Anand Giridharadas on How the Reverend Al Sharpton Works to Shape Narratives of Justice

The Rev was downtown when he got the text. One of his staff members at the National Action Network sent him a story being shared on social media. A young Black man had been choked to death on the subway. The Rev called his Harlem headquarters and told Malcolm Byrd, his lieutenant at the organization, to check out the story and, if it was true, learn more about the family, convey the Rev’s outrage to them. Call the precinct. Call the DA, an old friend in a city full of friends. Make it known to all involved: Anything the Rev could do, he would do.

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For the family of Jordan Neely, getting a call on behalf of the Reverend Al Sharpton was big. It raised the hope that Jordan’s death might come to mean something, be written on a million T-shirts and signs, be not just a personal tragedy but a lasting symbol. The family was thankful, but also in shock.

A few days later, Sharpton’s people got a call from a lawyer named Lennon Edwards. He was representing relatives of Neely. In this city full of friends, Edwards happened to be related to someone connected to one of the Rev’s television ventures—the Rev working, as he did, across the platforms of cable news, social media, the pulpit, the streets, backchannel advising, and the conference circuit. The Rev had seen this show many times, seen it ever since that urban vigilante Bernhard Goetz in 1984 shot four Black men in a subway car and claimed they were trying to rob him. Sharpton remembered giving Edwards and his law partner, Donte Mills, some advice.

Again and again, Black people were dehumanized. Again and again, their dehumanization was inverted and recast as a story of the threat of disorder that they posed.

The media was going to frame a narrative, he said, of Neely having a mental breakdown, being threatening, dangerous, an animal. These things would become the whole of him. The Rev told the lawyers that if they wanted a chance at justice, they had to stop that narrative from congealing. Lose the narrative, lose the opportunity for justice. The Rev knew the drill like he knew the sermons he never wrote down. It had happened in the days of slavery with the panic about revolts; it had happened during Jim Crow with the panic about Black men coming for white women; it had happened with the 1990s-era panic about young “superpredators” prowling America’s urban wastelands. Again and again, Black people were dehumanized. Again and again, their dehumanization was inverted and recast as a story of the threat of disorder that they posed. And the resulting panic about disorder was then exploited to enable still more dehumanizing. Neely’s death was at risk of servicing that rewriting.

Sharpton spoke on the phone with one of Jordan’s cousins, who explained that the beginning of this fight for justice for Jordan, whatever it might entail, was complicated by the fact that the family had its own divisions. Jordan and his father had had their ups and downs. People in the family had different points of view on things.

Sharpton tried to allay that anxiety. “Hold it, let me explain something to you,” he remembered saying. “I have never fought for a case that had the Andy Griffith, Mayberry-suburbs family. You want to talk about a dysfunctional family? I come out of a family where my father owned a corner store, moved out to Queens, had a nice middle class house, and he had a baby with my stepsister. And we end up, my mother and sister and I, in the projects. First ten years of my life, I was a middle-class Black in Queens, then I became a guy in the projects on welfare and all that, so I know both sides.”

“Your father knocked up your sister?” the cousin asked, as if suddenly forgetting about his own family drama.

The point was that it didn’t matter how together or fractious the family was. What mattered was that this guy Penny had come up and grabbed Neely from behind and killed him. The Rev didn’t know if this Penny was a white supremacist or not, but he sure knew it wasn’t self-defense. It was vigilantism, pure and simple. It had to be dealt with.

The Rev liked to think that, despite his nearly seventy years on the planet, he didn’t really belong to what he called “that old model, the old civil rights, Black church model.”

The Rev spoke with the lawyers again. He didn’t want them to think his attaching himself to the case meant bringing along some high-powered lawyers who would displace them. He recalled telling Edwards and Mills that he never recommended lawyers. Sure, they might have seen him standing beside a legal giant like Ben Crump, a friend, on TV. But that was because Crump called the Rev, not because the Rev called Crump. The lawyers’ positions were safe. They could trust him. They could do business together, the business of justice.

In fact, the Rev said, they should come on his show. He’d had the MSNBC show for twelve years. People hadn’t thought he’d last twelve weeks. To some, it might have seemed like a departure from his spiritual and activist duties. But he liked to say that he went on TV, wearing those three-piece suits with his initials monogrammed on his tie, to keep doing what he was doing, not to stop doing what he was doing. It was all part of his conglomerate of social justice. He could field a call from Neely’s family; give them forewarning, based on long experience, of what was coming their way; speak on their behalf if requested; invite them on his TV show to promote their pursuit of justice; call people into the streets if needed; mediate in secret among the family members; push officials who happened to be friends on how to speak about the case or what to do. He could Rev it all up.

