The space filled by Al Sharpton’s prayers and politics - Washington Post

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The Rev. Al Sharpton began his remarks the way that so many ministers do. For the first few minutes that he stood at the lectern in his dark suit with a handkerchief billowing from his breast pocket like a cumulus cloud, he cleared his throat. He did so by first acknowledging the other clergy who were present at the Monday afternoon funeral of Andrew Brown Jr. Then he expressed his condolences to Brown’s family and other mourners who had experienced similar losses.

Sharpton had flown into Elizabeth City, N.C., to eulogize Brown, who was killed by law enforcement officers as they were serving him with arrest warrants. He had done the same for George Floyd. And Daunte Wright. And now for Brown. This preacher with the gray, combed-back hair speaks of the con man’s game of three-card monte, as well as the Bible’s blind beggar, Bartimaeus. Sharpton is both pastor and street-wise, a combination he embodies with verbal eloquence, aesthetic flourishes and political self-awareness.

“When I landed, we were outside the airport and the guys got on the radio talking about, ‘I hope Al Sharpton don’t come here and start nothing.’ Well y’all do justice. Otherwise, I’ll be back over and over and over again,” Sharpton said as he was warming up to his audience. “The nerve of you. The audacity to take somebody’s life, to rob children of their father and you try to act like the issue is who came to help them rather than what you did to them.”

Sharpton is the imperfect messenger forever on-call for families whose search for justice — or simply the truth — is often met with jargon, dead ends and a verbal pat on the head from a legal bureaucracy that tells them to be both patient and calm. Sharpton talks like a grass-roots agitator, one who promises never to go away. But he’s also a pragmatist, one who’s pushing for the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. He shares history with the old-school civil rights advocates who swooped into hot spots and courted the attention of whoever happened to be in the White House. And for some, he remains the outside agitator who is seen with derision and suspicion — forever the big man with the bouffant in the 1980s who believed and reiterated the discredited story that Tawana Brawley was the victim of racial and sexual violence.

In the thick of calls for police reform, Sharpton injects a sense of spiritual righteousness into his demands for action. He’s someone who quotes scripture as readily as public policy. This protester from an older generation gives public props to the new marchers who call for social justice — and who do so without a prologue of prayer or a reading from the New Testament.

Yet even as new voices step to the microphone, and different times demand different tactics, Sharpton fills a space.

He has the ability to speak in intimate terms about victims he does not know by drawing on a feeling of heartbreak and exhaustion that he does. He places victims within the timeless context of biblical doctrine even as he cuts to the exigent politics of a movement. He shifts from the street corner to the pulpit in a single sentence. He is the de facto senior pastor of a leaderless movement at a time when burying the dead is a statement about social justice and political capital as much as it is a rite of mourning.

“I had to come ’cause of who I am. I’m a minister called by God to talk about the signs of the times. And if I stand up with God, he’ll hold me up on every leaning side. And no weapon, no police department, no state trooper, no weapon formed against you shall prosper,” Sharpton preached.

“There is a God that sits highs, but he looks down low. And the God I serve stands up for the rejected, stands up for the abused. I know y’all rather have some victim that fits your model, but Jesus came for those that nobody else would come for. Jesus met the woman at the well that nobody wanted to be bothered with. Jesus met the man that was Bartimaeus, that was a begging blind man, that didn’t have affordable health care and he opened up his eyes,” Sharpton continued. “Jesus met the hungry with a few loaves of bread and two little fishes. Jesus met those that were outcasts and were rejected.”

“I come in Jesus’ name to stand up for a Black man that might have had a record, but he had a right to live his life,” Sharpton said. “And in Jesus’ name, I will stand up for Andrew Brown, for George Floyd and for all that God gave life to.”

As bystanders’ videos and police body-camera footage thrust incidences of deadly force into the spotlight and into the public consciousness, the space that Sharpton fills only seems to expand. He delivers one eulogy and then flies off to give another. He arrives in his Sunday best and, in the middle of a weekday news cycle, roars about Jesus and injustice. Prayer may be powerful, but Washington is closer than heaven.

“This must stop. Enough is enough,” Sharpton said Monday. “How many funerals do we have to have ’fore we tell the Congress and the Senate that you’ve got to do something this time?”

Instead of offering reassurance that each day will get better and joy will come in the morning, Sharpton stands in the void — alongside the family. And personal grief takes on the tenor of a moral protest.

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The space filled by Al Sharpton’s prayers and politics - Washington Post
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