I came downtown to tonight’s meeting even though I’m still in the early stages of recovery from compound pneumonia because I wanted to speak directly with all of you. Thanks for all your good wishes and calls while I was in the hospital.

The very tragic death of Sean Bell and the current response of the city’s leadership to it, requires that we, the Coalition of Outsiders, talk together about what is—and isn’t—happening, and what needs to be done.

A young black man—23 years old—is dead. He was killed in what appears to have been a confusing, charged and dangerous scene outside a Queens nightclub where 50 shots were fired by police. Presumably the details of the incident—and its drastic consequences—will be revealed as the District Attorney’s investigation and the grand jury process move along. There is talk of City Council hearings—as if that were a genuine remedy to the problem—but so far no frank discussion of the problem. At a time like this, we cannot afford to be anything but frank.

There is a basic truth—one that everyone knows but that most people are afraid to say—that governs on the streets of the communities of color. It is that young people in our communities distrust, sometimes even hate, the police. And the police distrust and often dislike our teenagers and young adults. Most of the time those feelings are kept in check. But they are always there.

I am a developmental psychologist and, because no one else will say this aloud, a rather good one. I have worked with young people in the poor communities for 25 years and throughout that time I have worked closely with police officers, corrections officers, and others in law enforcement. There’s no question in my mind that this tension, this polarization, this dysfunctional relationship has to be addressed if we’re going to eliminate the possibility of future occurrences of this kind.

But, while there have been high profile meetings, and photo ops and press conferences over the last several days, there is so far no dialogue about how to deal with this basic problem. There has been a lot of “concern” expressed. There has been an effort to create a “fair” environment around the situation—both of which are positive. No one wants a return to the Giuliani era—nor do we have to worry about that. This is not the Giuliani era, it’s the Bloomberg era. Remember? We elected him!

In the last election, the mayor got 47% of the black vote. That vote was produced by the people in this room—by the black leaders in this city who went to the community and said “it’s time to take the politics out of policy.” Half of black voters broke with the political norm—also known as the Democratic Party—to go with us and that has impacted dramatically on City Hall’s handling of this incident. Only a liar—or a reporter for the New York Post—and generally those two are equivalent—would deny that.

I would add here, speaking in my role as a leader of the Independence Party, that it was the Independence Party that got Bloomberg elected in the first place in 2001, part of our long term mission to take the politics out of governing. We have never demanded any favors or special treatment for that, only that public policy—including crisis response—include all those who are qualified to join in, not just those who have been anointed by the clubhouse.

But, politics has a funny way of creeping into the picture—and that has happened in this situation and that needs to be pointed out. None of you—the Coalition of Outsiders—were called to a meeting at City Hall. I was not called to come to that or any other meeting. That is conspicuous to me. As far as I could see, there was not a single woman of color in any of these meetings. Either the photographers in this town use cameras that make black women invisible, or we weren’t there. If there was a black woman present she was kept so far on the sidelines that she didn’t turn up in any photograph. There were no psychologists, no mothers, no voices outside the political establishment.

Mike Bloomberg and Al Sharpton are the key players in this piece of political theatre—and I say that as someone who is a strong supporter of political theatre—I even occasionally act in one. Bloomberg and Sharpton have something very significant in common. They were both profoundly shaped by the outsiders, by the people in this room. Each of you has your history with Sharpton. Certainly I have mine. Long before Al Sharpton was officially “baptized” by the New York political establishment, he and I were on the streets together, marching against racially-motivated brutality, the chronic injustice of the justice system and the excessive use of force by the police. These protests gave Sharpton greater notoriety and political power. And that’s a good thing. Sharpton is an important leader and his exercise of power is important to the black community. That’s why I frankly object to him reducing himself to “press conference politics” when he has so much more to give and to contribute.

My background has been to bring new and developmental programs to the poor communities, specifically to develop young people to break out of and move beyond the anger and resentment that can produce dangerous and destructive events. That anger is understandable, but it’s also ultimately harmful to the young people themselves.

For all of the drama around the mayor’s and my relationship—most of which was created by the media, high paid PR professionals and political insiders looking to wreck non-conformist approaches to learning and education—he is well aware that the developmental approach I helped to create is a key tool for dealing with these kinds of problems. The city recently approved a $12.5 million bond for the All Stars Project which goes into the poorest and most alienated communities to create developmental opportunities for young people. The All Stars deals in an ongoing way with the very issues that are at the heart of the Bell tragedy. But not unlike Sharpton, who is limiting his role to the traditional “civil rights leader,” Bloomberg is limiting his own role to the traditional politician, albeit one with greater sensitivity to the black community, by not availing himself of effective resources for this crisis, even if they were created by outsiders.

The city needs Bloomberg and Sharpton to genuinely lead right now. That means bringing in the outsiders, those who are perhaps politically incorrect, but who have the experience and the track record to make a difference. The issue on the table is not a short term resolution to the death of Sean Bell. There can be no resolution there—it is too late. The young man is dead and we mourn him. His family’s pain, his children’s pain, will always be there and will never go away. The serious issue on the table is what is this city going to do about the intense antagonisms that produce these tragedies. Press conferences, posturing, public hearings and the like, do nothing to touch that. They simply reinforce it. If all you can offer the people of this city—including the poor black community and the police—is a photo op and a four-day media cycle, then you have compounded the original tragedy several times over.

The city would be better served by putting ten young black adults and ten police officers in a room together—without TV cameras, handlers, spin artists and media provocateurs—and help them talk to one another, help them go beyond the freeze frame they are stuck in. Some of us have already begun work on this project.

But at the same time, as outsider political leaders, as the people who shaped the careers of Al Sharpton and Mike Bloomberg, we have an obligation to let them know that they have to go beyond traditional political boundaries. We didn’t form the Coalition of Outsiders to score political points. If we wanted to do that, we’d have gone the clubhouse route. We came together as outsiders to demand that the insiders lead. I know Al Sharpton and I know Mike Bloomberg. I know they care and I know they want to make a difference. It’s our job to show them how to do that.

Bloomberg and Sharpton have an unusual opportunity to make a difference, but if that’s going to happen, if we’re going to push them in that direction, we can’t be armchair activists. We have to take our roles in this situation as seriously as we take theirs. You are all important players in this city. There are many hundreds of other activists who look to you for leadership. There are thousands of community people who take their cues from you. You have to reach them with this message. You have a special responsibility, because we are the outsiders. As outsiders, we are the closest to the people, who are the most outside of all. We have to be their voice demanding new approaches and new ways of dealing with the causes of this terrible event.

Read the original article here

I came downtown to tonight’s meeting even though I’m still in the early stages of recovery from compound pneumonia because I wanted to speak directly with all of you. Thanks for all your good wishes and calls while I was in the hospital.

