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short – or is a clever vehicle for a struggling cable news network to attract viewers who might not otherwise turn to television for news or might not consider the issues he raises from an unabashedly liberal perspective. Regularly reaching more than 700,000 viewers each night, Sharpton’s hour-long “Politics Nation” on MSNBC is popular among
the most coveted demographic, people ages 25-54, and among blacks in general. Indeed, his show, a lead-in to primetime, helps make MSNBC the overwhelming favorite among blacks. According to Mediaite, MSNBC led cable giant Fox News by 1,100 percent among black primetime viewers in 2013.
For traditionalists, this is a nightmare – not so much because Sharpton has done anything particularly horrific, but, on the contrary, because he is succeeding at what he intends as an activist. Even a staunch critic, Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has had a road-to-Damascus conversion, pondering in a column his newfound admiration: “Who else could've made Trayvon Martin a household name?”
In his book, The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (Cash Money Content, 2013), Sharpton wrote: “What is a civil rights activist if not someone who is engaged to make a public issue out of something that otherwise would be ignored?”
He went further in an interview for the Morgan Global Journalism Review (MGJR). “Those that question my ability to get a message in front of the media don’t understand that in the 21st century to not be able do that makes you an inept activist, because we’re in a time where that forms public opinion,” he said, observing that the Tea Party has Fox News, the most popular talk radio shows and bloggers galore. “I’m not on television doing ‘The Rich and The Famous.’ I’m on there dealing with policy issues. I’m on there dealing with mobilizing people. And if I am able to use the media to do that that should be applauded particularly [because] that is exactly what the adversaries are doing.”
That Sharpton is on the air for more than a sound bite is a mystery to many who recall the Sharpton of the garish neon-colored jogging suits, bellowing “No Justice! No Peace!” and exhibiting no shame in being pictured in the tabloids with his hair in rollers at a beauty parlor; the Sharpton literally knocked on his behind during a heated exchange with another national civil rights veteran on the The Morton Downey Jr. Show; the Sharpton who was the inspiration for the hustling Rev. Reginald Bacon in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; the Sharpton who was a throwaway line in any number of television shows with plots involving racial conflict. (“Our local Sharpton was still out there preaching to the choir,” a character tells cops looking for anyone who might have been on the street to see a young white man killed in Harlem in a 2000 Law and Order episode.) That would have been, as Sharpton recalled in The Rejected Stone, “that period of wanting to be in the newspaper, rather than being more concerned about what I’m saying and whether I’m using it for good.”
A metamorphosis took place in plain sight sometime after an act of civil disobedience on the Puerto Rican island of
Al Sharpton's memoir focuses on his growth as an activist.
Sharpton, who grew up marching for civil rights, still finds it an effective, but not the only major tool for advocates.
Photo courtesy of AFP/Getty Images.