President Joe Biden’s re-election announcement video only lasts three minutes — but that’s long enough to give us some sense of what Biden’s team and the Democratic Party believe will be a winning message for November 2024.
Part of that winning message: Al Sharpton.
Aside from Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sharpton is, I believe, the only recognizable figure from outside the Biden administration.
He appears in four separate images a little more than two minutes in, shown walking with Biden to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where the great standoff on civil rights took place in 1965.
In these pictures, Sharpton is filling the role not of Martin Luther King, who was in the center of the famous photo, but rather of the wise religious men surrounding King — men like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
It’s an abhorrent likeness since Sharpton’s key moment as a public figure came when he helped lead a pogrom in Brooklyn in 1991 after a tragic car accident in which a Hasidic Jew struck and killed a black boy.
During those three days of mob violence, Sharpton screamed into a microphone about “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights” in the vanguard of a horde that shouted “Kill the Jews!”
A student named Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death.
Four years later, Sharpton called the Jewish owner of a Harlem building that housed a store called Freddy’s Fashion Mart a “white interloper” in the midst of a rent dispute.
The mob he summoned then referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and shrieked about “burning the Jews.”
The protests continued for two months, until an armed man stormed the premises with a gun and set Freddy’s on fire. Seven people were killed.
When Al Gore was running for president in 2000, he found it necessary to kiss Sharpton’s ring a few times to keep the Rev from campaigning against him.
Sharpton professed himself satisfied with Gore’s kowtows.
But tellingly, no photo of the two of them was taken, so toxic was Sharpton’s mere visage.
Yes, it’s a quarter-century later, and yes, Sharpton has not lit New York City on fire again or played a role in the deaths of eight people, as he had in the 1990s.
We all change, and Sharpton is a far milder presence in American public life; how could he have been any more incendiary?
The Biden announcement video begins with images of the Jan. 6 mob storming the Capitol, and its clear overall message is that Biden needs to be reelected to keep the MAGA forces at bay.
But long before MAGA was even a twinkle in Donald Trump’s eye, Al Sharpton had perfected the art of performative political extremism — and here he is, given pride of place in the president’s historic declaration.
Sharpton has never accounted, nor been called to account, for his monstrous words and conduct.
And he never will be. After all, Joe Biden wants African Americans to vote for him in 2024 in record numbers, and to secure those votes, he has decided to run the gamut from Justice Jackson — who has spent her adulthood trying to serve as a constructive force in American public life — to Al Sharpton.
And that’s an insult to Jackson, to African Americans and to Americans altogether.
