The Fight For Might

By Jack E. White With Reporting By Tamala M. Edwards/New York

You bleed to death slowly in politics. As power and prestige ooze away, the hyenas around you grow bolder, until one of them finally gets brave enough to bring you down and take your place.

That is what has been happening to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the undisputed political leader of black America for the past generation, since the National Enquirer reported in January that he had fathered an out-of-wedlock child with Karin Stanford. She was the head of the Washington office of Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition during much of their four-year affair. In an attempt to refute the notion that he is mortally wounded, Jackson, 59, has been staging appearances with supportive ministers and Wall Street captains and issuing a barrage of sports cliches ("The ground is no place for a champion"). He obviously continues to enjoy a deep well of support among African Americans. But there's also no doubt that the hyenas are moving in. Or that the leader of the pack is the Rev. Al Sharpton, 46, the flamboyant former provocateur from New York City who was once Jackson's protege and is now his biggest rival.

The stage is being set for the next phase in the struggle for the leadership of black America. That struggle began in slavery, when the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass emerged as the first unquestioned spokesman for the African-American agenda. Over the decades, the battle to inherit Douglass's mantle sparked epic struggles, such as the early 20th century clash between the accommodationist Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, the militant founder of the N.A.A.C.P. The most recent chapter played out in the early 1970s, when Jackson himself displaced Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest confidant, Ralph David Abernathy, putting himself on course to become what many blacks wryly call the HNIC--Head Negro in Charge.

Climbing to that lofty perch seemed to have been Jackson's goal since he appeared on the Today show on the morning after King's assassination in 1968, wearing a turtleneck that he claimed (falsely) had been stained with the martyr's blood as King lay dying in his arms. His good looks and catchy slogans ("Put hope in your brains, not dope in your veins") captivated both the masses and the media. He was candid enough to tell blacks that many of their problems were the result of self-destructive behavior and brash enough to run for President in 1984 and 1988, garnering millions of votes from the multi-ethnic constituency he dubbed the "rainbow coalition." In the aftermath of last year's presidential campaign, when he crisscrossed the country to help produce the massive black turnout that nearly swept Al Gore into the White House, his claim to the throne had never seemed more secure.

Then the scandal broke, and years of accumulated suspicions burst forth--about everything from Jackson's alleged serial philandering to whether his family was unfairly profiting from his deals with corporations. To many blacks, it appeared that his time was running out. "What's his future?" asks Wyatt Tee Walker, pastor of Harlem's Canaan Baptist Church. "That's a no-brainer. Jesse's through. On a scale of 1 to 10, his credibility is about a 2."

Walker is an ally of Sharpton's, but he is also a credible voice--an influential Baptist leader who once served as King's chief of staff. His rage stems from an incident in January, when Jackson, freshly stung by the scandal, was trying to escape the sabbatical from public life he had promised to take. His strategy: organize rallies that would make it appear that the black masses were clamoring for his return. Jackson asked Walker if Canaan was available and Walker said yes, but only for a "service of penance" during which Jackson would make a public apology. But as he wrote in a letter to Jackson that was later made public by the Village Voice, Jackson "disrespected me, my pulpit and my people" by turning the event into a media circus, complete with pro-Jackson speeches by politicians like Congressman Charles Rangel. Jackson sent Walker a letter apologizing for "any error in judgment and communication," and Walker accepted it. Privately, he grumbles that "it wasn't much of an apology."

Such blunt criticism would have been bad news for Jackson under any circumstances. But the fact that Walker is also chairman of the board of Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, based in Harlem, made it even worse. Some Jackson allies see Walker's attack as the first step in an effort by Sharpton to knock Jackson off his perch.

Sharpton denies any such intention. Jackson has been his role model since Sharpton's days as a child evangelist. "I'm not one to think that Rev. Jackson's finished," he says. "I'm not trying to take advantage of his travail. My rise is not at Jesse's expense. If I'm rising it's because I've done the work on issues like police brutality that affect huge numbers of our people."

Maybe. But Sharpton's supporters can hardly contain their glee when they cite their evidence that Sharpton is ascending as Jackson sinks. They point out that when rioting erupted in Cincinnati, Ohio, last month over the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, black clergymen prevailed on Sharpton to cut short a fact-finding tour about slavery in Sudan and fly in to lead a rally. They claim, without offering proof, that Jackson was rebuffed when he tried to wrangle a similar invitation. "Jesse's not the go-to guy anymore," says a Sharpton admirer. Jackson, who denies scrounging for the invitation, says going "would not have been rational" because N.A.A.C.P. head Kweisi Mfume was already there.

Sharpton has been practicing the role of New Jackson for years. He has patterned his career on Jackson's, mimicking his every move. Sharpton's National Action Network is modeled on Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Sharpton's Madison Avenue Initiative, which pressures white companies to buy more ads in black-owned media, resembles Jackson's Wall Street Project, which pressures corporations to create more investment opportunities for blacks. And now Sharpton is planning to rip the ultimate page from Jackson's book by running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004--the same strategy Jackson used 20 years ago to cement his position at the top.

The idea came to him, Sharpton says, while he sat under a tree seeking relief from the Sudanese sun. "I feel that the Democratic Party must be challenged in 2004 because it didn't fight aggressively to protect our voting rights in Florida," he says. "I think we need to look at running a black in the primary. I have said I would be available to do it." It remains to be seen how much appeal Sharpton would have outside New York City, where his peaceful protests after police shootings have quieted some, but hardly all, of the deep qualms aroused by his rabble rousing during the 1980s. Many people will never forgive him for claiming, with no evidence, that a young white prosecutor named Steven Pagones took part in the rape of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager whose story has been thoroughly discredited. A group of black businessmen has paid the $65,000 defamation judgment Pagones won from Sharpton in 1998. But Sharpton has yet to apologize to him.

The Rev. Al has evolved into a masterly manipulator of New York's tabloid press and an astute political power broker, but his army of critics charges that he has not outgrown a tendency to play the crassest kind of racial politics. Case in point: the convoluted New York imbroglio this month in which Sharpton was reported to have offered to endorse Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer--a Puerto Rican who's trying to win the Democratic mayoral nomination by building a coalition of Latino and black voters--if and only if Ferrer backed a slate of black candidates Sharpton favored. The New York Times reporter who wrote the story, Sharpton says, left out the fact that his list of candidates included a "progressive" white. "I've grown too much to fall into the trap of seeming to be for some black-only thing," he says.

The real issue is whether the one-leader-fits-all model of black politics still makes sense. Back in Douglass's day, the overwhelming majority of blacks were slaves who could not speak for themselves. Even at the time of King, the movement to tear down segregation so overshadowed every other item on the black agenda that having one figure to symbolize its urgency was almost inevitable. But the black America of 2001 is vastly different--an increasingly middle-class, multifarious ethnic group whose interests extend far beyond civil rights. There is no way for any single leader, no matter how gifted, to represent its conflicting, complicated concerns. A majority of blacks, for example, favor experiments with school vouchers, but Jackson opposes them. In what sense can he be said to be speaking for black people on this issue?

Both Jackson and Sharpton pay lip service to the idea of broadening black leadership, but their actions contradict their words. Sharpton is convinced that Jackson cut short his sabbatical simply because he could not bear to be out of the limelight. Sharpton is no less eager for publicity. Their showdown promises to generate endless gossip and reams of breathless coverage. But in the end, it's just a sideshow. Given the growing diversity and power of the black community, it may no longer need an HNIC at all.

--With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards/New York