The very tragic death of Sean Bell and the current response of the city’s leadership to it, requires that we, the Coalition of Outsiders, talk together about what is—and isn’t—happening, and what needs to be done.

A young black man—23 years old—is dead. He was killed in what appears to have been a confusing, charged and dangerous scene outside a Queens nightclub where 50 shots were fired by police. Presumably the details of the incident—and its drastic consequences—will be revealed as the District Attorney’s investigation and the grand jury process move along. There is talk of City Council hearings—as if that were a genuine remedy to the problem—but so far no frank discussion of the problem. At a time like this, we cannot afford to be anything but frank.

There is a basic truth—one that everyone knows but that most people are afraid to say—that governs on the streets of the communities of color. It is that young people in our communities distrust, sometimes even hate, the police. And the police distrust and often dislike our teenagers and young adults. Most of the time those feelings are kept in check. But they are always there.

I am a developmental psychologist and, because no one else will say this aloud, a rather good one. I have worked with young people in the poor communities for 25 years and throughout that time I have worked closely with police officers, corrections officers, and others in law enforcement. There’s no question in my mind that this tension, this polarization, this dysfunctional relationship has to be addressed if we’re going to eliminate the possibility of future occurrences of this kind.

But, while there have been high profile meetings, and photo ops and press conferences over the last several days, there is so far no dialogue about how to deal with this basic problem. There has been a lot of “concern” expressed. There has been an effort to create a “fair” environment around the situation—both of which are positive. No one wants a return to the Giuliani era—nor do we have to worry about that. This is not the Giuliani era, it’s the Bloomberg era. Remember? We elected him!

In the last election, the mayor got 47% of the black vote. That vote was produced by the people in this room—by the black leaders in this city who went to the community and said “it’s time to take the politics out of policy.” Half of black voters broke with the political norm—also known as the Democratic Party—to go with us and that has impacted dramatically on City Hall’s handling of this incident. Only a liar—or a reporter for the New York Post—and generally those two are equivalent—would deny that.

I would add here, speaking in my role as a leader of the Independence Party, that it was the Independence Party that got Bloomberg elected in the first place in 2001, part of our long term mission to take the politics out of governing. We have never demanded any favors or special treatment for that, only that public policy—including crisis response—include all those who are qualified to join in, not just those who have been anointed by the clubhouse.

But, politics has a funny way of creeping into the picture—and that has happened in this situation and that needs to be pointed out. None of you—the Coalition of Outsiders—were called to a meeting at City Hall. I was not called to come to that or any other meeting. That is conspicuous to me. As far as I could see, there was not a single woman of color in any of these meetings. Either the photographers in this town use cameras that make black women invisible, or we weren’t there. If there was a black woman present she was kept so far on the sidelines that she didn’t turn up in any photograph. There were no psychologists, no mothers, no voices outside the political establishment.

Mike Bloomberg and Al Sharpton are the key players in this piece of political theatre—and I say that as someone who is a strong supporter of political theatre—I even occasionally act in one. Bloomberg and Sharpton have something very significant in common. They were both profoundly shaped by the outsiders, by the people in this room. Each of you has your history with Sharpton. Certainly I have mine. Long before Al Sharpton was officially “baptized” by the New York political establishment, he and I were on the streets together, marching against racially-motivated brutality, the chronic injustice of the justice system and the excessive use of force by the police. These protests gave Sharpton greater notoriety and political power. And that’s a good thing. Sharpton is an important leader and his exercise of power is important to the black community. That’s why I frankly object to him reducing himself to “press conference politics” when he has so much more to give and to contribute.

My background has been to bring new and developmental programs to the poor communities, specifically to develop young people to break out of and move beyond the anger and resentment that can produce dangerous and destructive events. That anger is understandable, but it’s also ultimately harmful to the young people themselves.

For all of the drama around the mayor’s and my relationship—most of which was created by the media, high paid PR professionals and political insiders looking to wreck non-conformist approaches to learning and education—he is well aware that the developmental approach I helped to create is a key tool for dealing with these kinds of problems. The city recently approved a $12.5 million bond for the All Stars Project which goes into the poorest and most alienated communities to create developmental opportunities for young people. The All Stars deals in an ongoing way with the very issues that are at the heart of the Bell tragedy. But not unlike Sharpton, who is limiting his role to the traditional “civil rights leader,” Bloomberg is limiting his own role to the traditional politician, albeit one with greater sensitivity to the black community, by not availing himself of effective resources for this crisis, even if they were created by outsiders.

The city needs Bloomberg and Sharpton to genuinely lead right now. That means bringing in the outsiders, those who are perhaps politically incorrect, but who have the experience and the track record to make a difference. The issue on the table is not a short term resolution to the death of Sean Bell. There can be no resolution there—it is too late. The young man is dead and we mourn him. His family’s pain, his children’s pain, will always be there and will never go away. The serious issue on the table is what is this city going to do about the intense antagonisms that produce these tragedies. Press conferences, posturing, public hearings and the like, do nothing to touch that. They simply reinforce it. If all you can offer the people of this city—including the poor black community and the police—is a photo op and a four-day media cycle, then you have compounded the original tragedy several times over.

The city would be better served by putting ten young black adults and ten police officers in a room together—without TV cameras, handlers, spin artists and media provocateurs—and help them talk to one another, help them go beyond the freeze frame they are stuck in. Some of us have already begun work on this project.

But at the same time, as outsider political leaders, as the people who shaped the careers of Al Sharpton and Mike Bloomberg, we have an obligation to let them know that they have to go beyond traditional political boundaries. We didn’t form the Coalition of Outsiders to score political points. If we wanted to do that, we’d have gone the clubhouse route. We came together as outsiders to demand that the insiders lead. I know Al Sharpton and I know Mike Bloomberg. I know they care and I know they want to make a difference. It’s our job to show them how to do that.

Bloomberg and Sharpton have an unusual opportunity to make a difference, but if that’s going to happen, if we’re going to push them in that direction, we can’t be armchair activists. We have to take our roles in this situation as seriously as we take theirs. You are all important players in this city. There are many hundreds of other activists who look to you for leadership. There are thousands of community people who take their cues from you. You have to reach them with this message. You have a special responsibility, because we are the outsiders. As outsiders, we are the closest to the people, who are the most outside of all. We have to be their voice demanding new approaches and new ways of dealing with the causes of this terrible event.

