want, but everyone else should too\u2026You should want all these things so you can do something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah\u2026right on\u2026that\u2019s right,\u201d members of the congregation are starting to respond.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s inspiring to see all these young people who want to be doctors, lawyers, and Supreme Court justices…If the community doesn\u2019t recognize young people when they do something right, then they lose the moral authority to condemn them when they do something wrong\u2026You can\u2019t be something you don\u2019t see yourself as\u2026If you let other people define you, that\u2019s what you\u2019ll be\u2026You\u2019ll never arrive where you ain\u2019t headed.<\/p>\n \u201cI flew here last night from Kennedy Airport in New York City\u2026I\u2019ve never seen anyone go up to the cockpit and ask the pilot for his credentials.\u00a0 He could be a chipmunk up there\u2026If you can put your life in the hands of someone you don\u2019t know, you can trust God.\u00a0 Last night I had the faith to let God be the pilot.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all must have faith\u2026to get back that hunger and drive (and know) that God will find a way\u2026Don\u2019t settle for being down.\u00a0 Even if you\u2019re not responsible for being down, you\u2019re responsible for getting up\u2026If you don\u2019t have the strength to get up, roll over and look up until you figure out how to get up.\u00a0 When I was down, God reached out (to me.)\u201d<\/p>\n As with many gifted orators, the words Sharpton speaks aren\u2019t as important as how he says them, and this charismatic fellow is delivering thunderbolts that make people jump and holler in the pews: \u201cI was recently in Atlanta with the daughter of Medger Evers\u2026Forty years ago he was murdered in his driveway (because he wanted equal rights for everyone.)\u00a0 He never got a chance to see his grandchildren grow up.\u00a0 In Birmingham four little girls were blown up by a bomb in a church.\u00a0 Four civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi.\u00a0 (But now, folks,) nobody\u2019s bombing your churches and schools, so you got no right to walk through doors that people opened for you and not be grateful\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIf I went around this church, everybody could tell me who did something to him\u2026My daddy left home when I was 10-years old.\u00a0 I was raised on welfare and ate peanut butter out of a tin can.\u00a0 I remember all the cheese, too.\u00a0 The welfare lady said to my mother, \u2018I don\u2019t know how you keep your house so clean.\u00a0 You must be hiding a man in here.\u2019\u00a0 After the lady left, my mother told me, \u2018Don\u2019t be mad.\u00a0 She\u2019s right.\u00a0 The man in this house is Jesus.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The band, with well-timed drum rolls \u2013 rat-a-tap-boom \u2013 is backing Al Sharpton\u2019s every declaration:<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been persecuted\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019ll make a way\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cYes He will\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter\u2026<\/p>\n At this point\u2026<\/p>\n What I\u2019m saying\u2026<\/p>\n I\u2019m a star\u2026<\/p>\n And you\u2019re thrilled\u2026<\/p>\n I\u2019m here\u2026<\/p>\n If you think Al Sharpton gets publicity because he takes controversial (and sometimes inflammatory) positions, turn it around.\u00a0 His oratory earns him the floor, and when everyone\u2019s looking he\u2019s compelled \u201cto do something.\u201d\u00a0 He founded the National Youth Movement at age 15, was still a teenager when he began several years as road manager of the frenetically-talented James Brown, and he learned more about show business from flamboyant but not-always-forthright boxing promoter Don King. \u00a0In the political ring Sharpton, who as a youth studied the dashing Harlem Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, ran for the United States Senate in 1994 against incumbent Daniel Patrick Moynihan and earned 26 percent of the vote.\u00a0 Three years later he garnered 32 percent in the Democratic primary of the New York City mayoral race.\u00a0 His latest project is to open the Bakersfield branch of National Action Network, an organization he founded to work on African American concerns about education, police misconduct, decency in the media, race relations, and AIDS.\u00a0 That\u2019s a heavy agenda, the kind Al Sharpton has always craved.<\/p>\n In December 1986 three black men were riding through the Howard Beach section of Queens when their car broke down.\u00a0 After dining in a pizzeria, they emerged and were confronted by a mob of white teenagers who racially cursed them and chased them into traffic on the Belt Parkway where Michael Griffith was hit by a car and killed.\u00a0 Sharpton quickly organized his community and a week later led 1,200 primarily-black marchers through a horde of epithet-spewing whites in the streets of Howard Beach.