At a time when many Black leaders have opted to remain circumspect or to place blame for the war in Gaza squarely on Israel’s shoulders, Reverend Al Sharpton has used his bully pulpit to call for calm and dialogue. He also has forcefully denounced the October 7 Hamas attack.
At the Saturday-morning rally that he leads each week in Harlem, Sharpton immediately took to the podium on October 7 to describe the atrocities that had been leveled against innocent men, women, and children that morning.
“He didn’t wait to check with his pollsters,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “He didn’t wait to put his finger to the wind to see what people were saying. He didn’t call around to allies to understand the political call. He just said what he said because it was the right thing to do.”
While the 69-year-old activist has long opposed Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Sharpton has also grown deeply frustrated by extremist groups like Hamas engaging in wanton violence.
For those who best remember the reverend from the 20th century—when he was associated with high-profile protests in New York City—and haven’t kept abreast of his emergence as a powerful national political figure or a staple on MSNBC, his full-throated empathy for Israelis and Palestinians might come as a surprise. But as the author of a forthcoming biography of “Rev,” as he’s referred to by those who know him best, I can say his actions on October 7 and his interest in Israel reflect both his enduring values and the moral growth that makes him arguably the nation’s most important civil rights leader.
For Sharpton, the October 7 massacre and Israel’s punishing attacks on Gaza recall 9/11. The al-Qaeda attack was personal for the Brooklyn-born native who runs his civil rights group, the National Action Network, from the House of Justice on 145th Street in Harlem. Travis Boyd—a young man who was a friend of one of Sharpton’s daughters—lost his mother in the attack on the World Trade Center.
For Sharpton, the October 7 massacre recalled 9/11. The 2001 attacks were unusually personal for the Brooklyn native, who runs a civil rights group in Harlem. “After September 11, I started thinking, ‘Now I understand what people go through in Israel and parts of the Middle East,’ ” Sharpton once wrote.
“After September 11, I started thinking, ‘Now I understand what people go through in Israel and parts of the Middle East,’ ” Sharpton recalled in his 2002 memoir, Al on America. “They go through this every day. Maybe it’s time for me to take a leap and identify with victims of terrorism—not deal with foreign policy but deal with the concerns of everyday people.”
Shortly after 9/11, Sharpton visited Israel, where he met then Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who encouraged him to visit Gaza and to meet with Yasser Arafat, the longtime chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “[Peres] said that it was important for me not only to learn about terrorism from the Israeli side, but he asked if I would meet with the Palestinians and appeal for peace,” Sharpton recalled, adding that during the hours-long meeting with the Palestinian leader, Arafat unequivocally denounced Osama bin Laden and the terrorist attacks on the United States.
“How did we get to where we could have a Shimon Peres and a Yasser Arafat have an open line of communication, to where we are now?” Sharpton asked in October on Morning Joe, the MSNBC show devoured by elite audiences in New York and Washington, D.C., where Sharpton is a regular. (He also has his own show on the network, Politics-Nation with Al Sharpton.)
A childhood prodigy as a preacher, Sharpton has the ability to deliver the right line at the right time. In his remembrance of Peres and Arafat, he encapsulated the frustrations of so many in the U.S. who are despondent about the destruction and unrest in a country the size of New Jersey, and who despair that Gazans are led by rejectionist terrorists while Israel’s politically desperate prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, clings to power despite legal woes and plummeting poll numbers.
Not content to simply speak out after October 7, Sharpton marshaled other civil rights leaders. Collectively, they issued a short but powerful statement that repudiated the violence and addressed the plight of civilians on all sides.
“We condemn this terrorist attack on Israel in which civilians have been targeted, killed, and kidnapped,” the statement, signed by Marc Morial of the National Urban League, Derrick Johnson of the NAACP, and Janet Murguía of UnidosUS, among others, began. It then appealed for calm and peace: “We hold innocent civilians’ families and our partners in our hearts, sharing prayers for their safety. We call on all our partners and colleagues to join us in solidarity because hatred and war must end.”
