Is Al Sharpton the Last Standing for Civil Rights?

Al Sharpton: American

If three cops get their kicks by puncturing your tender pink body with 50 bullet holes, will anyone run riot to object?

The lunatic fringe right makes heroes of rogue cops and murderous high officials.

Only Al Sharpton presses for street demonstrations to oppose the right wing thugs. We must go to England for this story. The right lunatic fringe controls the US MSM.

Al Sharpton revs up for strike

Charles Laurence, FirstPost.co.uk

The Rev. Al Sharpton is back in his pulpit of the street, crying for justice and threatening to bring New York City to a traffic-snarled halt.

This is not the 1980s when Reverend Al made his name by - falsely - accusing the cops of abducting a black teenager named Tawana Brawley. This is not the 1990s, when he made his name a lot more credible by - rightly - accusing the cops of gross racism and brutality in the near-killing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. It is 2008 and a New York judge has just dismissed criminal charges against three cops who loosed-off 50 bullets outside a strip club to kill an unarmed 23-year-old black man, Sean Bell, as he left his bachelor party for his wedding day.

"This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell!" cried Sharpton (above) to his congregation of dissent in Harlem. "We know strategically how to stop the city so people stand still and realise that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians!" The crowd swayed back and forth and clapped as they sang: "Shut it down! Shut it down!"

It makes an old-time New Yorker misty-eyed. Will Manhattan explode into the riots of Los Angeles after the Rodney King Verdict let its cops off in 1992? Will we get another chapter in the saga of Sharpton, always hilariously reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's Reverend Bacon, the Harlem preacher in Bonfire of the Vanities?

Things may have changed but Sharpton, 54, just keeps rolling on. Critics who call him a charlatan have no idea of how truly he reflects his culture. At 7 he was declared the 'Wonder Boy Preacher', ordained by the famed Pentecostal Bishop F.D. Washington of Brooklyn and toured as the warm-up act for gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. At school he organised student protests and was awarded the Martin Luther King medal he always wears. Then he worked as road manager for soul singer James Brown. He teamed up with boxing promoter Don King as an adviser to Iron Mike Tyson. In 1991, he survived being stabbed by a drunken white man. He has been investigated by the FBI for everything from skimming James Brown tickets to tax evasion to allegedly brokering a deal between Don King and the Columbian cocaine cartel.

Sharpton knows what it is like to be a black man in America. That is why he appeals to the street. In 2004, he ran as gadfly for the Democrat presidential nomination, but in this year's contest he has played an equally significant role. Sharpton is the man who Barack Obama is so determinedly not. Obama was the candidate not black enough to get the black vote until the Clintons blew it on race. Now he is the black candidate whose wife Michelle and preacher Jeremiah Wright might prove a little too black for the white vote.

Nobody ever had cause to doubt where Sharpton kept his heart. New York will find out this week whether its Reverend Al still has the clout to block the streets and shut the town. We can count on Barack Obama to stay as far away as possible. And that is why we sort of love Al Sharpton these days. He might well be the last person we'd vote for. But at least we would know why.