They should take this show on the road. 🙂 Sing along with me now: “Overture/Curtain, lights/This is it/The night of nights. No more rehearsing or nursing a part/We know every part by heart. Overture/Curtain, lights/This is it/We’ll hit the heights/And oh, what heights we’ll hit/On with the show, this is it!” LOL! 🙂

(Meanwhile, let’s peer past punditry for a minute. The first post-Katrina episodes of “This American Life” need to be heard (from) again. [On the main page, click on the “05” icon in the “Complete Archives” section. When you’re on the “Archives” page, scroll down to Show Nos. 296 and 297, clicking on the small megaphones next to the titles on the left-hand side.] Afterwards, move your mind ahead 365 days or so, because “News And Notes” has taken out the nice china. Farai Chideya‘s from-the-ground New Orleans stories from yesterday and today are required listening. [Is it just me, or is Farai is on her way to becoming a renaissance woman? :)] Anyway, her Katrina stories are airing this week on “N and N.”)

…………Richard Prince of “Journal-isms” fame has an update.

Here’s my unsolicited advice: Let our Brother Ed go back to television, since he now has that new Black Enterprise gig, and give FARAI the show. Yep. Makes sense, don’t it?

If you follow the MSM and/or news about people of color and you’re not reading “Richard Prince’s Journal-isms,” you’re wasting your online time. In his latest column, from the NABJ convention which began yesterday in Indianapolis, Prince updates the “News And Notes” story.

When “Eyes On The Prize” returns this fall to public television, check for the episode of “Eyes II” that starts with Amiri Baraka rapping about how Black people try to be Black, but they are prevented from doing so because there’s a white ghost on their shoulder or right behind them, warning that Black person of the consequences of the freedom to be oneself.

The current problems with National Public Radio’s “News And Notes” remind me of Baraka’s statement. The show is slowly fading, and host Ed Gordon may bolt.

I LOVE NPR’s “News and Notes with Ed Gordon” because it’s the only national Black news show that exists right now. On paper, it was a perfect match—NPR’s Mickey D-deep resources used to create a national Black perspective on the news. But here’s the problem: It’s a Black show produced by Black people on a white network funded personally and institutionally by liberal-to-moderate white people. So how do you pull off a Black “All Things Considered” for an audience who may not want it? (Whether Black America wants news or not is another story.) How to do a weekday Black newsmagazine on white terms for white people and a few HBCU stations? It may not be possible, but as a devotee of both Black radio AND NPR, I will continue to wish for it anyway. We’ll see what my Pen Pal, Michel Martin, comes up with when her NPR show premieres later this year or early next year.

My unsolicited suggestion to the white folks at NPR: If you keep “News And Notes,” loosen it up. Let the producers color outside the hegemonic lines; surprise me with something I haven’t heard before–or put a NEW spin on something I have heard before. Keep the roundtable, but wrap around it more poetry, music, commentaries and documentaries. (Everyone chant with me, now: “More ‘Soundprint,’ Less ‘ Morning Edition!'”) And for gosh sakes, let the staff produce content that OFFENDS SOMEBODY, whydon’tcha? 🙂 The very vanilla “On The Media,” another of my favorite NPR shows, seems to do whatever it wants to do every weekend. Its hosts are not afraid to challenge either its interviewees or its own assumptions. It gives itself the freedom—there’s that idea again!—to be silly. So please give me a reason to listen to “News And Notes” other than to prove my racial loyalty. Exorcise the white ghost.

I liked yesterday’s Sharpton-NPR dialogue so much I’ve decided to put in here, in its entirety.

———-

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

All this week on MORNING EDITION we’ve been listening to the debate over black leadership in America. We’ve heard from a corporate CEO, Ann Fudge, NPR’s Juan Williams, and author and linguist John McWhorter.

Today we hear from one of the most high-profile members of that community, Reverend Al Sharpton. He joins us from Sharpton Studios in New York. Good morning.

Reverend AL SHARPTON (Civil Rights Activist): Good morning.

MONTAGNE: Now, you may – in fact, you are the one person in our group of speakers who would commonly be identified as a black leader in the political sense and in the traditional sense. Do you think you are?

Rev. SHARPTON: I think a leader is anyone with a following. And I think that I lead an organization with a registered membership. I’ve run for public office and have demonstrated a base following. I think in that context, I guess I am.

MONTAGNE: Now you emerged on the national stage, if you will – you made headlines during a case about two decades ago involving a young black woman, a teenager, by the name of Tawana Brawley.

Rev. SHARPTON: That’s not true. The first case that went national, that I was involved in, was the killing of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach in 1986.

MONTAGNE: And that was young white men who killed him with a baseball bat when he was biking.

Rev. SHARPTON: Right. And ran him in front of a train, that’s right.

MONTAGNE: Right.

Rev. SHARPTON: Ran him in front of a car, I’m sorry. He went to a pizzeria at Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, and they said blacks should not be in the neighborhood, chased him with a baseball bat onto the Belt Parkway. He was run over. And when his family got in touch with me, we began a series of demonstrations and we were successful in getting a special prosecutor who in turn did convict people for that death.

MONTAGNE: Why did they come to you? You were in your early 30s at the time.