Sharpton’s tone, tenor, and tenacity during one of the darkest hours for Israel and American Jewry impressed Greenblatt. “After the massacre on October 7, the first person to call me was Reverend Sharpton,” Greenblatt said. “On October 8, the person who drove that statement … was Reverend Sharpton … [He’s] put himself out there in ways our community appreciates.”
Sharpton also put himself out for the Jewish community just two months earlier, when he ensured that Jewish leaders played a vital role in the rally celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. There was a strong Jewish presence on that hot August day during the John F. Kennedy administration. Rabbi Uri Miller provided an opening prayer, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz delivered an electrifying speech. In the months after that historic gathering, the progressive Black-Jewish coalition, which had been a linchpin of the civil rights movement, gathered steam. Two years later, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel heeded King’s call for religious leaders to join him in the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. In turn, King felt that it was critically important for him to stand in solidarity with Heschel over the Soviet Union’s mistreatment of its Jewish citizens.
Sharpton may seem to some an unlikely leader to rekindle that Black-Jewish alliance, which has become frayed over issues ranging from affirmative action to the Israeli occupation of lands taken in the 1967 war. Throughout the decades, there have been feelings of hurt and betrayal on both sides, as when Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. used the slur “Hymietown” to refer to New York City during an off-the-record conversation with a Black Washington Post reporter. It was the height of Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, and he later apologized.
In 1995, many Black leaders grew irritated by the demands from some in the Jewish community who urged them not to participate in the Million Man March, which was organized in large part by Minister Louis Farrakhan. Barack Obama, for one, attended the historic gathering and later celebrated the “need for African American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society.”
Sharpton briefly flirted with Black nationalism in the 1990s, though he never wandered too far from the nonviolent and integrationist teachings of King.
When the leadership of the United African Movement—an organization that Sharpton founded in 1988 with the late activist attorney Alton Maddox—demanded that whites be prevented from attending the organization’s rallies, held at Brooklyn’s popular Slave Theater in January 1991, Sharpton walked away in protest. He founded the National Action Network to “promote a modern civil rights agenda that includes justice, decency, and equal opportunities for all people.”
While Sharpton was leading a march in the mostly white working-class neighborhood of Bensonhurst to protest the killing of Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old teenager who was shot by a group of white youth two years earlier, a 27-year-old white man named Michael Riccardi plunged a knife deep into Sharpton’s chest. In an act of forgiveness, Sharpton later asked the judge to show leniency. (Riccardi was convicted of first-degree assault and sentenced to five to 15 years in prison; he served 10.)
Over the years, some Jews have accused Sharpton of antisemitism, although those allegations grow fainter as the years pass. They accuse him, for example, of stoking the flames in 1991 after seven-year-old Gavin Cato was killed in a car accident involving a Hasidic driver in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. With the community angered by the boy’s death, riots erupted, culminating in the stabbing death of a rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum. The New York media piled on Sharpton—who was asked by Cato’s father to deliver the eulogy at his son’s funeral—for encouraging the riots, even though an independent investigation by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, at the direction of then Governor Mario Cuomo, indicated that Sharpton did not.
“In January 1991, I forgave a white man for sticking a knife in my chest and trying to kill me. I also left the organization that I helped to build because they wanted to kick all of the whites out,” Sharpton told me. “Crown Heights happened in August 1991. I would have to be schizophrenic to do what they claim that I did. What would have been the point of me leaving the Slave Theater?”
Sharpton has also acknowledged, however, that he probably could have done more to ease the tensions. “We had our marches, and they were all peaceful,” he wrote in a New York Daily News op-ed published on the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots. “But with the wisdom of hindsight, let’s be clear. Our language and tone sometimes exacerbated tensions and played to the extremists rather than raising the issue of the value of this young man whom we were so concerned about.”
One of those incidents came in 1995 when Sharpton led protests against Fred Harari, who owned Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem near the famed Apollo Theater. Harari, who is Jewish, subleased the property to Sikhulu Shange’s Record Shack. Sharpton echoed Shange’s claims that Harari was trying to raise the rents and evict Shange—a South African—and called for a boycott of Freddy’s Fashion Mart. The building’s owner was the United House of Prayer for All, which tried to find Shange another location. Sharpton stood by Shange.
A childhood prodigy as a preacher, Sharpton has the ability to deliver the right line at the right time.
