It’s not every day you meet a white man standing in the heart of Oakland’s toughest neighborhood, proclaiming that the nation’s most prominent African-American leader is quietly plotting the genocide of the black race. But that’s just what Don Grundmann was doing at a noisy, ragged street corner on December 11, just outside the Allen Temple Baptist Church on 85th Avenue. Amid the stray dogs and hard men who wandered between liquor stores, he stood dressed in a modest gray suit and handed out fliers accusing the Reverend Al Sharpton of using abortion to wipe black people from the face of the earth.
“Al Sharpton and Carol Braun are liars & fakes who are helping white racists to destroy the black community,” the flier read. “Please rebuke Al Sharpton and Carol Braun for their evil actions against the black community and humanity as a whole!” Grundmann wasn’t just here on a whim; while he pestered the crowd filing into the church, Sharpton was somewhere inside, getting ready to urge potential voters to put him in the Oval Office. As the faithful did their best to ignore Grundmann, his antics began to try their patience, and a security guard lost his cool. “Was you doing that when Bush was taking office too?” he snapped. “When Bush was taking office, was you doing that?”
Inside the gym at the church’s Family Life Center, campaign workers culled the herd of people like Grundmann — after all, there was room for only one eccentric crusader on the bill tonight. Hundreds of people milled beneath the fluorescent lights, from well-dressed African-American men to Quakerish white spinsters. They had come to hear the good reverend conduct the latest in a string of absurdly improbable campaigns for higher office — two for a Senate seat, one for mayor of New York, and now for Democratic candidate for president. And none of the punch lines that follow Sharpton around the country were on their minds this evening. In an era when a throwaway line about the South’s Good Old Days can cost you your position as Senate majority leader, Sharpton’s ability to weather scandal after tawdry scandal continues to amaze. Not even his antigentrification campaign of 1995, in which his rhetoric about “white interlopers” may have inspired a protester to burn down a Jewish clothing store and kill eight people, has tarnished his reputation among die-hard supporters. Now, as Jesse Jackson fades from the scene, Sharpton is using his latest campaign to inherit Jackson’s mantle as the nation’s moral leader on civil rights. F. Scott Fitzgerald may have crawled out of a gin bottle long enough to declare that “there are no second acts in American lives,” but he never met Al Sharpton.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who organized Sharpton’s appearance and bathed in the giddy applause as she accompanied him onstage, billed the event as a dispassionate forum to discuss burning issues of the day. But from the invocation by Nation of Islam minister Keith Muhammad to the opening gospel tune, the program was more tent revival than political discussion. Lee, Muhammad, and Allen Temple Pastor J. Alfred Smith may have sat onstage, but they were just window dressing; the night belonged to Sharpton. Still, “moderator” and talk-show host Ray Taliaferro couldn’t quite bring himself to endorse Sharpton, either. “In ten months and 22 days, we have an election,” Taliaferro boomed in a voice honed by years of secular sermonizing. “That’s the election where we will elect someone with decency, intelligence, with caring, with a patriotic sense of what this country’s all about, to replace the person we have in the Oval Office today!” As the crowd leaped to its feet and cheered, barely anyone seemed to care that Sharpton, who sat three feet away and clapped perfunctorily, will never be that someone.
That was the elephant stalking about the room: Al Sharpton can’t win. In fact, Sharpton has built a career out of not winning; every time he does better than expected, New York Democratic pols have to court him all the more to get out the black vote. But these people didn’t come out to advance the career of a Bed-Stuy kingmaker — they came to believe in something. These were people who have been left out in the cold like no others, thanks to years of Democratic Leadership Council strategizing, a Florida vote heist based on striking thousands of African Americans from the rolls of eligible voters, and a maddeningly slim margin of Republican victory in Congress. Now, as Sharpton ascended to the podium, they strained to find hope in what he said, to look past his cynical history and focus on the message.
Sharpton seemed to acknowledge this in his very first remarks. He swayed from side to side in his three-piece suit, mimicking the cadence of his words, and his eyes flared and swept over the heads of his audience, as he declared that this election was so much bigger than Al Sharpton. “This is not about who you elect!” he barked. “This is about what you believe in! We are engaged, on the domestic front, in a nonmilitary civil war. It began with the recount in Florida, it went from there to the redistricting in Texas, it went from there to the recall here in California. From recount to the redistricting to the recall, all to reject the principles of a democratic process in this country!”
