Lower Manhattan — The Reverend Al Sharpton crept in and out of the designated protest area at One Police Plaza like the blob in a lava lamp.
Arriving in a huge scrum of reporters and hangers-on that dwarfed the crowd of protesters who had spent two hours waiting for him to finally turn up, Sharpton’s roiling entourage struggled to pass through the bottleneck police had created with two long lines of converging metal barriers, only to reconstitute itself once past it, amorphous and unwieldy, percolating for a bit around its well-coiffed, media-savvy queen bee before floating back upward toward the street (and rush-hour traffic) again, where the boys in blue would eventually load vans and busses destined for the pokey.
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While inside this miniature
Panopticon, Sharpton did not preach. He mostly milled around with a stern look — the same face he would don when being queried about
Tawana Brawley during his 2004 presidential run — quietly registering his solemn approval as protesters raging against the acquittal of three officers in the 2006 shooting death of
Sean Bell chanted
We remember Sean Bell/NYPD go to Hell and
No justice/No peace/No murdering-ass police, while carrying ubiquitous signs declaring
We Are All Sean Bell. The Whole Damn System is Guilty.
“If you want to be arrested follow Reverend Sharpton,” an organizer, his profile framed against the
Welcome to Police Headquarters sign, barked into a bullhorn. “If you
don’t want to be arrested,
don’t follow Reverend Sharpton.” Fairly simple instructions. Having been arrested a stone’s throw from the site while covering a protest during the 2004 Republican National Convention I personally planned to err on the side of distance, especially once I saw the rolls of orange netting and ungainly clumps of white plastic handcuffs protruding off police officers’ belts.
I tried to warn a couple of curious guidebook-toting, broken-English speaking, German tourists away from the upcoming melee, to no avail. I presume they figured it out for themselves; if not, incarceration with Al Sharpton makes an inimitable vacation story.
***
Last weekend I snickered at reports of Sharpton telling a congregation, “God used David to challenge Goliath. So what makes you think God can’t use Al Sharpton to challenge George Bush?” God did not prevail upon the good Reverend to seriously challenge Dick Gephardt or Dennis Kucinich in 2004, never mind an actual sitting president. If that does not sufficiently convey a failure to bestow heavenly favor, surely Sharpton’s unholy love of tracksuits does.
Even without evidence of transcendent partiality, the New York City Police Department took Sharpton’s promises of a city shutdown — by Wednesday afternoon it was being labeled a more modest city slowdown — much more seriously, greeting protesters with an daunting show of force: Officers, uniformed and plainclothes, were omnipresent in the crowd, on souped-up mopeds, alone and in gaggles, above and below, left and right.
How odd it is Sean Bell will never know the sometimes touching, frequently bizarre ruckus his tragic death has instigated and the myriad of tangential-at-best interests that have struggled to co-opt it.
Amongst the perhaps 500 gathered, for example, were people stumping for Barack Obama alongside those hawking the latest issue of The Workers’ Vanguard headlined, “Obama, Clinton: No Friend of Workers, Blacks, Or The Oppressed.” An older woman gushed over her hug from Sharpton as her homemade sign reading, “The Black Race Is the Origin of Mankind,” fluttered in the spring breeze. The Revolutionary Communist Party attempted to recruit for the vanguard destined to overthrow capitalism. Several men showed up with a banner promoting RIPPED — Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities.