He encapsulates the frustrations of Americans who are despondent about the destruction and who despair that Gazans are led by rejectionist terrorists while Benjamin Netanyahu clings to power despite legal woes.
“I said, ‘We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street,’ ” Sharpton later recalled. “Yes, I referred to Freddy as a ‘white interloper.’ And that was wrong. But I had no clue that he was even Jewish.”
On December 8, 1995, Roland James Smith Jr., a deranged and armed Black man, entered Freddy’s Fashion Mart and set the building on fire. Eight people, including the gunman, were killed. Some incorrectly blamed Sharpton for the incident.
Today, Sharpton is widely recognized as a force for healing. As the 60th-anniversary march wound down, Sharpton got word that a white supremacist, firing a weapon emblazoned with a swastika, had gunned down three Black people at a Dollar General store in New Town, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida.
When the family of Angela Carr—the 52-year-old mother of three who was shot dead in her vehicle outside of the store—got in touch with Sharpton’s office to ask him to deliver her eulogy, Sharpton invited Greenblatt to accompany him to the memorial service at Bethel Baptist Church in Jacksonville. The two had attended a private meeting at the White House two days after the march that included President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, members of the King family, and other civil rights leaders. Greenblatt agreed.
As they flew from New York City to Jacksonville in a private plane, the two leaders discussed how Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League and Sharpton’s National Action Network could do even more to bring Blacks and Jews together.
There was a strong Jewish presence at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address. Rabbi Uri Miller provided an opening prayer, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz delivered an electrifying speech. In the months afterward, the progressive Black-Jewish coalition, a linchpin of the civil rights movement, gathered steam.
“In many ways, we felt that we were trying to put together the coalition that Dr. King put together and not point fingers at anybody,” Sharpton later recalled, “and it was time to come together in a post-Obama presidency because we are all being stereotyped and targeted, including Arabs.”
Greenblatt wholeheartedly agreed with Sharpton. “Black and Jewish communities have so much in common. Antisemitism and anti-Black racism are tightly intertwined in many respects, and there are antagonists and bad actors who are trying to divide our communities, but I really strongly believe that we are stronger when we are together,” he told me. “We’re both often victimized. We both have a history of dealing with pervasive bigotry.”
Sharpton understands, as did King, that America’s civil rights struggles are part of global struggles. King, for instance, was outspoken on the Vietnam War. With King’s philosophical teachings as the moral compass and Jesse Jackson as a mentor, Sharpton believes that the fight for justice should not stop at the water’s edge. “I am for a two-state solution,” Sharpton said on MSNBC in October. “But we can talk and not condone killing each other, particularly those who are not even in the military and have nothing to do with what either state is about.” A passion for international justice made Sharpton go to South Africa in the 1990s as an election observer when the liberated nation chose Nelson Mandela to lead a government that had imprisoned him for nearly three decades.
As the National Action Network has grown in scope and size, so has its reach. The organization has offices in every corner of the nation and chapters in most states. Efforts are already underway to set up a chapter in the UK. The seeds were planted back in 1991, when Sharpton arrived in London to call attention to the death of Rolan Adams, a 15-year-old Black British teenager who was surrounded by a white mob who taunted him with racial epithets and chased him and his brother Nathan. Rolan collapsed and died. The case was eerily similar to an incident in December 1986 in the Howard Beach section of Queens, New York, when a group of white teenagers attacked three young Black men. One of them, Timothy Grimes, outran his attackers, but the others, Michael Griffith and Cedric Sandifold, were not as lucky. Griffith was chased by the gang into traffic and died after he was struck by a vehicle, and Sandifold was severely beaten. Sharpton led around-the-clock protests culminating in what was called the “Day of Outrage.”
After the WNBA player Brittney Griner was imprisoned by the Russians in 2022, Sharpton signaled that he would travel to Russia with a group of other ministers to pray with her. He called on the Biden administration to help arrange the trip. While the mission never took place, Griner was eventually released after nearly 10 months of confinement and has credited Sharpton with helping keep her case on the front pages of the media.