Read the original article here

After a hiatus during the war, President Bush begins fundraising again Wednesday, when he is scheduled to be the big draw at a dinner for congressional Republicans. Unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise, those House and Senate contenders and the 2004 presidential candidates, Bush included, will be playing under a new set of spending rules Congress passed last year. Supposedly, these new rules will make it harder for big-money contributors — the much-maligned special interests — to have their way with the American electoral process. But here’s the unanswered question: Who will step in to take their place?
Campaign finance reformers have focused their efforts on limiting the influence of the wealthy. But our democracy is not a finished product, a spectator sport that need only to be defended from the corrupting influence of the well-heeled. For democracy to flourish, the citizenry must work continuously to develop and improve it. We must invest our time, our energy — and our money.

Unfortunately, few Americans do so. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, less than half a percent of adult Americans gave $200 or more to a candidate or party during 2000. A third of the money raised during the 2000 president campaign came from a mere 15,000 individuals, and the largest 100 special interest groups gave about 30% of all the money raised in federal campaigns. Because they dominate political giving, these special interest groups shape our nation’s political agenda.

In charity we trust

Contrast this to philanthropy, where individual giving overshadows institutional involvement.

According to Giving USA 2002, individual Americans gave $177.05 billion to charity in 2001. Nine out of 10 households contribute to charitable organizations, Independent Sector reports. Institutions account for only 16.5% of charitable giving.

Our culture encourages giving to improve the well-being of our communities, cure disease, ease suffering and preserve natural resources. So Americans give willingly, and see the value of giving, to these causes. But they have been fooled into thinking that they don’t need to invest in the development of our greatest national treasure: our democracy.

Of course, there are justifiable reasons why we don’t give politically. Contributions are no longer tax deductible. Both major parties use funds on distasteful negative campaigns, attack mailings and manipulative “issue” ads. Contributing $100 to a homeless shelter makes you feel good. Giving $100 to a political campaign can leave you feeling in need of a shower.

Put money on it

To improve the conduct of political campaigns and ensure that vital issues are debated and discussed, however, Americans must apply their philanthropic know-how to the political arena. They must become the primary financiers of political life, if they are to be reconnected to the political process.

Although further regulating the supply of special-interest dollars will not change the status quo, some steps could encourage giving, such as restoring the tax exemption for political contributions. But the country also needs a new breed of political reformers whose focus is not on getting the money out of politics, but getting the people into politics — as voters, as educated citizens and as donors.

These politically involved individual contributors could fund candidates who are willing to talk about the controversial issues — comprehensive election reform, school vouchers, legalized marijuana, national health care, trade policy — that special interests now keep off the table. They could finance candidates, initiatives, petition drives, debates, forums and grassroots campaigns to shift control away from special interests.

Today’s “dumbed-down” campaigns will not change overnight. Nor will the power and influence of special interests vanish immediately. But any positive change in our electoral system will require the philanthropic participation of the American people.

The impulse to “get the money out of politics” is understandable. But the bigger issue is getting the people in.

Read the original article here

All the latest articles about Al Sharpton’s Presidential campaign miss the point. “Nightmarish complications” cries the liberal American Prospect. “The Sharpton nightmare” chuckles conservative columnist Bob Novak. “This strategy of appeasement…is devastating for the party as a whole,” admonishes The New Republic, referring to the legitimacy the white Democratic Presidential contenders are currently conferring on Sharpton. In other words, the shared obsession is about what he might do to the Democratic Party.

I have a different concern. I’m concerned not with what the Reverend Al Sharpton might do to the Democrats. My question is – what have the Democrats done to Al Sharpton?

During my nearly 20-year history with him, I have seen him become ensnared in a dangerous trap, one that is a political dead-end for him and, more importantly, for Black America. I have seen him set aside the visionary for the viable. I have seen him try to recreate himself as a progressive, out of expedience – not principle. I have seen him become what is, sadly, a second rate Black leader.

I know Al Sharpton. I probably know him better than any other Black leader in America knows him. I know him with the kind of intimacy that comes from being together in critical and formative times.

We did many things together in the 1980s and early ‘90s – things you’d expect, like marching for racial justice, sitting through courtroom trials, mourning at funerals for young Black men shot by the police or by local racists. But that was the public dimension. Privately, we’d become partners in a long-term enterprise to fill the vacuum in Black leadership. I bought him a good suit and my friends and I bought him an expensive watch.
We went to Los Angeles and stayed at the ultra-fancy Biltmore Hotel and held meetings with the Cripps and the Bloods. My close friend Jim Mangia and I took him into the gay community in San Francisco – his first public act of connecting to gays and the transgender community.

We’d sit in my offices – often with my political mentor Fred Newman, who funded some of Sharpton’s activities in the early days – plotting, scheming, and laughing about the backwardness of the handkerchief-heads, the white liberals, the phony Black revolutionaries. I brought white people out to Bensonhurst to march with us after the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in 1989 and we’d joke about how crazy the Black nationalists acted in response. Sharpton and I became a team. I was the socialist, he was the preacher. The Black community was curious, but supportive. We were so different from all the other leadership.

II.

Today Al Sharpton is seeking the Democratic nomination for President not simply as a Black candidate, but as an anti-war candidate, a progressive candidate – in other words, as a left candidate. But when I first got to know Sharpton he was not what you’d call a leftist. He was a Black Baptist conservative, fairly homophobic, politically incorrect, prone to nationalism, though smart as a whip. He was persona nongrata to Black leftists and white leftists, they considered him trash and a police informant. The Black establishment and intelligentsia were embarrassed by him. The New York media hated him. To them he was a charlatan, a showman, a publicity seeker with conked hair and a fat belly.

I was no bargain myself – according to the establishment. I was (and am!) a leftist, raised in the Baptist church but no longer religious, with my own brand of political incorrectness. The Black left and the white left hated me too, but for different reasons from the ones that made them hate Al. They snubbed him because he wasn’t a progressive. They snubbed me because I was, although I refused to join their club. (Being a woman didn’t help, either.) The media didn’t like me, but, contrary to how they dealt with Sharpton, they expressed their disdain largely by ignoring me – except when they figured out they could sell papers by calling me a Farrakhan Friend, an anti-Semite, or a cultist.

Sharpton and I both recognized how visionless and compromised the New York Black leadership was, although he saw this in purely racial terms and I saw it in more political terms; I believed (and still believe) that the Democrats had betrayed their progressive roots, abandoning the fight against poverty and injustice in favor of empty notions of Black empowerment. Our partnership was based to no small degree on finding ways to create a new politic for the Black community. Newman and I told Rev he’d have to move left to do that: he’d have to learn and embrace progressive politics much in the same way that Malcolm X, Dr. King and W.E.B. DuBois had; he’d have to be willing to challenge the Black community’s fundamental conservatism in order for it to grow as a force in New York and national politics.

