The man I call “Rev. 911,” Alfred Sharpton, did a good job this morning on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” He succinctly explained the difference between him and the others NPR interviewed this week in what the show called a “Debate On Black Leadership:” A leader, said Sharpton, “is anyone with a following.”

I’m not sure on how much of a “debate” it was; it seemed an interesting way to help NPR’s Juan Williams hawk his brand-new book “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It.” Williams definitely suffers from double-consciousness: he defends Black people well on “Fox News Sunday,” and he writes very good books on the Civil Rights Movement, Thurgood Marshall and historically Black colleges and universities, but has long had a problem with the other side of Black politics and culture—Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the like. I grudgingly admit that Williams does not have to pass any Black Leftist Activist Test of mine in order to write and speak about, and for, Black America. But Williams, who has regular access to America’s most prestigious mikes (and, coincidentally, 🙂 has no BLACK following that I’ve been able to see or find!), seems to want us to be “respectable”—to embrace the American flag and stop complaining. Fair enough—on the latter.  

I’m not going to re-hash the NPR series; you can listen to it here and make up your own mind. I just wanted to point out that Sharpton, unlike most Black pundits (and those interviewed for the series), actually has a history of confronting The Powers That Be for other people. Sharpton is far from a saint; I covered him in a Jersey City police-shooting-of-person-of-color case back in the early 1990s, and the slickness didn’t come from just the perm. But if I ever got in trouble, I know who I’d call. 

Now, if you want to hear a real NPR commentary on the state of Black leadership, check this out from the first incarnation of “The Tavis Smiley Show,” from 2004. It made me remember what I discovered when I went to a Harlem event with Sharpton back in 1991 or so–that Rev is just trying to fit into Adam Clayton Powell’s clothes. Whatever you think of that idea, perhaps that’s better than supposedly trying to chart the course of a people without their consent–or even agreement.