The Party of Buttigieg and Sharpton
The mayor seeks the blessing of a dubious Democratic elder.
By Matthew Hennessey
April 29, 2019 6:41 p.m. ET
Pete Buttigieg and Al Sharpton in New York, April 4. Photo: don emmert/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
While Joe Biden is being held to account for things he said and did as long ago as the 1970s, Mayor Pete Buttigieg had lunch in Harlem Monday, seeking the blessing of the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Mr. Buttigieg was only 5 in 1987 when the world outside New York first met Mr. Sharpton, so he may not have a clear sense of how his lunch companion came to wield such influence. Mr. Sharpton was chief spokesman for the family of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager who ran away from home, then falsely claimed she’d been abducted and raped by a gang of white men.
Ms. Brawley’s lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, accused Fishkill police officer Harry Crist Jr. of orchestrating the abduction. Crist couldn’t defend himself because he had committed suicide the same week Ms. Brawley went missing. Mr. Maddox claimed Crist had been murdered by co-conspirators because “he was the weak link of all of the culprits.” Ms. Brawley’s trio of advisers also accused Steven Pagones, the county prosecutor who’d investigated the case, of being part of the gang.
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A grand jury determined the abduction was fake and found no evidence that Ms. Brawley had been assaulted. A former aide to Mr. Sharpton admitted in 1988 that the whole thing had been “only a media show.” A decade later Mr. Pagones won a defamation judgment against Ms. Brawley and Messrs. Sharpton, Maddox and Mason.
Mr. Sharpton also has a history of anti-Semitic agitation. In August 1991 an Orthodox Jewish driver ran a red light and swerved into Gavin Cato, an 8-year-old black child, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. The following night a mob set upon 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum—an Australian student who had nothing to do with the accident—and stabbed him to death. At Gavin’s funeral, Mr. Sharpton caricatured Jews as “diamond dealers” and, according to a report in Newsday, “seemed to scoff . . . at labeling Gavin’s death an accident.” At a rally around the same time, he was quoted as saying: “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
In the summer of 1995 Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network held daily protests against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned Harlem retailer that had a rent dispute with a black-owned subtenant. Protesters screamed about “bloodsucking Jews” and “Jew bastards,” and Mr. Sharpton himself vowed: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.” In December Roland Smith, 51, who’d participated in the protests, returned to Freddy’s, brandished a gun, and burned the place down. Smith killed seven people and himself in the attack.
Mr. Buttigieg lunched with Mr. Sharpton Monday in a Harlem that looks almost nothing like it did in 1995. A Kid’s Foot Locker and a Gap Factory Store now stand where Freddy’s once did. Mr. Sharpton looks different too. He’s lost weight and traded his velour track suits for pinstripes, street demonstrations for a hosting gig on MSNBC.
Somehow the media and the Democratic Party have granted Mr. Sharpton the absolution Mr. Biden desperately seeks. And how was lunch, Mr. Mayor?
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
