The Fight For Might

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The idea came to him, Sharpton says, while he sat under a tree seeking relief from the Sudanese sun. "I feel that the Democratic Party must be challenged in 2004 because it didn't fight aggressively to protect our voting rights in Florida," he says. "I think we need to look at running a black in the primary. I have said I would be available to do it." It remains to be seen how much appeal Sharpton would have outside New York City, where his peaceful protests after police shootings have quieted some, but hardly all, of the deep qualms aroused by his rabble rousing during the 1980s. Many people will never forgive him for claiming, with no evidence, that a young white prosecutor named Steven Pagones took part in the rape of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager whose story has been thoroughly discredited. A group of black businessmen has paid the $65,000 defamation judgment Pagones won from Sharpton in 1998. But Sharpton has yet to apologize to him.

The Rev. Al has evolved into a masterly manipulator of New York's tabloid press and an astute political power broker, but his army of critics charges that he has not outgrown a tendency to play the crassest kind of racial politics. Case in point: the convoluted New York imbroglio this month in which Sharpton was reported to have offered to endorse Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer--a Puerto Rican who's trying to win the Democratic mayoral nomination by building a coalition of Latino and black voters--if and only if Ferrer backed a slate of black candidates Sharpton favored. The New York Times reporter who wrote the story, Sharpton says, left out the fact that his list of candidates included a "progressive" white. "I've grown too much to fall into the trap of seeming to be for some black-only thing," he says.

The real issue is whether the one-leader-fits-all model of black politics still makes sense. Back in Douglass's day, the overwhelming majority of blacks were slaves who could not speak for themselves. Even at the time of King, the movement to tear down segregation so overshadowed every other item on the black agenda that having one figure to symbolize its urgency was almost inevitable. But the black America of 2001 is vastly different--an increasingly middle-class, multifarious ethnic group whose interests extend far beyond civil rights. There is no way for any single leader, no matter how gifted, to represent its conflicting, complicated concerns. A majority of blacks, for example, favor experiments with school vouchers, but Jackson opposes them. In what sense can he be said to be speaking for black people on this issue?

Both Jackson and Sharpton pay lip service to the idea of broadening black leadership, but their actions contradict their words. Sharpton is convinced that Jackson cut short his sabbatical simply because he could not bear to be out of the limelight. Sharpton is no less eager for publicity. Their showdown promises to generate endless gossip and reams of breathless coverage. But in the end, it's just a sideshow. Given the growing diversity and power of the black community, it may no longer need an HNIC at all.

--With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards/New York