Sharpton was a quick study. He knew Black history, although he was conflicted about the influence of socialists and socialism on these great Black leaders. Still, he was a pragmatist. He saw Jesse Jackson go from 3.5 million votes in his 1984 Presidential bid to 7 million votes in 1988, largely as a function of his own move left and his ability to speak for what became known as America’s Rainbow movement. He saw and he made note, in the brilliant and calculating way that Sharpton always does.

III.

When I ran for President as an independent in 1988 – becoming the first African American and first woman to access the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia – my campaign slogan was “Two Roads Are Better Than One.” The first road was to support Reverend Jackson.

I backed Jackson in the Democratic primaries but I believed (as did Sharpton) that Jesse – and Black America – would be turned away by the Democratic gatekeepers and reminded to stay in our place. The second road was my independent campaign, a tactic to lay the groundwork for an independent political movement that would free up African Americans to re-negotiate partnerships and programmatics with other becoming non-aligned Americans.

In the summer of 1988 Sharpton was with me in Atlanta – where we staged four days of rallies, protests, marches and Black Agenda gatherings outside the Democratic National Convention. Inside, Jackson was being marginalized by Michael Dukakis and the party hierarchs.

Al was understandably circumspect about electoral politics. He saw how difficult the independent road was – I got only a quarter of a million votes in 1988. Like many, he was outraged over what transpired with Jackson, who arrived at the convention having come in second, polling 29% of the votes cast and with 1200 delegates, and who left without the vice presidency or any significant role in either the campaign or the Democratic Party. The party bigwigs were obsessed with trying to bring white Reagan Democrats back into the fold.

Sharpton continued to see himself as the social agitator to my independent electoral crusader. I ran for Governor; he lay down on the subway tracks. I ran for President; he championed Tawana Brawley. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to end up like Jesse Jackson,” he told me repeatedly. He once wrote that the Black community would “be a jackass to follow” the Democratic Party “donkey.”

IV.

But Sharpton, while rejecting the establishment in general and Jackson in particular, was also irresistibly drawn to the limelight. Carefully cultivating his public image as the voice of the Black citizenry, he was almost oblivious to whether the political base gathering around him could be empowered in new ways, rather than simply used to bolster his own political ascendancy. Jackson had done much the same thing.

Sharpton was so incorrigibly committed to promoting himself that on the day he was stabbed in Bensonhurst in 1991, he was already figuring out how to use his near-death experience to open the pearly gates of political acceptability while he still lay in his hospital bed. I know this because Newman and I were there – we’d been with him in the schoolyard staging area when Michael Riccardi thrust a knife into his chest; Newman took him to the hospital in his car because the ambulance was slow to arrive. Once he was out of danger, Sharpton regaled us with hilarious accounts of the solemn parade of Black officialdom that passed by his bedside. The Black hierarchs – from Mayor David Dinkins to Jesse Jackson himself – were eager to preside over his redemption. And Sharpton, for all his righteous fury, wanted to be redeemed. In retrospect, I realize this was the day that Sharpton decided to trade in his nascent independence to become a Democrat.

V.

A year later Sharpton took the plunge and decided to run for office himself. It was early 1992. Jackson had foregone a third run. I was in New Hampshire campaigning. It was my second Presidential try, and I’d entered the Democratic Party primary there to inject a pro-democracy message and to establish myself as a national Black leader who was willing to challenge the Democratic Party.

Sharpton drove up to Manchester to tell us about his decision to enter the Democratic primary for U. S. Senate. (Republican Senator Alphonse D’Amato was the incumbent.) Newman, with a distinct taste for the tongue in cheek, set up a support committee for the campaign that he called “White People for Sharpton.” The committee had a chairman, a treasurer, and, not surprisingly, no members. The media practically choked on the idea. (How the worm turns. Today Tucker Carlson looks like he’d head the committee if he didn’t have prior journalistic commitments.) But back in 1992, Sharpton was still radioactive.

VI.

Unlike Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson was no particular friend of mine. We’ve met in person only a handful of times. We both spoke at a labor rally in Detroit and have seen each other at various functions over the years. After the 1988 campaign Sharpton tried to put together a meeting with Jackson, Newman and myself but it never happened. In the one photograph Jackson and I posed for together we both look pained.

Our political relationship, such as it was, was a rocky one. I had been publicly and vocally critical of what I considered his obeisance to the Democratic Party, and I believe he squandered the force of the Rainbow movement by attaching it so unequivocally to the Democrats.

I wasn’t the only Black leader who thought so. Robert Starks, an associate of Jackson’s from Operation PUSH, once told journalist and author Marshall Frady that after Walter Mondale’s 1984 refusal to put him on his ticket, Jackson “should have organized a solid force to regenerate the Democratic Party, or formed his own independent party. For about two months there after the convention, you were ahead of the game, you could still get the agenda, and he could have put something together that could have made a great difference in this country.” (p. 368 Jesse: the Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson – Marshall Frady.)

Many people felt that way. I was perhaps the only one who said it publicly, and the only one leading an effort to create an independent party.

But, even with those differences, I will say this much for Jackson. His two Presidential runs were historic. Jackson was a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the hearts and minds of Black America he inherited the legacy of King’s profound mass movement for equality and fairness that still remains unfulfilled.

What’s more, when Jackson ran in 1984 there had not yet been a full blown Black presidential candidacy. Yes, Shirley Chisholm had launched one in 1972, but it was almost immediately buried by the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. The Gary leadership, looking to reap the benefits of the civil rights and voting rights movements, chose instead to pursue the path of getting more Blacks elected to local public office, for which they wanted the support of liberal white Democrats. They would not back Chisholm over the left’s choice for the Democratic nomination, George McGovern.

Twelve years later, however, there was much water under the Democratic bridge. There was a network of Black elected officials who were hitting the glass ceiling of minority representation. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. The new conservative political reality – combined with the impotence of the Democratic Party to reverse it – fostered a climate ripe for a challenge. Jackson had both the brains and the balls to grab the opening. In so doing, he not only galvanized Black America into having a new stake in the Presidential process, he also galvanized the American left – much of which had previously disdained electoral politics altogether. Dr. King was revered by the left as a true visionary, a man willing to stand alone on principle, who paid the ultimate price for his independence. The left, for the most part, was willing to accept Jackson as his political heir.

In return, Jackson took political risks. Like Dr. King before him, he brought white progressives into his inner circle and asserted a vision that went beyond the Gary assumptions of entitlement and demographics to issues of poverty, the structural defects of capitalism, the critical role of organized labor as an engine for progressive social change, and the dangerously destabilizing nature of U.S. foreign policy. Jackson allowed his entry into electoral politics to transform him from a rudderless vestige of the civil rights era into a full throated left winger. The more he moved left, the more his vote totals grew.

