Is Al Sharpton a pampered celebrity – just like Paris Hilton? Of course he is, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to talk radio puffers Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. The teenage researchers these wealthy gabbers employ will never find the truth about Al Sharpton with a computer search engine. I, on the other hand, am older than all of them and my memory is sharp. I also collect newspaper articles and books, one of which is Al Sharpton’s autobiography, titled Go and Tell Pharaoh, published in 1996. This endearingly candid book went straight to the bargain bins because Big Al’s core constituency is literacy challenged. I got my copy on e-bay from an obscure Texas bookseller. It was well worth the two bucks I paid for it because it revealed a thousand truths I had never heard on talk radio.
For example: Back in 1993 Big Al Sharpton was sentenced to forty-five days in the slammer for fomenting urban chaos in Howard Beach. He was a big-time repeat offender. As Al himself put it, “I’ve been arrested twenty times and jailed, for five days, five times . . . I never get a permit to march because I don’t think I should have to, I think it’s a human right to march. And every time someone asks me for a permit I say, ‘I got my permit on October 3, 1954, when they gave me my birth certificate. And I didn’t apply for that one.’” He feels a sense of entitlement. As long as his heart is in the right place he believes himself to be empowered to do whatever he desires.
So Sharpton had been begging for a jail sentence, just like Paris Hilton who went zipping about in her sporty Mercedes Benz on a suspended license after a drunk-driving conviction.
At his court hearing Sharpton was represented by C.Vernon Mason who had been his legal sidekick in the horrible Tawana Brawley hoax. Mason was barred from practicing law in 1995 because of “a pattern of professional misconduct.” When last heard from he was a seminary student.
On that morning in 1993, Mason rose to begin his legal blather when Judge Albert Koch reminded him that the time for disputation had long past: “Excuse me, Mr. Mason, there’s no argument here, you’ve stated all the arguments, you’ve lost the appeal, this is a surrender, turn the defendants over to the police.” According to Sharpton, “Everyone in the courtroom started screaming.” Recalled Big Al, “I was going to be gone forty-five days – at least thirty, you had to serve two thirds of it.” Wow, a forty-five-day jail sentence – just like Paris Hilton. To her everlasting credit Paris Hilton did not appear in court with a hyper-racist co-defendant.
Sharpton came to court with co-offender Charles Barron, a so-called “reverend” and former Black Panther Party storm trooper. Barron is now a New York City councilman. He’s renowned for such signature statements as, “I want to go up to the closest white person and say ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.” This revelation prompted laughter and applause from the thousands of black folks who had come to Washington, DC seeking reparations payments for something called slavery, which was something some of them had read about in some book. While Barron was busy ruminating about the health benefits of assaulting white people, vendors from the New Black Panther Party were busy pushing T-shirts that read “Kill Whitey.” Mr. Barron calls this “black hyperbole.” (Please don’t call it hate speech.)
On page 228 of his autobiography Al Sharpton recollects the special treatment he received from New York City’s one-and-only black mayor: “So we got in the paddy wagon and they took us to Rikers Island. Then they decided we shouldn’t stay there – apparently Dinkins was getting a lot of static that we had been sent to jail – and they moved us to the Brooklyn House of Detention.” So, who was giving Mayor David Dinkins “a lot of static” about Sharpton’s imprisonment? Maybe it was the same pool of black super millionaires who later paid Sharpton’s $87,000 debt to Steven Pagones, whom Sharpton had hideously defamed in the Tawana Brawley hoax.
Sharpton goes on: “They put us on a tier by ourselves, gave us a twenty-four-hour phone, and tried to get us to take work release, to only sleep in jail. Congressman Charlie Rangle even offered to have us work for him, he would supervise our activities.”
Sharpton spent ten days in the Brooklyn House of Detention on his personal tier. “Then Bill Lynch of the mayor’s office comes down and says that if we are given work release to my office, and agree to be back by ten at night, with me as my own supervisor, will I take that? And Barron could be his own supervisor as well. We agreed to take it. Charles and I are probably the first prisoners in history who were released to supervise our own work release.” [Emphasis added]
Fast Forward to 2007
The police stopped Paris Hilton again. She had been driving erratically. Her driver’s license had been suspended following a drunk-driving conviction. The papers called her an heir-head; adults called her pathetic; Judge Michael T. Sauer called her a repeat offender. Just like Al Sharpton, she didn’t believe that society’s rules applied to her personally. For violating the terms of her probation, Judge Sauer sentenced Ms. Hilton to forty-five days in slam. His decision included the hand-written notation, “No work furlough. No work release. No electronic monitoring.” In other words, Ms. Hilton was not to be offered any of the cushy alternatives that were pressed on Al Sharpton by New York’s black-power elite, including the city’s mayor.
After she had served a scant three days of her sentence at the women’s jail at Lynwood, California, Sheriff Lee Baca snapped an electronic monitoring device on Ms. Hilton’s ankle and sent her back to her $2.1 million mansion in the Hollywood Hills for 40 days. Sheriff Baca claimed that jail was just too stressful for Ms. Hilton. Upon hearing of her release, Judge Sauer observed that Sheriff Baca had no authority to countermand a court decision. The judge slapped the sheriff with a contempt-of-court citation.
Meanwhile, an indignant and noisy Al Sharpton pushed his way into the spotlight and declared, “I think that it’s both another glaring display of how race and money seem to get different treatments. There seems to be a different criminal-justice system for some than others.” Well, yes . . . If you are a pompous black celebrity blowhard with lots of super rich black friends and you live in a town with a black mayor, then you get a special floor all to yourself at the House of Detention, followed by a sweetheart work release deal that lets you supervise yourself . . . a sweetheart deal you can crow about in your autobiography.
