In fact this came close to the heart of it: that it seemed, on the basis of the videotaped statements, fairly clear who had done what to whom was precisely the case’s liberating aspect, the circumstance that enabled many of the city’s citizens to say and think what they might otherwise have left unexpressed. Unlike other recent high-visibility cases in New York, unlike Bensonhurst and unlike Howard Beach and unlike Bernhard Goetz, here was a case in which the issue not exactly of race but of an increasingly visible underclass could be confronted by the middle class, both white and black, without guilt. Here was a case that gave this middle class a way to transfer and express what had clearly become a growing and previously inadmissible rage with the city’s disorder, with the entire range of ills and uneasy guilts that came to mind in a city where entire families slept in the discarded boxes in which new Sub-Zero refrigerators were delivered, at twenty-six hundred per, to more affluent families. Here was also a case, most significantly, in which even that transferred rage could be transferred still further, veiled, personalized: a case in which the city’s distress could be seen to derive not precisely from its underclass but instead from certain identifiable individuals who claimed to speak for this underclass, individuals who, in Robert Morganthau’s words, “sought to exploit” this case, to “advance their own private agendas”; individuals who wished even to “divide the races.”
If the city’s problems could be seen as deliberate disruptions of a naturally cohesive and harmonious community, a community in which, undisrupted, “contrasts” generated a perhaps dangerous but vital “energy,” then those problems were tractable, and could be addressed, like “crime,” by the call for “better leadership.” Considerable comfort could be obtained, given this story line, through the demonization of the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose presence on the edges of certain criminal cases that interested him had a polarizing effect that tended to reinforce the narrative. Jim Sleeper, in The Closest of Strangers, described one of the fifteen marches Sharpton led through Bensonhurst after the 1989 killing of an East New York sixteen-year-old, Yusuf Hawkins, who had come into Bensonhurst and been set upon, with baseball bats and ultimately with bullets, by a group of young whites.
An August 27, 1989,
Daily News
photo of the Reverend Al Sharpton and a claque of black teenagers marching in Bensonhurst to protest Hawkins’s death shows that they are not really “marching.” They are stumbling along, huddled together, heads bowed under the storm of hatred breaking over them, eyes wide, hanging on to one another and to Sharpton, scared out of their wits. They, too, are innocents — or were until that day, which they will always remember. And because Sharpton is with them, his head bowed, his face showing that he knows what they’re feeling, he is in the hearts of black people all over New York.
Yet something is wrong with this picture. Sharpton did not invite or coordinate with Bensonhurst community leaders who wanted to join the march. Without the time for organizing which these leaders should have been given in order to rein in the punks who stood waving watermelons; without an effort by black leaders more reputable than Sharpton to recruit whites citywide and swell the march, Sharpton was assured that the punks would carry the day. At several points he even baited them by blowing kisses …
“I knew that Bensonhurst would clarify whether it had been a racial incident or not,” Sharpton said by way of explaining, on a recent Frontline documentary, his strategy in Bensonhurst. “The fact that I was so controversial to Bensonhurst helped them forget that the cameras were there,” he said. “So I decided to help them…. I would throw kisses to them, and they would go nuts.” Question, began a joke told in the aftermath of the first jogger trial. You’re in a room with Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Al Sharpton. You have only two bullets. Who do you shoot? Answer: Al Sharpton. Twice.
Sharpton did not exactly fit the roles New York traditionally assigns, for maximum audience comfort, to prominent blacks. He seemed in many ways a phantasm, somebody whose instinct for the connections between religion and politics and show business was so innate that he had been all his life the vessel for other people’s hopes and fears. He had given his first sermon at age four. He was touring with Mahalia Jackson at eleven. As a teenager, according to Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, M. A. Farber, E. R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff, the New York Times reporters and editors who collaborated on Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, Sharpton was tutored first by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (“You got to know when to hit it and you got to know when to quit it and when it’s quittin’ time, don’t push it,” Powell told him), then by the Reverend Jesse Jackson (“Once you turn on the gas, you got to cook or burn ’em up,” Jackson told him), and eventually, after obtaining a grant from Bayard Rustin and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm, by James Brown. “Once, he trailed Brown down a corridor, through a door, and, to his astonishment, onto a stage flooded with spotlights,” the authors of Outrage reported. “He immediately went into a wiggle and dance.”
It was perhaps this talent for seizing the spotlight and the moment, this fatal bent for the wiggle and the dance, that most clearly disqualified Sharpton from casting as the Good Negro, the credit to the race, the exemplary if often imagined figure whose refined manners and good grammar could be stressed and who could be seen to lay, as Jimmy Walker said of Joe Louis, “a rose on the grave of Abraham Lincoln.” It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the familiar role — assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell — of the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being. It was, for example, repeatedly mentioned, during the ten days the jury was out on the first jogger trial, that Sharpton had chosen to wait out the verdict not at 111 Centre Street but “in the air-conditioned comfort” of C. Vernon Mason’s office, from which he could be summoned by beeper.
Sharpton, it was frequently said by whites and also by some blacks, “represented nobody,” was “self-appointed” and “self-promoting.” He was an “exploiter” of blacks, someone who “did them more harm than good.” It was pointed out that he had been indicted by the state of New York in June of 1989 on charges of grand larceny. (He was ultimately acquitted.) It was pointed out that New York Newsday, working on information that appeared to have been supplied by federal law-enforcement agencies, had in January 1988 named him as a federal informant, and that he himself admitted to having let the government tap his phone in a drug-enforcement effort. It was routinely said, most tellingly of all in a narrative based on the magical ability of “leaders” to improve the commonweal, that he was “not the right leader,” “not at all the leader the black community needs.” His clothes and his demeanor were ridiculed (my husband was asked by Esquire to do a piece predicated on interviewing Sharpton while he was having his hair processed), his motives derided, and his tactics, which were those of an extremely sophisticated player who counted being widely despised among his stronger cards, not very well understood.