\u00a0 Mayor Ed Koch called the crime a \u201cracial lynching\u201d and Governor Mario Cuomo appointed a special prosecutor.\u00a0 This was the first time many New Yorkers and most people in the United States had heard of Al Sharpton.<\/p>\n He was evidently so intoxicated by the publicity it soon shattered his judgment.\u00a0 In November 1987 Tawana Brawley, age 15, was discovered lying in a garbage bag in Wappingers Falls, New York.\u00a0 She had been smeared with feces, her clothes were ripped and burned, and racial insults written on her body in charcoal.\u00a0 Brawley accused six white men of raping her and holding her captive a few days.\u00a0 A vigorous investigation immediately began.\u00a0 Sharpton jumped onto the stage and, even as doubts emerged about Brawley\u2019s honesty, he accused several law enforcement officials, including assistant district attorney Steve Pagones, of committing the crime.\u00a0 He also \u201ccompared state Attorney General Robert Abrams, a Jew, to Adolf Hitler (and) linked Governor Mario Cuomo to organized crime and the Ku Klux Klan.\u201d<\/p>\n All the charges were preposterous.\u00a0 Forensic examinations proved Brawley hadn\u2019t been raped or even assaulted, and her good physical condition indicated she couldn\u2019t have been held captive outside a few days.\u00a0 Also, despite wearing charred clothes, no burns were found on her body.\u00a0 Furthermore, the upside down writing on her body indicated she\u2019d scribbled the epithets herself.\u00a0 The feces found on her came from a neighbor\u2019s dog.\u00a0 And some fellow students testified \u201cshe had attended a local party during the time of her supposed abduction.\u201d\u00a0 At Steve Pagones\u2019 press conference following his exoneration, Sharpton tried to barge in, shouting, \u201cYour accuser has arrived.\u201d\u00a0 Earlier he\u2019d said, \u201cWe\u2019ve stated openly that Steven Pagones did it.\u00a0 If we\u2019re lying, sue us, so we can go into court with you and prove you did it.\u00a0 Sue us \u2013 sue us right now.\u201d\u00a0 Pagones did indeed sue Sharpton and two accomplices \u2013 a fair characterization \u2013 for $150 million for defamation of character.\u00a0 The jury ruled Sharpton and the others had made defamatory statements and awarded Pagones $345,000.\u00a0 The $65,000 judgment against Sharpton was paid by friends.\u00a0 He still hasn\u2019t apologized to Pagones.\u00a0 To do so, ghetto-proud Al claims, would be \u201call about submission\u201d to white folk.\u00a0 Decency evidently isn\u2019t a consideration.<\/p>\n Al Sharpton the Good reappeared after an August 1989 racial crime in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn.\u00a0 A mob of white youths pounced on and beat four black teenagers, and one of the assailants used a handgun to murder 16-year old Yusef Hawkins.\u00a0 Sharpton organized and led several marches through Bensonhurst where watermelon-holding residents bombarded protestors with shouts, \u201cNigger go home.\u201d\u00a0 Several months later, when \u201cone of two leaders of the mob was acquitted of the most serious charges,\u201d Sharpton again protested with a march.\u00a0 And in January 1991, after other attackers received light sentences, Sharpton was once more preparing to march when a drunken resident, Michael Riccardi, rushed up and stabbed him in the chest.\u00a0 Despite sustaining serious wounds, Sharpton visited Riccardi in jail, telling his assailant that as \u201cpart of the generation of leaders after Martin Luther King, I have to be big enough to accept redemption.\u201d\u00a0 At the trial Sharpton urged the judge to be lenient.\u00a0 Riccardi received a sentence of five to 15 years and eventually served eight.\u00a0 \u00a0Sharpton visited him in prison where a contrite Riccardi asked to be forgiven.<\/p>\n Only seven months after his stabbing, Sharpton would have another opportunity to examine the choice between redemption and retribution.\u00a0 In the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, Yosef Lifsh was behind the wheel of a station wagon, trying to keep up with the police-escorted motorcade of the Grand Rabbi of Lubavitch, Menachem Schneerson.\u00a0 At an intersection his car collided with one coming from the side, and Lifsh\u2019s car careened onto the sidewalk and struck two seven-year old Guyanese children, Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela.\u00a0 Lifsh jumped out to administer aid to the seriously injured youngsters, but a crowd soon gathered and robbed and beat him.<\/p>\n When a private ambulance from a Jewish company arrived, police, who\u2019d also just come on the scene, ordered the driver to take Lifsh away not only for his safety but that of the now-besieged volunteer ambulance workers.\u00a0 A city ambulance had already been called, and soon arrived and took Gavin Cato to the hospital, but the child died.\u00a0 Blacks accused the police of racism and unequal treatment for the victim.\u00a0 Three days of rioting erupted.\u00a0 Fires were ignited, shops were looted, a police car was overturned, 110 people were arrested, blacks gathered in front of Lubavitch headquarters, yelling \u201cHeil Hitler,\u201d and a mob surrounded rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum who was then stabbed to death by 16-year old Lemrick Nelson.