An in-depth look at the “con man.”

Al Sharpton has been in the public limelight for just over 30 years – ever since he first burst upon the scene by promoting the fake story of a white-on-black gang rape in upstate New York in 1987. But not until now has America had a president with enough courage to tell the nation exactly what Sharpton is: “Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” said Donald Trump on Monday. In response, Sharpton did the only thing he's ever really learned how to do: He accused the president of harboring “a particular venom for blacks and people of color.” What a surprise. “Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man,” Sharpton added. “I do make trouble for bigots.”

Let's take a brief look at some of the career highlights of this self-anointed “troublemaker for bigots” shall we?

Supporting a Communist Front and Angela Davis

The February 9, 1971 edition of the Communist Party USA newspaper Daily World, noted that Sharpton had recently addressed a White Plains, New York rally in support of a CPUSA front group called The Committee to Free Angela Davis. At that time, the Marxist revolutionary Davis was in prison for her role in abetting the murder of a California judge.



Sharpton Praises the Marxist Holiday, Kwanzaa



On December 24, 1971, the New York Times quoted Sharpton praising Kwanzaa, the race-centered winter holiday that had been recently established by Maulana Karenga, a Marxist black nationalist who had once been arrested for assaulting and torturing two women. The philosophy underlying Kwanzaa is known as Kawaida, a variation of classical Marxism that also includes enmity toward white people. Practitioners of Kawaida believe that one's racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances, and self-understanding” -- just as Marxists identify class as the determining factor of one's life conditions.



The Tawana Brawley Racial Hoax



Sharpton first entered America’s national consciousness on a large scale in November 1987, when he injected himself into the case of a 15-year-old black girl named Tawana Brawley, who claimed that she had been abducted and raped by a gang of six whites in Dutchess County, New York. Despite a complete absence of any credible evidence to support Miss Brawley’s story, Sharpton assumed the role of special adviser to the girl. In the autumn of 1988, after conducting an exhaustive review of the facts, a grand jury released its report showing beyond any doubt that the entire Brawley story had been fabricated, and that at least $1 million of New York taxpayers’ money had been spent to investigate a colossal hoax.



The Central Park Jogger Case

In April 1989, a 28-year-old white woman, dubbed the “Central Park jogger,” was brutally gang-raped and nearly beaten to death in New York’s Central Park by a group of black and Hispanic teenagers. Despite the defendants’ graphic and detailed confessions, which were captured on videotape and delivered mostly in the presence of their parents or guardians, Sharpton insisted that the boys were innocent victims of “a fit of racial hysteria” that was sweeping the criminal-justice system and all of American society. Charging that the jogger’s boyfriend was the real rapist in the case, Sharpton organized protests outside the courthouse where the five suspects were being tried, chanting, “The boyfriend did it!” and smearing the victim as a “whore!” All five suspects were convicted for their involvement in the crime and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 13 years. Their convictions would later be overturned in 2002 when another man, who was already serving a life prison sentence for other felonies, confessed to having committed the 1989 rape in Central Park. But there was never any doubt that all five of the original defendants had been intimately involved in the brutalization of not only the young woman, but of several other victims in Central Park that same night.



Racial Slurs Against Black Political Adversaries



In the early 1990s, Sharpton derided moderate black politicians with close ties to the Democratic Party as “cocktail-sip Negroes” or “yellow ni**ers.”



The Anti-Semitic Riots in Crown Heights



In the summer of 1991, Sharpton injected himself into the unrest that followed an August 19 incident where a Hasidic Jewish driver had accidentally run over and killed a 7-year-old black boy named Gavin Cato in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. Reporter/columnist Jeff Dunetz wrote that immediately after the child’s death: “A false rumor began to spread that the Hasidic ambulance crew had ignored the dying black child in favor of treating the Jewish men. This falsehood was later used by Al Sharpton to incite the crowd.”



Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights who had witnessed the riots of 1991, stated the following in a July 1994 sworn deposition: “Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”[1] According to the New York Times, more than 250 neighborhood residents went on a rampage that first night, mostly black teenagers, many of whom were shouting “Jews! Jews! Jews!” Three hours after the tragic crash, 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked by a gang of black teens who stabbed him to death. All told, Crown Heights was engulfed by race riots for three days and nights. Sharpton reacted to the chaos by repeatedly shouting the mantra, “No justice, no peace!” “We must not reprimand our children for outrage,” he declared, “when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”



Sharpton Derides Mayor Dinkins As a “Ni**er Whore”



During the administration (1989-93) of New York City mayor David Dinkins (an African American), Sharpton angrily denounced Dinkins (when the latter was unsupportive of Sharpton’s activism) in the following terms: “David Dinkins, you wanna be the only ni**er on television, only ni**er in the newspaper, only ni**er that can talk. Don’t cover them, don’t talk to them, ’cause you got the only ni**er problem. ‘Cause you know if a black man stood up next to you, they would see you for the whore that you really are.” (Click here for audio.)



On another occasion, Sharpton referred to Dinkins as “that ni**er whore turning tricks in City Hall.”



The Racist Kean College Speech



In 1994, Sharpton delivered an incendiary speech at New Jersey’s Kean College, where he said: “White folks was in the cave while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”



The Kean College speech also featured Sharpton explaining that America’s founders consisted of “the worst criminals, the rejects they sent from Europe … to the colonies.” “So [if] some cracker,” he continued, “come and tell you ‘Well, my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold you pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks.” Sharpton later defended his use of the word “cracker,” calling it merely a colloquial term used to describe a certain kind of equal-opportunity bigot: “It’s certainly not a racist term and certainly not an anti-Semitic term,” said Sharpton, “because a cracker hates [both] Jews and blacks.”



