President Obama’s meteoric political rise was built in part around his call for a new kind of civility in American public life — as he often put it, an environment in which people could “disagree without being disagreeable.” We support this goal, which is why we find it mind-boggling that his administration has sent not one, but five cabinet secretaries, to address the annual conference of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

It is easy to dismiss Sharpton, now an MSNBC host, as a harmless, buffoonish talking-head along the lines of Ed Schultz. But he isn’t. In 1995, the same National Action Network played a role in turning a Harlem landlord-tenant dispute into a deadly racial incident that killed seven.

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