There was one element of the left that Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition did not embrace, however. That was me, Newman and the evolving independent movement we were building. White leftists had busied themselves penning diatribes about us. The most popular of these was entitled Clouds Blur the Rainbow. Newman and I were the clouds. At its Washington, D.C. convention in 1986, the Rainbow Coalition rebuffed efforts to open a dialogue on pursuing an independent strategy if the Democratic Party route failed. And in 1992, the Rainbow Coalition informally sanctioned an “independent” Presidential run by Ron Daniels, a Black long-time leftist, who got on the ballot in nine states and devoted most of his campaign rhetoric to attacks on me.

VII.

1994, the year Sharpton and I both entered the Democratic Party primary to challenge two of New York’s most powerful incumbents – I ran against Mario Cuomo for the gubernatorial nomination, and he went up against Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan – was a turning point in our partnership. We had a very public, very ugly political fight during the campaign. Sharpton and I had planned to endorse each other, but the weeks dragged on and he refused to announce his support for my candidacy. I was interviewed on a popular local talk radio show and suggested that his silence meant that he might have cut a deal with Cuomo.

Sharpton went ballistic. To this day, I do not completely understand what motivated him, but he went on a major public tear against me, accusing me of being Fred Newman’s puppet and a traitor to the Black community, mimicking the Rainbow Coalition’s criticisms of me. He dispatched a variety of proxies to attack me in the Black press. In effect, it was a red-baiting attack designed to undercut me with Black voters and, I presume, to demonstrate to the Democratic Party hierarchs that he wasn’t afraid to take me on. I responded aggressively. Even with the attacks, when the votes were counted, he outpolled me by only five percentage points – 26% vs. 21%.

Following the primary, I did not endorse Cuomo. Instead, I solidified my evolving connection to the Perot movement and accepted Tom Golisano’s request to endorse his independent bid for Governor, a run designed to win ballot status for what became the Independence Party. At one point Sharpton tried to negotiate his way onto the ticket but failed. He went on to conduct a voter registration drive for the Democrats, but Cuomo lost anyway to Republican George Pataki. We won ballot status (Golisano polled 217,000 votes, more than four times the number needed for ballot status) and I set out to bring my base of Black, Latino and progressive independents into the Independence Party.

An interesting, and not irrelevant, side note is a comparison between Sharpton’s and Jackson’s New York numbers. In 1984 Jackson polled 355,541 votes, coming in third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. In 1988 he came in second, with 585,076 votes, beating out Al Gore, among others, in the face of a vicious and highly publicized campaign by then Mayor Ed Koch to tag Jackson as an anti-Semite, warning that any Jew who would vote for him was “crazy.”

In Sharpton’s two statewide primary runs in 1992 and 1994, he didn’t get anywhere near Jackson’s New York totals, polling 166,665 and 178,231 respectively. Most of those votes came from Black districts. My 1994 total — 141,918 votes — came from a cross-section of Black and white communities, dispelling the myth that Sharpton was a significantly bigger vote getter than me among Democrats and establishing that a progressive candidate who is Black could be competitive with a Black candidate whose message was largely nationalistic.)

VIII.

After 1994 our paths diverged dramatically. Sharpton ran for Mayor in 1997, almost forcing a run-off in the Democratic primary. The Democratic nominee, Ruth Messinger, lost badly to Republican Rudy Giuliani. Ed Koch came to Al Sharpton’s birthday party.

I continued building the Independence Party and the national independent movement. We backed Perot’s second run in 1996 and established the Reform Party on a national level. Sharpton got money from Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party for registration and get-out-the-vote activities. We were on distinctly different paths, but were friendly all the same.

In 1999, when Pat Buchanan entered the Reform Party’s Presidential primary and sought my support, I called Sharpton and told him I wanted to bring Buchanan to Harlem to meet with him. He agreed. Buchanan never came. In 2000, after U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton publicly denounced me at an Independence Party forum as an anti-Semite and extremist (she wanted the Independence Party line without a primary and had been told she couldn’t have her way), Sharpton was the only Black Democrat to speak out in my defense.

Late in 2000, as the set-up for the 2001 mayoral contest was proceeding, Sharpton met with Newman and me to talk about his plans. He hadn’t decided whether to run himself, or whether to support Fernando Ferrer. He told us he was under a lot of pressure to join a Black/Latino coalition behind Ferrer’s candidacy, although he was still irked that Ferrer had supported Messinger in 1997 and not him. He was looking for a two-way street that hadn’t materialized.

Sharpton went on to endorse Ferrer, who won the first round of the mayoral primary but lost the run-off to Mark Green. The Ferrer defeat sparked a huge scandal over the Green campaign’s encouragement of white Democrats to back Green on the grounds that Ferrer was really controlled by Sharpton.

The Independence Party, meanwhile, had given our line to Michael Bloomberg, on whose behalf I campaigned in the Black community well before the Sharpton/Green incident played itself out. As soon as it did, Bloomberg gained traction among Black voters. Sharpton appeared at a unity rally with Green, but left early and sat out the rest of the race. The Independence Party went on to provide Bloomberg’s margin of victory, as 30% of the Black vote peeled away from the Democrats. Sharpton and Bloomberg had their picture taken together two days after the election.

IX.

Some have speculated that Sharpton’s idea of a Presidential run was being forced by his weakened circumstances on the ground in New York. The vaunted “Black/Latino” Democratic Party coalition had been deflated by Mark Green, and then undercut by Mike Bloomberg and the Independence/Republican coalition. It was regrouping behind the gubernatorial candidacy of Carl McCall, but Sharpton knew McCall was a loser. What’s more, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel – not Sharpton – was its prime mover in the Black community. Plus, the Bloomberg win had repositioned the Independence Party in Black politics. The prospect of an African American break with the Democratic Party was “on the table” in a way it had not been before, which meant that I was in a stronger position than ever to challenge him over his role as a militant (albeit conflicted) front-man for the Democrats. Some observers thought he might be looking to disengage from the New York scene for a time.

Whatever his motives, though, Sharpton decided to make the run. That decision required him to come to terms with two things: the rationale for his candidacy, and his “crossover” appeal to white voters. Ironically, that meant he was finally going to have to deal with the issue that Newman and I had posed to him more than a dozen years earlier – the need for him to move to the left, politically, if he was going to be both relevant and significant. It also meant that he would have to face the specter that had haunted him for much of his political career. The man who did not want to end up like Jesse Jackson was about to follow in his footsteps.

X.

In the interviews Sharpton has recently given to the liberal and left press, he tells a story of how the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) reacted to Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition by pulling the Democratic Party to the right. His candidacy, he says, is about returning the party to its progressive roots. “I watched Jesse take this party to where it should go,” Sharpton told the Village Voice in a February 2003 interview. “This is a battle in 2004 of the children of the Rainbow versus the DLC. I think this is what it’s going to come down to, if I’m successful in what I want to do.”

