JUST LOOK AT REV. AL — with his processed Mother-Popcorn tresses, that canary yellow shirt sheathing the brick-oven belly, and the neckwear explosion that could pass for a Maryland state flag jammed into a six-button sausage casing. Say this for the new gear, it beats the living hell out of his old Le Coq Sportif sweatsuits and Richard Roundtree medallions.
But the man has a charm that’s all his own, sitting on the stage of the Israel Baptist church in northeast Washington on the eve of his planned ” prayer vigil” in front of Clarence Thomas’s house. To hear Al Sharpton tell it, not since Plessy v. Ferguson has such injustice been perpetrated by the Supreme Court, what with Thomas lending his highly treasonous vote throughout last summer’s spate of decisions against affirmative action, minority set-asides, and voter districts drawn on the basis of race. For God’s sakes, Thomas has set The Movement back 30 years (Sharpton still calls it “The Movement,” as if he’s just off the Selma red-eye). “I remember growing up reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” barks Sharpton. “Now I get to see it.”
With a chorus of well-wells and ah-yeahs, Sharpton’s in his groove, holding the assemblage in the palm of his puffy hand like a buttered cob fresh out of the shuck. He’s dropping quips and couplets, popping and zinging and growling and gurgling — and launching a froth-like projectile that hits this reporter some seven rows back and 30 feet away.
From his front-man performances in hot-button racial cases ranging from the slaying of Yusuf Hawkins to the fabrications of Tawana Brawley, Sharpton has had cause to see it all, wobbling straight into the belly of Klan country, or worse still, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where his face-off with the angry Sons of Sicily once earned him a knife in the chest. Now, on this outing, he was packing the troops off to the battlefields of . . . suburban Fairfax County, Va.? “We’re going to make a house call on a very sick and ill brother,” Sharpton explained.
At issue as much as Thomas’s votes were seemingly benign quotes given to black talk radio host Armstrong Williams, such as: “You cannot embrace racism to deal with racism, it’s not Christian,” and, “If I write racism into law, then I am in God’s eyes no better than they are.”
“Clarence could’ve gotten away with a lot, but when you’ve brought God into it, Clarence, then we’ve got the right to come ring your bell,” said Sharpton, who’d been planning the drive-by nearly a month before these comments appeared. “The main beneficiary of affirmative action was white women,” he continued. “In fact, if we check, his wife may have an affirmative action job. ” Sharpton brought the house down by denouncing the company Thomas keeps. ” His only black friend is Armstrong Williams, which means he don’t have no black friends,” Sharpton said. “[Armstrong] couldn’t get 20 Negroes together if he was passing around free fried chicken.”
Over 600 people turned out for the vigil, many caravanning from as far away as New York or Atlanta, then enjoying a police escort from Israel Baptist to Thomas’s bucolic spread. I freedom-rode with former D.C. delegate and longtime pastor of D.C.’s New Bethel Baptist Church, Rev. Walter Fauntroy, sitting shotgun in a church van worth about one-third as much as his watch.
In the hour-long excursion, Fauntroy, who recently pled guilty for falsifying a financial report to Congress over a church donation, told me how O. J. was framed by “senseless fascists,” James Earl Ray was innocent, the black community is due reparations from all non-black taxpayers because of slavery’s legacy, and how he almost set Clarence Thomas straight during his confirmation hearings: “He said, “I’m a Supreme Court Justice for life, is that what you’re telling me? Then I’m going to do right.” And he’s disappointed me because he hasn’t.”
We rolled past the Clifton Pottery Shop, with its birdbaths, fountains, and acrylic lawn ornaments, up to Thomas’s development. Turned out the police had blocked off Thomas’s street, at the homeowners’ request, keeping us a quarter- mile from his residence.
Sharpton worked the bullhorn as timid hausfraus, hauling their kids to soccer practice in Plymouth Voyagers, navigated past bowed-armed, bristle- headed cops and the well-ordered, spiritual-singing throng. Dick Gregory had said, “You can never humiliate someone with prayer.” But with God on their side (Sharpton: “So many ministers who are in the God business clearly say that he is off base. . . . It is not the will of God that he vote against affirmative action”), they gave it a fair shot.
In the course of the two-day extravaganza, alternating clergy deemed Thomas “an educated fool,” “a pygmy in a high place,” an “oreo cookie” “ungrateful, despicable, and gutless,” “wide-nosed, big-jawed and big-eared” “a disgrace to the Negro race.” And when Sharpton scoffed at the paddy wagons and marshals surrounding his house as if such activities were commonplace, Gregory himself said, “They got that because they thought Mark Fuhrman was coming looking for a nigger with a white lady” — causing a gleeful eruption.
This, after Sharpton recited Matthew 21:22: “And all things whatsoever ye should ask in prayer believing, ye shall receive.” Nary a soul brought up the earlier passage in Matthew, chapter 7, verse three, the one about the mote in your own eye. Consider the Sharpton in the field: “Clarence has to ask himself who he’s speaking for when he talks about God. . . . He uses his skin to give him immunity to say the most outrageous things.”
by Matt Labash