The New York Times reported that “The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, decried Ms. Hilton’s release as an example of ‘double standards,’ saying consideration was given to a pampered rich girl that could never have been accorded an average inmate.” Sharpton had nothing to say about the special treatment accorded to fat, pampered, civil rights activists.
Said Sharpton: “I think that it gives a very bad signal when Ms. Hilton is treated any differently than any other parole violator in their county or in this country.” That’s real tough talk from a seasoned street agitator who served a lighter sentence than young Ms. Hilton now faces. Sharpton has been showered with favoritism by prison authorities; he was always isolated from danger; even his loudly publicized “prison fasts” were no more than doctor-supervised diets. His health was never in any danger as long as his momma Ada was bringing him lots of hearty soups to eat.
The bloated hypocrite jabbered on: “Though I have nothing but empathy for Ms. Hilton whom I have met and appeared with on Saturday Night Live the night I hosted in 2003, this early release gives all of the appearances of economic and racial favoritism that is constantly cited by poor people and people of color.” How sweet. Sharpton sticks a knife into her back even as he seeks to elevate his own social stature by reminding everyone that he once appeared on the same stage with her. He doesn’t mention the extravagant favoritism that was offer to him by the black power elite that ruled New York City. Why is he so forgetful now; he crowed about it in his book. Again: “Charles and I are probably the first prisoners in history who were released to supervise our own work release.” Racial and economic favoritism doesn’t get any more blatant than this.
Judge Michael Sauer ordered Paris Hilton back to prison to serve the remainder of her sentence. In contrast, Mayor Dinkins, in a deep genuflection to “the black community” sent an emissary to beg Al Sharpton to accept history’s cushiest work release program. Paris was guilty of driving with a suspended driver’s license; she says that she didn’t understand the terms of her probation, but stupidity is no defense. Al Sharpton was guilty of fomenting social chaos just because he was in the mood to do so. In his own way, Al Sharpton is as emotionally immature as Paris Hilton. This pneumatic egoist isn’t even a reverend as most people understand the definition of that word.
Who Is This Guy?
Al Sharpton never attended any seminary college, not even for a minute, and certainly not for the brief six months that Jesse Jackson loitered in seminary school before dropping out.
On page 10 of his autobiography Mr. Sharpton acknowledges: “I never had a private life. But I always knew how to attract attention, I grew up attracting the attention of the crowd. I grew up understanding the psychology of standing out. And I understood the emotions of people.” Would any of us be surprised if Paris Hilton had uttered these exact words?
Mr. Sharpton offers us deeper insight: “I started preaching when I was four years old, but I remember coming home from church when I was even younger than that, about three, and taking all my sister’s dolls and lining them up in my mother’s bedroom and preaching to them, just as I’d seen our pastor, Bishop Frederick Douglass Washington, do at church that morning. Then I would go and put on my mother’s wig and sing whatever the bishop’s wife and our music director, the great gospel singer Ernestine Washington, had sung at the service . . . I did that for weeks. My father did not like it . . .”
Mr. Sharpton continues, “I was ordained and licensed as a minister in the Pentecostal Church when I was ten . . . I was officially a ‘reverend.’” He reflects: “It wasn’t until I got older that I understood it [ordination] empowered you to marry people and bury people and all that. At ten years old, it was just a certificate to me. I was glad to have it, but I didn’t understand it.”
Got that? At age ten Al Sharpton was ordained a clergyman without understanding what his ordination implied. He was clueless. In the years since he has simply invented what he imagines it means to be a clergyman. He has become the self-invented monster we witness today: the fulminating bigot who broadcast anti-Semitic hostility from radio stations that encouraged thousands of blacks to travel to New York City’s Crown Heights neighborhood and indulge themselves in a days-long orgy of rampaging arson, mayhem and murder. As the city’s black police commissioner kept his officers at a distance and the mayor repeatedly referred to the rioters as “demonstrators,” the black mobs that Sharpton had inspired chanted “Get the Jews!” Black mobs lynched two white men: Yankel Rosenbaum and Anthony Graziosi, whom they mistook for a Jew.
Sharpton’s inflammatory racist rhetoric inspired the slaughter of eleven people at Freddy’s Fashion Mart, all because Sharpton didn’t want whites doing business in the black holy land of Harlem. He calls the Jews “diamond merchants,” he disparages white and Korean businessmen as “interlopers,” he is derisive of “them Greek homos,” and he extols black racial exceptionalism, repeatedly referring to blacks as The Original Men, an expression lifted whole from Wallace Fard’s ultra-racist theology of the Nation of Islam, a.k.a the Black Muslims, which preaches that the white race was invented by a demented black geneticist named Yacub for the sole purpose of bedeviling black people.
It was the racist racial incendiary Al Sharpton who fomented surprise “parades” in New York ethnic neighborhoods that provoked racial unrest, riots and lingering racial hostility. For all that, he was given a mere 45 days in jail as a repeat offender, only to be rescued by the prissy and weak-kneed David Dinkins. And now this same racial incendiary is spouting rubbish about how Paris Hilton is a symbol of twisted justice in America. That’s perfectly Sharpton. In a republic that was less weird than ours, uber-racists who inspire public lynchings with their hateful rhetoric would get more jail time than silly, celebutantes. But this is our America.
Someone other than me should have told you all this. If you ever get a moment with Hannity or Limbaugh or some other radio pitchman, tell them where to go to do their homework. I’m tired. I’m going back to my books in the basement.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2007
May 18,2007