In actuality, though, Jesse didn’t take the party where it should have gone. He tried, but failed. In 1988, the pinnacle of Jackson’s movement, the Rainbow vision was displaced by Dukakis’ “it’s not about ideology, it’s about competence” anti-vision. No wonder the DLC’s Bill Clinton became the party’s standard bearer in 1992. He was the perfect synthesis of Jackson and Dukakis – of vision and anti-vision. He cared for the problems of the working man and woman (especially the woman) but he was pragmatic. He was a product of the visionary 1960s, but he didn’t inhale. The vision hadn’t mastered him. He had mastered the vision.

Once in the White House – doubtless the beneficiary of Perot’s attraction for what would otherwise have been Republican voters – even Clinton was surprised by the “soullessness” of the Democratic Party. They had the White House and control of Congress. Yet his dream of universal health care for all Americans – virtually all that remained of the party’s historic connection to socialist principles – was shattered. By the midterm elections in 1994, he was nearly undone. Triangulation became the Clinton watchword. He could not pass health care reform. He could only enact welfare reform. There would be no more vision – only deals.

XI.

To follow Jackson, but not end up like him, Sharpton must not allow himself to be overdetermined by the Democrats. He is a smart man. He is a great communicator. He has a profound intimacy with the pain and humiliation of being Black in America. This I know. But over the years he has learned to trade on that pain, bartering whatever vision he had at the ultimate marketplace for commodified oppression – the Democratic Party.

Recently Sharpton told the American Prospect : “Even if I lose, I have the option to negotiate points with the Democratic Party.” What points, exactly? The ones even Bill Clinton – as President – couldn’t win? The poverty, underdevelopment and cultural deprivation of Black America are so great that the political, economic, and social restructuring required to address them go far beyond any “points” that the Democrats are willing to negotiate with Sharpton, or with anyone else.

That is Sharpton’s dilemma. To be a true power on behalf of Black America, he must become bigger and more radical; he must not allow himself to be encumbered by the culture of Democratic Party politics. But to be a player in the Presidential primary process, he must constantly prove his loyalty to it.

More than ten years ago, I moderated a dialogue on Black-Jewish relations in New York politics between Sharpton and Newman in Brooklyn. A young Black woman raised her hand to speak. Where is the vision in all you are doing, Reverend Sharpton? How do you use what you’re doing to achieve freedom and dignity and decent lives for the poor?

We’ll deal with that, said Sharpton forcefully. We have to achieve a level of power, and then we’ll deal with that. The sister, in search of a mainstream Black leader who could put forth a progressive vision without compromise, sat back down in her seat. She did not believe her question had been answered.

When I think about Sharpton going through the primary season – making his way to the Democratic convention, being sidelined by whoever becomes the nominee, being given a speaking slot to assuage the restlessness among the children of the Rainbow – I think of that young woman in Brooklyn, and his promise that with a requisite level of power in hand, he’d be ready to fully embrace a progressive social vision. I can picture Sharpton up at the podium – eloquent as ever. I can hear him calling America to a higher ideal of brotherhood, equality and peace. And then, my fantasy goes – as the convention applauds wildly and party bosses glance over at one another, eager for the display to be over – Sharpton suddenly catches sight of his own image. Lord Jesus, he says to himself. I’m about to end up just like Jesse Jackson. And so, he announces that he’s leaving: leaving the convention, leaving the party, leaving politics-as-usual to lead an independent people’s movement.

I know Al Sharpton. I know him well. I haven’t given up all hope that this is the real Al Sharpton.

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A little-noticed USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll in October showed 35 percent of Americans consider themselves independents — a plurality of the national electorate (Republicans, 32 percent; Democrats, 31 percent). It is statistically obvious that independent voters decided the results of the November elections. But who is the independent voter? And how does this plurality fit into the American political scene?

Independent voters are largely misunderstood because they are always examined through a parochial two-party lens as voters who swing to one or the other of the major parties. The fact that these millions have declared themselves to be other than Democrats or Republicans is considered irrelevant. I have sat in endless campaign meetings with political consultants who relate to independents simply as voters to “poll and pull” on the issues, never willing to investigate why or respecting that they have made a particular statement in defining themselves outside the two parties.

Those who made an effort to understand the independent voter — Michael Bloomberg in the 2001 New York City mayoral race — succeeded in overcoming huge odds to win. Presidential aspirant Sen. John McCain, who reached out to independents with an explicit anti-special interest message, didn’t win but established himself as a national leader of integrity, a quality that is hard to come by in today’s political marketplace. Given the numbers, presidential contenders (and their parties) ignore independents at their peril.

The more closely you look at the numbers, the more intriguing the picture gets. Some 22 states have open Democratic primaries in which independents are permitted to vote. The electoral college votes from these states total a hefty 233. While independents split between McCain and Bill Bradley in 2000, in 2004 there will (presumably) be no Republican presidential primary, putting independents in play only in the Democratic primaries. The Democrat shrewd enough to connect to the independent voter will have a significant edge going into the compressed primary season and, if successful, in the general election, too.

Still, it is difficult for traditional Democratic and Republican players to appreciate the political and psychological make-up of the independent voter.

Many analysts and consultants contend that the independent voter is, ideologically speaking, at the center.

The problem with this analysis is that it fails to note that independents actually span the ideological spectrum and, more important, reject the traditional left/center/right ideological paradigm altogether. No small part of why independents declare themselves as such is that they balk at the idea of being categorized. Independents seek solutions to policy questions that are free of labels, which means free of partisan politics.

The prevailing (bipartisan) approach to independents is to try to plug them back into the ideological paradigm with the accompanying mantra “they’re really centrists,” or whatever label fits the pollsters’ bill. Those of us who’ve been building the independent movement know otherwise. The independent voter might support policies associated with diverse points along the spectrum, but they are independents because they believe there is something wrong with the existing political order. They believe politicians and government have been corrupted. They’re looking for a “way out,” a way out of special interest-driven politics.

The establishment parties, not surprising, do not want to encourage this direction. Instead, they offer independents a way by broaching policy issues that poll well with them. That’s why independents, ultimately, have to rely on themselves as the engine for the kinds of political reforms that will bring the special interests to heel. The Democrats and Republicans will not willingly undermine their bipartisan control of America’s political process.

Until now, Republicans have done better than Democrats with independents. In broad historical terms, the Democratic Party, the philosophy of liberalism and the New Deal coalition, dominated the past century’s Big Government political order (and can be held accountable for its failures). It is natural that Republicans and independents bond more frequently on the need to challenge Big Government.