The Deadly Boycott of Freddy’s Fashion Mart



In 1995, Sharpton led his National action Network in a racially charged boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners announced that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer be subletting part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was also the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. (In the 1970s, Powell had been confined to a mental hospital after he had attacked a police officer with a lead pipe while shouting, “I am going to kill you, pig.” He eventually escaped from that hospital and, in the eighties, went on trial for breaking a Korean woman’s head during another protest.)



Powell and his fellow anti-Freddy’s protesters repeatedly and menacingly told passersby not to patronize the “crackers” and “the greedy Jew bastards [who are] killing our [black] people.” Some boycotters openly threatened violence against whites and Jews––all under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton, who referred to the proprietors of Freddy’s as “white interlopers.” The subsequent picketing became ever-more menacing in its tone until one of the participants eventually shot (non-fatally) four whites inside the store and then set the building on fire––killing seven employees, most of whom were Hispanics.



In the aftermath of that atrocity, Kareem Brunner, a black security guard employed by Freddy’s, testified to the State Supreme Court that he personally had heard the boycotters say such things as: “Kill the crackers”; “Get the Jew bastards”; “This block is for blacks only”; and “Get the Jew owners out.”



Appearance at a Socialist Scholars Conference



In 1998 Sharpton was a featured speaker at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York.



Speaker at the Million Youth March



Along with the notorious anti-Semites Malik Zulu Shabazz and Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Sharpton co-organized an infamous September 5, 1998 “Million Youth March” which was held in Harlem, New York and was sponsored by the New Black Panther Party. The event drew about 6,000 people and ended in clashes between the attendees and city police. Just prior to the rally, Shabazz had threatened to kill any police officers who might be tempted to “interfere” with the proceedings. Then, in his address to the marchers, Shabazz stated: “The only solution any time there is a funeral in the black community, is a funeral in the police community.” “I don’t care what the Jews say,” he added. “You [blacks] are the only people that have been in bondage for over 400 years. You are the true chosen people of God, and it is not the so-called Jew.” Sharpton, in his own remarks to the crowd, praised former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed as well as Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and Khalid Abdul Muhammad.



“Redeem the Dream” Rally



In August 2000, Sharpton held a “Redeem the Dream” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, where one of the featured speakers was Malik Zulu Shabazz. At that event, Shabazz called on black young people, including “gang members,” to unite against their “common enemy” — “white America” and its allegedly racist police departments. He also articulated a “black dream that when we see caskets rolling in the black community … we will see caskets and funerals in the community of our enemy as well.”



Sharpton’s Closeness to Khalid Abdul Muhammad



In February 2001, when Khalid Abdul Muhammad died in a hospital as a result of a brain aneurysm he had suffered, Sharpton was at Muhammed’s side. He then gave Muhammad’s family $10,000 to help cover his funeral expenses. Among the more noteworthy things Muhammad had said during his career as an activist:

He said that Jews had provoked Adolf Hitler when they “went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped.”

He declared that blacks, in retribution against South African whites of the apartheid era, should “kill the women,…kill the children,…kill the babies,…kill the blind,…kill the crippled,…kill the faggot,…kill the lesbian,…kill them all.”

He praised Colin Ferguson, a black man who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters (killing six of them) in a racially motivated 1993 shooting spree aboard a New York commuter train, as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.”

He advised blacks that “[t]here are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.”

The Duke Lacrosse Case

In March 2006, a black stripper accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of having beaten, raped and sodomized her during an off-campus party. These charges triggered an instantaneous eruption of outrage among left-wing civil-rights activists. Sharpton, for his part, declared that these “rich white boys” had attacked a “black girl,” and warned that if arrests were not made immediately, there would be no peace. He further claimed that “this case parallels Abner Louima, who was raped and sodomized in a bathroom [by a New York City police officer] like this girl has alleged she was…. and just like in the Louima case, you have people here saying she fabricated it….” It later became evident, however, that the plaintiff’s charges were indeed entirely fabricated, and all charges against the defendants were dropped.



Disparaging Mormonism



When Mitt Romney, a Mormon, ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Sharpton said: “As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don’t worry about that; that’s a temporary situation.”



Praising the Council on American-Islamic Relations



In September 2012, Sharpton was a guest speaker at the annual fundraising banquet of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), where he called CAIR “one of the most important civil-rights organizations in the United States today.” Also addressing that same convention was Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Two years later, Sharpton keynoted the 2014 incarnation of this same CAIR event.



Sharpton Derides Black Political Adversaries As “Negroes”



In June 2016, Sharpton led a rally at his National Action Network headquarters in support of black Assemblyman Keith Wright, who at that time was running in a Democratic primary election as part of his quest for the House of Representatives seat that would soon be vacated by the retiring congressman Charles Rangel. At the rally, Sharpton derided Wright’s primary opponents, who also were black, in terms suggesting that he viewed them as race traitors: “You’re supposed to be attracted to these Negroes you ain’t never seen before,” said Sharpton. “I mean, they must have a laboratory to just create these Negroes.”



Conclusion: President Trump Was 100 Percent Right



In summation, it is clear that President Trump's assessment of Sharpton was entirely accurate. Sharpton is indeed a “con man” and a “troublemaker.” In fact, those words are far more charitable than a disgusting reprobate like him deserves.



NOTE:

[1] Jonathan Mahler, “Sharpton’s Image As New Moderate Dimmed by Video,” Forward (December 22, 1995), p. 4.