Ironically, of the more than 30 times Sharpton has been arrested for civil disobedience across New York City, the longest he has served—three months, in 2001—was in the Federal Detention Center Brooklyn, for protesting against military exercises far from the continental U.S. on Vieques, a small island six miles from Puerto Rico where the presence of a U.S. Navy training range angered residents. (The range was finally closed in 2003, after protests that included Sharpton.)
From the “Double V” campaign slogan during World War II—in which the nation’s Black newspapers, like the Pittsburgh Courier, proudly declared as their mantra “victory against fascism abroad and victory against Jim Crow segregation and racism at home”—to Jackson’s securing the release of an American airman from Syria in 1984, Black civil rights leaders have always been out front on global and international issues.
Even as Sharpton battled a litany of high-profile racial profiling cases within the U.S. in the 1990s, he traveled to Rwanda to call attention to the genocide and civil war that left more than a half-million Tutsis dead at the hands of Hutu militias. Seven years later, he traveled on a three-day mission to Sudan, in northeastern Africa, to expose the nation’s ongoing practice of slavery.
“There are those that want people to feel we will ignore some things that our people were able to be duped into,” Sharpton said after returning from the war-torn country. “Well, we’re going to be against slavery no matter who are the slave masters, the slave traders, or who are the slaves.”
With a global presence and the ear of politicians in the U.S., Sharpton has used his clout well. While the Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter was cheering Hamas after the attack with a tweet hailing the militants who flew into Israel on hang gliders, Sharpton was denouncing the attack. While he led protests after the death of George Floyd, spoke at his funeral, and has praised the BLM movement, he has also cautioned against defunding the police. Such a radical move, he has rightly argued, does not resonate with the millions of Black people in urban communities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered.
“We need to reimagine how we do policing” in the U.S., Sharpton told the MSNBC audience. “But to take all policing off is something a latte liberal may go for as they sit around the Hamptons discussing this as an academic problem. But people living on the ground need proper policing.”
Nine days after Hamas attacked Israel, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, the National Action Network hosted its swanky Triumph Awards, created to honor influential figures who champion social, racial, and economic justice.
Sharpton, who has lost over 130 pounds since 2009, looked svelte in his tailored suit.
Among this year’s honorees was Greenblatt, who had worked with Sharpton on several initiatives, including pushing the Biden administration to host the United We Stand Summit in September 2022, the first White House convening to focus on hate crimes. That summit came into being after 10 Blacks were murdered by an 18-year-old white supremacist at a Tops Friendly Markets supermarket in the East Side neighborhood of Buffalo.
In his interactions with Sharpton, Greenblatt sees similarities between the activist clergyman and his predecessors, such as Thurgood Marshall and King. “I think Reverend Sharpton is a prophetic leader, and he works so hard for so many often behind the scenes that people don’t see, and I’ve learned so much from him and have appreciated his allyship,” Greenblatt said.
With a global presence and the ear of politicians, Sharpton has used his clout well. While the Chicago BLM chapter was cheering Hamas after the attack, Sharpton was denouncing it. While he led protests after the death of George Floyd and spoke at his funeral, Sharpton has also cautioned against defunding the police.
At the start of the awards ceremony, Sharpton used the opportunity to call for an end to terrorism and hatred. He reiterated that the fight for global human rights is merely an extension of the civil rights movement. “When we see what happened in Israel and Gaza, and you don’t feel for people who look like you and don’t come from your background, then you justify people who have done that to us,” he told the mostly Black crowd. “You can’t choose who you gonna fight for, and you can’t eliminate those that are gonna fight for you if they’re gonna stand up and fight.”
It was whites and Jews, Sharpton declared, who “marched with us in the South so that you could get the right to vote.”
Sharpton summoned Travis Boyd, now a licensed minister with a doctorate in ministry, to the stage.
“When I heard about what happened in Israel, and everyone was going through the politics, I thought about Travis and his mother and thought about the mother in Israel who was like his mother,” Sharpton said as the crowd nodded in affirmation. “There’s a mother in Gaza like his mother. So, anybody who is upset that we stepped into it, I want you to know that I don’t give a darn because I’ve seen what it looks like to be just collateral damage like you don’t matter. And that is why I wanted Travis here tonight, because I want you to understand these are real people.”