Republicans are betting the new order will benefit them. At the moment, the independents are insufficiently organized and lack a unified political voice to fully assert their distinct interests in the mix. The collapse of the Perot movement and the Reform Party, the sectarian marginality of the Greens, the Libertarians and other third party ideologues and the elaborate matrix of laws and regulations biased against independents have disrupted and delayed efforts to unify an independent movement.

But with the numbers there — 35 percent of the electorate — leaders of the independent movement are working to effect a level of unity sufficient to bring an anti-special interest, political reform agenda into the 2004 presidential elections and to challenge all candidates to address it.
If architects and leaders of the movement succeed in helping independents find their own voice, this anti-establishment voting bloc will become powerful indeed. The Nov. 5 results have Republicans believing they are now a majoritarian force. The Democrats, wounded and tattered though they are, still see themselves as an emerging majority. But add the self-defined, self-propelled independents to the mix and soon an energized, anti-corruption plurality will be able to drive American politics in a whole new direction.

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Last week was marked by two interesting events in Black politics. The first was the public spat among Black Democrats over Reverend Al Sharpton’s proposed presidential run. The other was the firestorm surrounding Mississippi Senator Trent Lott’s racist remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party.

The Lott debacle first. You’ve got a good ol’ boy Republican doing what the good ol’ boys do when they get together. They reminisce about the good old days when the Negroes knew our place, but those damn liberals stuck their noses into the white man’s business and, in this particular case, tried to integrate the Armed Forces. In this case, the damned integrationist was also the Commander-in-Chief, President Harry Truman, a Democrat. So Strom, loyal son of the South that he was, turned his back on his fellow Democrats and ran for President as a Dixiecrat who pledged to maintain segregation forever.

As it turned out, Truman won, the Armed Forces were desegregated, Thurmond became a Republican, and Black people began to vote for the Democrats. That trend crescendoed when Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Soon Black empowerment advocates staked out their political turf in the Democratic Party. Millions of African Americans followed.

This new Democratic voting bloc was a mixed blessing, however. In 1968 George Wallace replayed Thurmond’s strategy, broke with the Democrats and ran for the presidency as a segregationist. He got 13% of the vote and set the stage for the modern exodus of southern whites from the Democratic Party. The Democrats have been trying to get them back ever since. (Since the 1948 presidential election, the Democrats have won the White House only three times.)

In 1992 a candidate came along who knew that the Democrats needed a southern strategy to win back the white folks who’d been helping to elect Republican presidents.

His name was Bill Clinton. He and the Democratic Leadership Council ran a campaign which hammered home a not-so-subliminal message when he publicly crucified Reverend Jesse Jackson with his now infamous “Sister Souljah” remarks: Here was one white Democrat who was not going to be dictated to by Jesse Jackson and the Black community. That strategy got Clinton elected and got the Democrats back in the White House for two terms. Black folks got over being mad at Clinton for hanging us out to dry during the election. In my opinion, we should use our forgiveness a little more sparingly – not to mention intelligently.

Now some Democrats are calling for Lott’s head on a platter. He’s asking for forgiveness for his slip of the tongue. Truth be told, though I don’t care whether he is or isn’t forced out of his Senate leadership post, I feel a little sorry for Mr. Lott. He is being made to bear the brunt of 50 years of opportunistic partisan politics around America’s conflictedness over race, the Republican Party’s willingness to inflame that conflict and the Democratic Party’s inability to assert our social and economic progress in the face of entrenched racism. The political feeding frenzy is all a game. It ain’t about standing up for Black people or for decency. Both political parties gave that up a long time ago.

Enter Al Sharpton. He’s running for President in the Democratic primary. Why? Because, he says, the party has become alienated from its progressive roots and he wants to reassert that tradition. Some Democrats are worried about this – and none are more worried than the Black Democrats – notably members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). They don’t want Sharpton
to eclipse the CBC’s institutional role as the national broker of the Black vote. Towards that end, they’ve started floating a story – through Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s 2000 campaign – that a number of Black Congresspersons might run “favorite son” campaigns in their home states so that Sharpton won’t have an unobstructed path to the Black vote.

The CBC does not want to be supplanted by a competitor. But more importantly, they’re loyal Democrats. They understand that Sharpton is a polarizing figure who, if he emerges from the primary season as a major broker, will become a symbol that the Democratic Party is too tied to the Black community. This will make trouble for the (white) eventual Democratic nominee. The racialism Lott toasted at Thurmond’s celebration is alive and well in the Democratic Party, too.

Sharpton would say that the point of his running is to overcome that racialism. Maybe he really believes that, but I doubt it. Sharpton is a smart man. I think he recognizes that his power is maximized by keeping the current dynamic in play – even if it does nothing to further the cause of Black America.

The Republicans, by the way, get this point also. That’s why President Bush distanced himself from Lott. He’ll play the part of the anti-racist (wink, wink) while Lott (whether he stays or goes) is an unsung hero to the far right.

That, in a nutshell, is the state of American politics. Two parties. A high stakes game. And Black people perpetually caught in the crossfire.

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Usually, when we — as African Americans — talk about the need for leadership — we are talking about leadership in the fight against racism. We deal with racial profiling — at the street level and the corporate level; we mount defenses of affirmative action; we seek justice in response to excessive use of force against us by the police, or cruel and unusual punishment by the courts. Fighting racism is the paradigm (the model) which has defined our issues, our vision and our leadership.

I am, of course, sympathetic to those concerns. I have worked for and continue to be involved in those issues. When families come to me for help in a police brutality or corporate discrimination situation, I respond vigorously. But while I believe these issues are important, I do not regard them as the core of the new Black agenda.

The Black agenda is evolving. It is transforming. New paradigms are coming to take the place of old ones — in politics, in education, and in psychology. What I want to share with you today is what those paradigm shifts are, who’s making them, and what you can do to be a part of these critical new developments.

Does the pursuit of new paradigms mean we have ended racism? No. We have not. We have legally abolished it. That’s what the Civil Rights Movement accomplished, and that was a powerful and historic accomplishment. That we are meeting in Mississippi makes that point loud and clear. And we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us — from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Fannie Lou Hamer, from Medgar Evers to Rosa Parks and Ella Baker.

Because of them we are now — as a people — legally admissible to all institutions, all aspects, and all avenues of American life. Much of what our present day leadership does, whether it’s the Congressional Black Caucus, academics such as Dr. Cornell West and his associates at Harvard, or even my friend and brother Rev. Al Sharpton, is to mobilize for the complete exercise of our civil rights and resist the remaining practices of racism.