Rev. SHARPTON: I had a civil rights organization that was very active and high-profile. People come to civil rights organizations because they are seeking help, one, to expose their problem, and B, to stand up and put pressure on the system for them.

I’m sure that the reason – Howard Beach 20 years later, we just had the case of Glenn Moore, who was beaten up in Howard Beach and there was just a conviction in New York on that about a month ago with Fat Nick. The reason his parents came to me, probably, is because if you look at Howard Beach, one, or Bensonhurst, or Abner Louima, or any number of cases that we got involved, we successfully put pressure on the system and got some measure of justice.

So I guess people go to people that they, one, see have a track record, and two, fill the needs of what they are looking for at the time.

MONTAGNE: Now, part of your track record, and you know it better, I would say, than anyone else, is that you’ve been charged with being everything from an ambulance chaser in terms of cases like this, to Reverend Soundbite. Why do you think that you get that sort of reaction from some people, including people in the black community, when earlier civil rights activists never seemed to get tagged with those sorts of criticisms?

Rev. SHARPTON: Well, to name one, Jesse Jackson has had best-selling books written against him, called Shakedown. Are you kidding? Jesse Jackson is…

MONTAGNE: Well, later. Later. But when he was young and coming up in the world of civil rights…

Rev. SHARPTON: No, when he was young, coming up, the first book, Barbara Reynolds, the first biography on Jesse Jackson, Barbara Reynolds, a black writer, wrote against Jesse Jackson. Not true. Martin Luther King was constantly attacked by black commentator Carl Rowan. Most civil rights leaders are never given credit until they’re dead.

The real question becomes why these guys cannot explain why victims come to us and why we have built a following and an organization that has sustained past all of them.

MONTAGNE: Why do – why do victims, as you call them, come to you?

Rev. SHARPTON: Because I think victims go to where they feel people have the expertise and the track record to do what they want. And what they want is someone to stand up for them, to command public attention on their issue, and get some justice for them. There’s always somebody that not only wasn’t involved, didn’t even support the fight. They want to sit by in some studio and give commentary on something that they know nothing about, which is why I say I don’t understand the point.

MONTAGNE: One of the points is this: there are black commentators out there who argue that some leaders delight in feeling that their followers are victims.

Rev. SHARPTON: Well, I mean, again, I don’t know the commentators, most of whom have never talked to me, and some of the people they attack. They’re trying to sell books. And let them sell books. And…

MONTAGNE: Well, well, let’s just get to it. Do you view people who would follow you, do you view part of leadership as carrying the load, if it will, for victims, or do you view it as a way of empowering people?

Rev. SHARPTON: Absolutely view it as a way of empowering people. In fact, you would not fight for them to get justice if you weren’t empowering them. And you wouldn’t do other things. I’ll give you an example. When you support, as I just finished the last two weeks fighting for Ned Lamont to get the Democratic nomination in Connecticut because he’s right on the issues against Lieberman, who was the victimization there? I mean, that’s absurd.

When we fight to stand up with Bill Cosby against what is negative in terms of the use of the music industry in our culture, and I went to FCC last year about the radio stations being used to pit one group against another in hip-hop, who’s the victimization there?

The reality is that we have fought against those in the music world and in other worlds that want to make money off the victimizing our community.

MONTAGNE: The publisher of New York’s black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, has written of you that while white media thought they were using Al Sharpton as a caricature, Al is using the media. Do you think you use the media?

Rev. SHARPTON: I think the media is part of how you address the broader body politic of this country. Media is like electricity. It could be good and light up the world or it could be bad and burn it down. So you have a media strategy in every fight you do.

Yes, I’ve always tried to have the media strategy, even when it was negative media, to put light on situations that would not have gotten light. Sometimes that means they’re going to burn you, and they’re going to distort you and attack you. But your job is to get the attention.

MONTAGNE: Last question, Reverend Sharpton. What do you think will be the legacy of your leadership?

Rev. SHARPTON: I hope the legacy will be that in the latter part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, when many people felt that the human rights and the civil rights struggle was waning, that there were those soldiers that stayed on the battlefield to fight to preserve voter rights and civil rights and to fight against unjust wars, and Al Sharpton was one of the soldiers that stayed on the field.

They will not say – they cannot say I was a perfect man. They cannot say that I was a flawless man. They may not even say that I was a good man. But they can say, he was on the battlefield. He fought in his day, in his generation. And those that were before him, he tried to live up to their expectations. That’s all.

MONTAGNE: Thank you for joining us.

Rev. SHARPTON: Thank you.

MONTAGNE: The Reverend Al Sharpton is an activist based in New York.

You can hear equally vehement opinions about the state and nature of black leadership on our Web site. CEO Ann Fudge, Mayor Corey Booker and other guests in our series are at npr.org.

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.

Got my newsletter in the mail yesterday. Regardless of the European name, the Prometheus Radio Project is doing Shango’s work. 🙂 The project is an activist group attempting to provide the world’s voiceless and informationally disenfranchised with low-power radio stations. I was very impressed with its presentation when I first learned about the project at a Washington, D.C. meeting of Consumers Union earlier this year. If I return to Howard University this fall, I plan on using the DVD the project’s leaders were kind enough to give me. It showed the project and a small group in Tanzania jointly create such a station for a particular community. Helping people to find their voices and to informationally control their communities—particularly in the African World—is vitally important work in the Information Age.