Al Sharpton As "Elder Statesman?" What A Joke!

One of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read was reportedly said by Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, who defended his hiring of Al Sharpton as guest anchor by calling him an "elder statesman." Give that man a medal for reaching such a lofty executive position while being a total moron - my apologies to morons everywhere. Al Sharpton - who sometimes is referred to as "Reverend" - is not an elder statesman. He is a race-baiting demagogue responsible for inciting the deaths of innocent people or is Mr. Griffin unaware of Sharpton's gory past?

Can it be possible that Mr. Griffin has not heard of Sharpton's involvement in the 1991 Crown Heights riots? Caribbean-American and African-Americans rioted for four days after a young Guyanese boy was accidentally killed by a Jewish man. During the riots, stores were looted; Jews were beaten in the streets, and a visiting Australian student Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered by a member of the mob shouting "Kill the Jew." Sharpton marched through Crown Heights with about 400 protesters (who chanted 'Whose streets? Our Streets!' 'No justice, No peace' 'Death to the Jews!')

Sharpton was also closely connected with the 1995 Freddie's Fashion Mart tragedy in Harlem. The store was operated by a Jewish man, Fred Harari, who had been ordered by his landlord to evict a subtenant, a black-owned store, The Record Shack. Ironically Harari's landlord was a black Pentecostal church, the Universal House of Prayer. Nevertheless, Sharpton led protesters against the eviction and shouted, "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."

One of the protesters, Roland Smith, entered Harari's store with a gun and flammable liquid and set the store on fire and shot several customers. Seven store employees died of smoke inhalation and Smith fatally shot himself. Although Sharpton expressed regret for making a racial remark, he denied responsibility for inflaming and provoking violence.

A few years ago, I was invited to cover a lunch meeting with Roy Innis, the Chairman of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and Dog the Bounty Hunter who had been suspended by the producers of his A&E cable show for making racial remarks. Innis was mentoring Dog to rehabilitate his reputation and during the lunch I heard details of the infamous 1987 Tawana Brawley incident for which Al Sharpton should forever be ashamed of.

Sharpton and Innis had been civil rights colleagues and former friends. Niger Innis, Roy's son and National Spokesperson for CORE told us that Al Sharpton had come to his father asking for help in the Tawana Brawley incident. He told him, "I'm in trouble." Roy Innis, however, wanted nothing to do with the racial hoax and refused to help. To me that would indicate that Sharpton knew that Tawana Brawley had fabricated her story of being raped and smothered in excrement by several white men including a police officer.

Sharpton, along with attorneys Alton H. Maddox and Vernon C. Mason had handled Brawley's publicity and claimed that officials all the way up to the state government were covering up the defendants. They named Steven Pagones, the Duchess County Assistant D.A., as one of the rapists and a racist. (Pagones later sued Sharpton for defamation and won but to this day Sharpton has never apologized.) The incident was later exposed as a gigantic hoax that was largely believed by members of the black community and others in the entertainment industry.

Roy Innis is one of the most genuine civil rights leaders and continues to this day to be the most unbiased and trustworthy. CORE is indeed a bona fide bipartisan civil rights organization and not an adjunct of the Democrat Party like the NAACP, although Innis is still a registered Democrat. That's probably why the mainstream media ignores CORE's noteworthy multiple achievements in global and national human rights issues. Recently Mr. Innis wrote an op-ed for Breitbart's Big Government in which he warned about jumping to conclusions and not letting the justice system complete investigations.

He wrote: "I have been having a strong sense of deja vu in recent weeks, as I've watched the media and the public take sides in the Dominique Strauss-Khan case. In 1987, many of us listened to the harrowing story Tawana Brawley was telling and assumed the worst of our law enforcement, public servants and neighbors. She said she had been raped by six white men, including police officers and a New York prosecutor. She said she had been smothered in feces and left for dead. It was unfathomable that a young woman would make up such a story. So we believed her, and we rallied behind her. It became black versus white, rich versus poor, and it was bad for our city.

"But Brawley did make it up, most of us have concluded. Maybe we couldn't have known that then. But having lived through it, we should all know better than to assume that a victim's sad story is absolutely true. The very fact that DSK's alleged victim, Nafissatou Diallo has taken her case to the media, rather than work her way through the court system, should raise red flags."

He concludes in his piece, "As a civil rights leader for close to half a century, I am deeply troubled by the racialist games that so many of my colleagues engage in. Just today, Reverend Herbert Daughtry held a press conference to stir the racial pot, by blindly calling for prosecutors to aggressively pursue charges against DSK. Just across town, Khadijah Shakur, who I've never heard of, but who is a member of some box top imitation of a civil rights group called the New Black Panther Party, held a press conference with a gang of 12 and played the race card by referring to Ms. Diallo as "the victim". I have been pleasantly surprised to see my old friend Al Sharpton has largely stayed out of the DSK case. Perhaps he has learned his lesson from Tawana Brawley and the Duke Lacrosse case. It is time for others to allow the law to determine guilt and innocence, and to end the practice of armchair juries."

If MSNBC wanted to hire a black anchor then why not recruit someone from the National Association of Black Journalists which is now up in arms at being passed over by an activist without a journalism background?

If MSNBC was truly concerned about representing the interests of the black community fairly they'd hire legitimate bipartisans like either Niger or Roy Innis as commentators. The proof that they never considered that option and instead hired the charlatan Sharpton proves that this news network is only interested in promoting the most negative and polarizing individuals in the black community. Isn't that true racism?

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com