WASHINGTON, D. C. AUGUST 26, 2023
Can’t tell you what Martin Luther King Jr. was doing in the hours, minutes, before he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, but I can tell you that sixty years later, Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. is sitting in an upholstered wooden chair in his trailer, parked on a fence line behind the Lincoln Memorial, fielding calls on his cell phone about today’s rally, at which he will deliver his own speech. Can’t tell you the logistical concerns MLK solved himself in the minutes before he gave his most famous public address, but I can tell you that Sharpton’s cell is ring ring ringing with handlers and schedulers panicked about the lineup, about having the event shut down by the National Park Service for the bureaucratic alibi that it has run past its permitted time.
On the umpteenth such call, Sharpton, who’s about as calm as an August breeze, tells the anxious messenger to get ahold of Stephen K. Benjamin, a senior advisor to President Biden, and have him handle it.
There were 250,000 people at the original March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But today’s continuation—that’s what he’s calling it, a continuation, not a commemoration—appears not to reach the 75,000 estimated by Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, two of its chief organizers. Still, King is present with his wife and their daughter, MLK’s only grandchild. And Sharpton? Coretta Scott King herself once described him as a leader “in the spirit and tradition of Martin Luther King Jr.” Nonetheless, over his long career as a rabble-rouser, there have been no few folks naysaying how well he has bent the moral arc of the universe toward justice, who’ve questioned whether he’s deserving of inclusion on the esteemed short list of civil-rights icons.
The trailer has a kitchen, bottled waters and half-dirty dishes scattered across its countertop. A dining table holds Sharpton’s briefcase and a bottle of his trusty Cool Mint Listerine—he swishes it as a habit to preserve his voice, which is tinged with natural rasp. Against a wall of fake bricks: one of the world’s tiniest flat-screen TVs and a gas fireplace. Sharpton wears a blue three-piece suit with a blue-and-white-striped tie, a uniform of empowered men from a certain era, of his era—the man is sixty-nine years old. He wears black oxfords that have the comfortable soles of sneakers, and the shoes aren’t new, proven by the white threads peeking around their top lines.
Sharpton’s cell keeps right on ringing.
Amid the fusillade of frantic calls, one turns out to be not from a worried handler but from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
He who was here to witness (up close) the original “I Have a Dream” sixty years ago, he who made two serious runs for the presidency of the United States, he who is an incontrovertible civil-rights titan.
“Reverend,” Sharpton says, a warm smile in his voice.
Jackson responds, but Sharpton—whom most people call Rev and diehards proclaim is the president of Black America—can’t hear him, so he puts the call on speaker.
“I’ll come see you, Reverend,” Sharpton says.
Jackson’s health has been deteriorating, and he sounds to my ear unintelligible. But Sharpton, who speaks to his mentor on the regular, deciphers it.
What are the chances it would be Jackson calling right now? Jackson, who worked side by side with MLK. Jackson, who met Sharpton when he was a teen and helped nurture him into a leader. Jackson’s garbled voice in this trailer is a bridge to a long-gone past, from MLK’s admired activism to Sharpton’s much-criticized methods.
“Don’t worry about that,” Sharpton is saying to Jackson. “I’m going out there. I’m speaking for you…. You trained me to do it, and I’m gon’ do it. Don’t worry about it, Reverend. I’ll call you soon as it’s over.”
Sharpton hangs up his phone and says, “That was an omen.”
SOUTH CAROLINA THREE WEEKS EARLIER
There may be no greater marker of evolution than the posterity of the once enslaved traveling by private jet to visit an old plantation. Sharpton has chartered one to see the South Carolina property on which his forebears worked as chattel.
The entourage includes about a dozen folks, counting Sharpton’s security detail, his personal photographer, and members of his communications team. The most meaningful travelers today are his daughters—Ashley, thirty-six, and Dominique, thirty-seven—who, because neither has visited, were the motivation for the trip.
A small delegation—local historians, folks whose ancestors were enslaved with Sharpton’s—receives him at an airport in South Carolina. We caravan in black SUVs (Sharpton doesn’t drive) to what used to be a plantation called Cactus Hedge. In 2007, Sharpton learned from a genealogist that his great-grandfather Coleman Sharpton Sr. was enslaved by pre–Civil War plantation owner Alexander Sharpton—a man who once owned more than four thousand acres of farmland and enslaved seventy-eight people—and that Alexander purchased Coleman for $276 in 1839. Sharpton also discovered that his great-grandfather was later enslaved by a relative of Strom Thurmond, the longtime South Carolina senator and staunch segregationist.
Old trucks, rusted to the color of clay, squat in a field. A fence of chicken wire surrounds the main house. You can hear chickens clucking, a pen of turkeys gobbling and yelping, see goats wandering. There’s a pit of rocks and twigs for a bonfire. The man who now owns the property, Phillip White, tells Sharpton that he bought it because he loved it, and it was cheap. (He says he paid $50,000 for the house and ten acres in 1983.)
White is squat, with a neck that doesn’t move much. He tours us through his two-story main house, large for its time at around two thousand square feet. He acknowledges
