Word: sharpton
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even outspoken local civil rights activists have been reluctant to raise an uproar. Philadelphia's NAACP head J. Whyatt Mondesire, not a man known to be shy about criticizing the city police, publicly dismissed the Rev. Al Sharpton when he called the case "worse than Rodney King" and came to town to visit one of the beaten suspects. "We let him know we didn't particularly like outsiders coming in and making comments about a situation he wasn't aware of," Mondesire told TIME. "But he practices his own brand of headline grabbing. So let him do his own thing...
...part, Sharpton said he had not come to Philadelphia to provoke controversy. "Reaction to what? I didn't call for any reaction. If I had called a march or called a gathering I can see [why people would say nothing came of it]." He came to do mainly one thing: "I met with the mother." As for Mondesire's comments, Sharpton told TIME, "I guess he's into organizational competition...
...roots. Some will claim that it is good politics for him to do so because the South Carolina primary features a Democratic Party electorate that is 50% African American. Another source of pressure comes from old-school civil rights activists suddenly facing eclipse, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton...
...although some activists and commentators do question whether Obama is "black enough," they are far from representative. Most black voters see Obama as unmistakably black, regardless of whom they prefer, and are thrilled to see an African American vying as a serious contender for the presidency. When Jackson and Sharpton ran, they did so symbolically. They were not genuinely campaigning for the presidency of the U.S. They were instead campaigning to become the HNIC (head Negro in charge) of black America. Obama, by contrast, is genuinely seeking to capture the White House. Most blacks recognize that a realistic effort...
...forge a new alliance of voters that transcends race. When Senator Hillary Clinton accused Obama of deliberately racializing her ill-chosen remarks on Martin Luther King Jr., L.B.J. and civil rights legislation, she implicitly suggested that the Obama camp had indulged in racial opportunism--victim-mongering of the Jackson-Sharpton variety. An important slice of the white vote that Obama attracts is made up of people who are keenly attentive to such charges. They would quickly abandon him if convinced that, contrary to his rhetoric, he too was engaged in the old routines of accusatory racial gamesmanship...