Sharpton’s horizontally integrated machinery of justice seeking could be powerful. But he was aware that there was a younger generation of activists like Hawk Newsome who were not interested in having the kinds of friends the Rev had, who were losing patience with the we-shall-overcome-ing, who were restive and angry, who were ready to abandon the notion of preachers and turn-the-other-cheek marchers petitioning for their own freedom, who were skeptical of timeworn theories of change, who were tired of asking. The Rev liked to think that, despite his nearly seventy years on the planet, he didn’t really belong to what he called “that old model, the old civil rights, Black church model.” He sometimes told people that he descended from the James Brown tradition, not the Martin Luther King Jr. tradition. “I come out of the urban swagger movement,” he said. “Martin Luther King would’ve never wore his hairstyle like mine or walked around like I do.”

Still, it was less and less clear if such declarations, and the Rev’s insider-outsider activism, would be enough to appease the Hawks of the world, or whether the fed-up-ness with stasis would continue to drive them—like so many in the country—toward new answers that involved taking matters into one’s own hands.

The Rev’s powers and platforms and friends still had their uses, though, as when the matter of the funeral arose. The Rev tried to tell the family that, in a case like this, you get hustlers. People who can’t even spell Jordan’s name correctly will start GoFundMe pages. The Rev recalled telling Jordan’s cousin: “Whatever the cost of the funeral is, let me know, and we’ll try to help.” The cousin was thankful, but the Rev got the message that the family didn’t need financial help.

But then Jordan’s father, Andre Zachery, called. He thanked the Rev for getting involved. The Rev agreed to do the eulogy. It would be a chance to establish the right narrative. Better he frame the story than someone like Hawk Newsome—or the churchy old guard. Now they needed a venue. Jordan’s mother, after being killed by her boyfriend and stuffed in a duffel bag, had been funeralized at Mount Neboh Baptist Church in Harlem. The senior pastor there, Johnnie Green, was a friend of the Rev’s, on the board of the Rev’s National Action Network. He would host the funeral.

It crossed the Rev’s mind that the last time Jordan had seen his mother was in the casket at the church where his casket would soon lie.

Shortly before the funeral, the Rev got word of a hiccup. The family was having trouble accessing the funds in the GoFundMe account, and the funeral director wanted his money.

The Rev felt that Neely could well become the George Floyd of the crisis of mental health, the George Floyd of the crisis of homelessness, the George Floyd of urban white vigilantism. But the case needed to be shaped, conveyed.

“We’ll pay it,” the Rev told a representative of the family. “Y’all don’t even have to pay us back. That’s what we do.” He said that his getting involved in a case tended to make it harder for certain politicians to demonize the dead. Mayor Adams had already said some highly questionable things about Jordan, about whether people like

Jordan should even be allowed to ride the subway. The mayor was a friend, and the Rev attaching himself to the case might make Adams think twice.

The death of George Floyd didn’t become The Murder of George Floyd by itself. It took shaping. It took strategy. It took having friends. It took a family that could come together in spite of all the forces unleashed by tragedy that made unity so difficult. It took a carefully waged, two-pronged case that indicted the accused but also indicted a whole community for enabling the act—without absolving the actor.

Not long after Neely’s death, Sharpton ruminated on his inside-outside strategy of nudging and chastising his friends, pulling and pushing them. “Many people felt that because of my relationships, I wouldn’t say anything,” he said. “And I decided that I’m not only going to say something, I was going out front. And I didn’t have to get in line.”

Speaking of Mayor Adams, he said: “I say it all the time to Eric’s staff, that Eric has got to show not only a new generation but a new direction. I’m not condemning them as of yet, let me be clear, but I am saying that Neely is going to be a real point of where he will be graded not only by the Black community but by the city. And the same thing with Alvin Bragg.

“Yes, we have a new generation,” he went on. “Eric and I are in the same generation—he may be a few years younger than me—but Alvin’s younger than both of us. The question is, Do we have a new direction? We didn’t fight and go to jail and do the stuff we did when we were young,” the Rev said, “just to put some Blacks in high places.”

He had not judged Alvin Bragg as of yet, but he was going to be watching closely. He had not called him, even though he was a friend, because he did not want to compromise any case that might be brought. He would call later on if needed.

The office from which the Rev was speaking was at Fortieth Street and Seventh Avenue. Every day, as he walked from car to office and office to car, he saw people in great need: without homes, boxing demons, untended. Lately, in every one of them, he saw Neely.

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