Sharpton soon settled down into the same litany of gripes we’ve heard for years. He launched into a pro forma denunciation of Republican partisan fanaticism, the Democratic Leadership Council’s betrayal of its leftist bedrock, and the Iraq invasion as “21st-century colonialism.” It was all boilerplate liberalism — you can recite it in your sleep. Then the call-backs began. “That’s right!” “Preach it!” “Thank you!” The crowd leapt to their feet for another standing O every other sentence. These weren’t your usual enervated lefty sad sacks, milling about the ash heap of history and wondering how they found themselves so isolated. There was passion in the room, an urgency that breathed life into the most prosaic remarks Sharpton made. At the foot of the stage, a dozen different amateur videographers swept the room with their camcorders and digital cameras, eager to capture history in the making.
And if the crowd lapped up Sharpton’s more facile moments, they really got going when he hit a stride. “I was in New York on September 11,” Sharpton said, calming the room before building to his next flourish. “Over three thousand people died. Bush did not go after al-Qaeda and bin Laden. This December night, we still don’t have bin Laden. Now, I grew up in the ‘hood in Brooklyn. And there’s a lotta crime. When folks break into your house, and you call the police, and the police come, you send the police after who broke in your house! You don’t send them after the guy around the corner that was friends with your daddy twenty years ago! … We cannot find bin Laden, we have not found Hussein, we have not found the weapons of mass destruction. But I’m not surprised, ’cause I can’t find the votes in Florida that made him the president anyhow!”
The subsequent cheers didn’t spring from anything as simple as racial solidarity; fully 40 percent of the room was white, and those people shouted themselves as hoarse as anyone else. This was Oakland’s version of Angry Liberalism, the great wave of indignation that seems to define this election season. Ever since the Dukakis debacle, the Democrats have hewed to Clinton’s strategy of appealing to centrist soccer moms and capturing just enough battleground states to squeak by. But the years of triangulation and Democratic civility are over, at least for now. From Howard Dean’s momentum to the new lefty radio network that seeks to replicate Rush Limbaugh’s bomb-throwing, liberals everywhere are venting their spleen and vowing to fight as dirty as they claim right-wingers do. And even Hussein’s capture will do nothing to diminish this anger.
In a way, Sharpton’s very marginalization worked in his favor that night. He may not be taken seriously by the chattering classes, but this crowd — the teeming masses of Bay Area progressives, who have accumulated a litany of grievances over the years — feels just as marginalized as he does. They identify with Sharpton’s unhappy role as the butt of Beltway jokes, but they’re sick of laughing politely. It may not be smart politics; November is a long way off, and anger has not won a national election any time in recent memory. And many in this room will not cast their lot with Sharpton come election day. But tonight, they were his soldiers.
“My effort is to take those who have been ignored and marginalized!” Sharpton thundered as he drew to a conclusion. “Where they come to us for our vote, but don’t wanna deal with our issues! Where they treated us like mistresses, that they can have fun with us but they can’t take us home to mom and dad! In 2004, we either gonna get married, or we gonna find somebody else to run with!”
After a few more choice words, Sharpton had to run. He was late for a plane bound for Cincinnati, where he hoped to insert himself into the latest police brutality scandal, so he couldn’t stick around to press the flesh. But no one seemed to mind; in fact, they seemed giddy that a presidential candidate had at least shown up in Oakland, if only for ninety minutes. Besides, they had enough anger to sustain themselves without Sharpton. As the crowd wandered into the parking lot, Steve Wilkinson, a tall black man and financial adviser for thirty years, stood in the lobby and talked with a friend after the speech. They spoke of the conflict in Palestine, the power of the Israeli lobby, and of being “treated like shit” by cops like the ones in Cincinnati. When asked what Sharpton didn’t say that he should have, Wilkinson’s response was startling. “I would like to see the Democrats really start being more aggressive in attacking the current administration,” he said. “Talk about stuff like impeaching Cheney for all the crimes he committed. ‘Cause there’s enough evidence that’s proven that he’s committed atrocious crimes. Especially if you impeach a president for having oral sex, right? You’re gonna impeach a president for having oral sex, but you’re not gonna impeach somebody who lied about intelligence information to the president in order to start a war?”
Financial advisers for impeachment — it sounds like a new K Street lobby. Five years hence, the lefties may have gone back to sleep, and the Dems may have returned to courting soccer moms and NASCAR dads. But right now, this is Al Sharpton’s moment in the sun.