\u00a0 The assailant would later in court describe himself as the \u201cvictim.\u201d<\/p>\n Sharpton did not incite the riots.\u00a0 Tensions had long festered between blacks and Jews in the area, and members of each group had been set upon and either severely beaten or killed.\u00a0 But \u201cReverend 911\u201d did not cool tensions.\u00a0 At Gavin Cato\u2019s funeral he inveighed: \u201cWhat type of city do we have that would allow politics to rise above the blood of innocent babies?…Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights\u2026All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it.\u00a0 No compromise.\u00a0 Pay for your deeds\u2026It\u2019s no accident that we know we should not be run over.\u00a0 We are the royal family on the planet.\u00a0 We are the original man.\u00a0 We gazed into the stars and wrote astrology.\u00a0 We had a conversation and that became philosophy\u2026We will win because we are right.\u00a0 God is on our side.\u201d<\/p>\n Hallelujah, and remember during that period Sharpton also said, \u201cIf the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1995 it was still doubtful Al Sharpton had forgiven New York\u2019s large and prosperous Jewish community for, in fact, being large and prosperous.\u00a0 Ground zero started at Freddie’s Fashion Mart, a business owned by Freddie Harari, a Jew whose rent was raised by his landlord, a \u201cblack Pentecostal Church, the United House of Prayer.\u201d\u00a0 Harari in turn raised the rent of his subtenant, who by chance was black and had to move.\u00a0 An outraged Sharpton organized rallies to intimidate Jewish customers and bellowed, \u201cThere is a systematic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business\u2026I want to make it clear\u2026that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.\u201d\u00a0 Following three months of tormenting tactics, a deranged protestor, Roland Smith, charged into the store, shouting, \u201cIt\u2019s on now.\u00a0 All blacks out.\u201d\u00a0 He shot several people, burned the store down, then put a gun to his head, making himself the eighth victim.<\/p>\n This time Sharpton conceded he\u2019d erred but only in noting the \u201cinterloper\u201d was \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, by the turn of the century Sharpton\u2019s dynamism and political clout had coalesced with more moderate behavior to make him an essentially mainstream figure.\u00a0 Perhaps his finest moment \u2013 and the tipping point \u2013 had come in 1999 when Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, was murdered by police.\u00a0 Sharpton spearheaded numerous protests but counseled: \u201cLet not a brick be thrown.\u201d<\/p>\n Former mayor Ed Koch called him a changed man. \u00a0Presidential candidates of the day Al Gore and Bill Bradley pressed his flesh and sought his endorsement.\u00a0 Future senatorial candidate Hillary Clinton twice invited him to the White House.\u00a0 In 2004 he ran for president and, despite attributing his loss in the South Carolina Democratic primary to the vote count being \u201cJewed,\u201d was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention.\u00a0 On this international stage, his performance was clever and overpowering, as in a Bakersfield church on a recent Sunday.<\/p>\n Sharpton\u2019s future achievements will not be limited by his detractors, no matter how unjust he may perceive them to be.\u00a0 If he is derailed it will likely be by the twin H-bombs of hubris and hypocrisy.\u00a0 The man who has hurled countless racial invectives has anointed himself the moral arbiter of correct language on the airwaves, and already attacked (and defeated) radio comedian Don Imus who at least was trying, however ineptly, to be funny when he called Rutgers women\u2019s basketball players \u201cnappy-headed hos.\u201d\u00a0 Has Al Sharpton generally been joking when he\u2019s made his cutting racial remarks?<\/p>\n Sources \u2013 Al Sharpton\u2019s sermon in Bakersfield on June 24, 2007; Wikipedia: Al Sharpton, Crown Heights Riot, and Tawana Brawley rape case; National Review: Jay Nordlinger articles “Power Dem in March 2000” and “Poisonous and Brilliant” in July 2004; Village Voice: “Al Sharpton\u2019s Jewish Problem” by Richard Goldstein in November 2001; Capitalism Magazine: “Al Sharpton: The Democrat\u2019s David Duke” by Jeff Jacoby in February 2003; Salon.com: “You can call me Al” by Keith Moore in July 1999; RealChange.org: “Al Sharpton\u2019s Skeleton Closet.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Later on we\u2019ll talk about Al Sharpton the bold political activist and brazen race baiter, the man who strives to build communities and the one who\u2019s addicted to public controversy.\u00a0 Right now it\u2019s Sunday morning and none of that matters.\u00a0 Reverend Al has come to Bakersfield and is somewhere in the church.\u00a0 The pews are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,387,28],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n