Les Payne
Who indeed are the black leaders these days? Two pretenders to the throne were to enlighten the National Association of Black Journalists last week in Indianapolis. The Rev. Jesse Jackson thought better of his appearance and left the defense to his erstwhile protege.
Proving that he is as immune to irony as he is to shame, the Rev. Al Sharpton strutted onto the stage as a panelist for the annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture. That most vital American scholar of the last century would likely have viewed Sharpton as a noisy answer for which there is no known question.
Luckily for the impressionable in the hall, a panel of journalists preceded Sharpton and broadened the beam of candidates. The clouds were salted with such names as Colin Powell, Harold Ford, Barak Obama, Corey Booker and even influential rappers. Rochelle Riley, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, looked locally. She emphasized the need for daily leaders, especially among the young – and she dismissed the headline-grabbing methods of Messieurs Jackson and Sharpton.
Sandwiched between a local Republican councilman and a Democratic Party operative, Sharpton said that the single black national leader, “a messiah,” was an undesirable media concept that never has occurred in America. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he reminded quite accurately, had Malcolm X, Whitney Young, Fannie Lou Hamer and other national rivals, and Du Bois in his day had Booker T. Washington.
No one disputes Sharpton’s skills as a talker, and he was in fine form, even as his own qualities as a black leader stood wanting and in sharp relief to the occasion of the Du Bois Lecture.
Sharpton took “the Jackson model of black politics to a new low,” Juan Williams writes in his new book about “phony black leaders,” titled Enough. Williams’ Sharpton indictment centers on his 2004 presidential run when, for some financial aid, the reverend reportedly leased some control of his Democratic campaign to Republican operative Roger Stone.
Sharpton’s campaign double-dealing, the latest in a career peppered with such treachery, was first reported in the Village Voice and other places. Williams, a Washington broadcast pundit, re-circulates the published findings that reveal Sharpton as a bought-and-paid-for GOP “mole inside the Democratic primary.” In this, the stump preacher resembles Williams’ D.C. buddy Armstrong Williams, who, despite his U.S. Department of Education kickback scandal, continues his deception as a black voice of reason in print, on stage and over the airwaves.
Journalists entertained by the Sharpton sideshow left the hall needing to enlighten themselves elsewhere on the question of black leadership.
A good start would have been the 37-volume works of Du Bois, edited by his friend and protege Herbert Aptheker. Perhaps best known for his book The Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois was a prodigious scholar and social activist. His methodical research of urban racial conditions, published in the book The Philadelphia Negro, was the first such scientific study and earned his reputation as one of the fathers of social science.
Du Bois knew a thing or two about leadership. A founder of the NAACP, Du Bois created and edited its Crisis magazine and was a visionary, pan-African activist against European colonialism. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, on the very day of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, D.C.
“History cannot ignore W.E.B. Du Bois,” Dr. King wrote, “because history has to reflect truth, and Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people.”
It is not known what King would have made of Sharpton, but we know what the martyred civil rights leader thought of Sharpton’s mentor, Jesse Jackson. Not much.