As I said, I have respect for those activities and I participate fully in them. But, at the same time, I also have a problem with them. My problem is that while fighting racism appears militant — and often is — as a paradigm for Black empowerment it falls short. Why? Because it accepts the existing realities of America’s political and economic arrangements and seeks simply to improve or advance our position within them. I believe the next phase in the Black struggle must involve challenging those arrangements altogether.

Dr. West wants more recognition of the need for diversity at Harvard. Rev. Sharpton wants more Black people in public office. The Congressional Black Caucus wants more government money for the social service and economic development programs that its members have engendered.

All these demands are reasonable. But, in my opinion, they fall short because they do not address the more fundamental ways that political power is organized and distributed. What’s more, they do not take into account that the paradigm of Black politics is now shifting. It is shifting in the direction of political independence and the formation of new coalitions. The newest generation of Black leadership — you, the people in this room — must be leaders whose attention is focused on that shift. That’s what I want to talk to you about today. When we talk about the connection between education and political empowerment we must talk about the old paradigms and the new paradigms. We must educate ourselves so that we may educate others.

What is the New Paradigm?

I came here — to Mississippi — from New York City. Though I grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania –a small, poor, culturally deprived Black suburb of Philadelphia — I moved to New York City to go to graduate school, and I never left. I completed my doctoral dissertation there. I raised my two children there.

New York City, as the whole world knows, was the scene of a horrible and devastating disaster on Sept. 11th. Considerably less well known is that New York also underwent a political convulsion of great significance around the same time. This political earthquake included a new direction in Black politics.

What happened? In a gigantic political upset, Mike Bloomberg, a white billionaire businessman running as a Republican and an Independent, was elected mayor of New York City.

Now, sisters and brothers, I know what you’re thinking: What could the political fortunes of a white male billionaire possibly have to do with transforming political paradigms and the empowerment of Black people? That is a fair enough question. Here’s the answer. Mike Bloomberg won the election against huge odds because some 30% of Black voters who went to the polls voted for Bloomberg and in so doing, they smashed the political paradigm that has governed our political standing for a generation. They voted — not simply for Bloomberg, but explicitly against the Democratic Party. They rejected the counsel of almost every single Black elected official, of every famous Black Democrat, and virtually every Black minister. Ordinary Black folks — tens of thousands of people — became independents on Election Day — and told the Democratic Party to go to hell.

A Brief History of the Contemporary Movement for Black Empowerment

How did this happen? Where did this Black rebellion come from? What are its consequences? To answer these questions, I have to tell you my story — for in many respects, I was the architect of that rebellion. The Independence Party — which ran Mike Bloomberg for mayor — is a party which I co-founded and which I have shaped to be an instrument of Black political and social empowerment. Let’s go back and take a look at the roots of this rebellion.

In 1984, Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for the presidency of the United States for the first time. More precisely, he sought the nomination of the Democratic Party to be its candidate for President. Why did Jesse Jackson run as a Democrat? Because that’s where most Black people had landed, politically speaking.

We began our liberated political life as Republicans, followers of the party that abolished slavery. In the 1930’s, we began our exodus from the Republican Party, moving in large numbers to support Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 1960s when the Democrats became the champions of civil rights and voting rights, we completed our partisan realignment. From that point on, Black people voted for Democrats at rates of 90% and upward. In effect, the civil rights movement — an independent social and political movement — was folded into the Democratic Party.

In 1972, at the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, a new phase of Black empowerment struggles began. Black activists from across the country came together to evolve a strategy which consisted of expanding the number of Black elected officials at every level of government. That meant working inside and through the Democratic Party. In essence, the cooptation of the civil rights movement engineered by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 1965, was completed in 1972 by the Black leadership. They said: Okay, we’re going to put all our eggs in the Democratic Party basket. By 1984, when Rev. Jackson launched his campaign, the numbers of Black elected officials had increased over 300%. But it was Rev. Jackson who grabbed the presidential bull by the horns and set his sights on the White House.

That 1984 campaign was an education for the Black community — an education in the limits imposed on us by the Democrats. On the one hand, Rev. Jackson was an explosive candidate who mobilized and moralized millions of African Americans to involve themselves in the electoral process. At the same time, his candidacy exposed the ingrained and institutionalized racism of the Democratic Party, which sought to marginalize him even as his popularity expanded the Democrats’ political base. It was then that we saw the extent to which Black voters had come to be taken for granted.

The Democrats Make Us Pay a Price

After going through the primary process and polling 3- 1/2 million votes — but being denied an equitable number of convention delegates — Rev. Jackson was given a prime time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. But, he was instructed that he had to use a portion of that time on national TV to make an apology. He had already been told — and had agreed — to repudiate Minister Louis Farrakhan whose Fruit of Islam had provided security for Rev. Jackson early in the campaign. The televised apology was the next dictate handed down by the Democratic hierarchs.

Jackson had to apologize for a highly publicized reference to New York as “Hymietown” — a remark that was considered anti-Semitic. The remark was, of course, no more or less anti-Semitic than millions of remarks made everyday in the Black community– just as millions of racist remarks are made in the white and Jewish communities, and millions of sexist and degrading remarks are made about women in locker rooms and bars.

But the Democratic Party, which invented racialistic politics and whose political origins lay in slavery was out to make a point. Its racialist point was both to Rev. Jackson — and through Rev. Jackson to Black people: They wanted us to know that this was their party and if we wanted to be there, we’d have to do it on their terms.

I remember watching Rev. Jackson’s speech on TV and thinking that the 1972 Gary, Indiana strategy had pretty much played itself out. It was one thing to pursue getting Black people elected to office from majority Black districts. The overall political system could absorb that easily enough. It was quite another to have a Black leader raising issues about pervasive poverty and the lack of democracy, seeking to lead all Americans. The line had to be drawn there. And it was.

Though I’d already been involved in independent party building efforts starting in the 1980s, it became undeniable in 1984 that Black people would have to find another political road. Indeed, given the options, we were going to have to create another political road. Moreover, that was not going to be easy. It was going to be resisted strongly, including from within the Black community and Black leadership circles.

Beginning in 1985, the year after Rev. Jackson’s first run, a Black newspaper here in Mississippi — the Jackson Advocate — devoted 36 straight issues to attacks on me and my efforts to build a national independent political party that would offer Black people an alternative to the racialism of the Democrats.

The more I built that was politically independent, the heavier the attacks were that followed. In 1986, I ran for Governor of New York as an independent on the New Alliance Party ticket in an effort to create a permanent ballot status party. The campaign turned into a feeding frenzy in which the Republicans, the Democrats and the news media accused me of being anti-Semitic because I was a “friend” of Minister Louis Farrakhan. I had never met the man. Nonetheless, I was called upon to repudiate him. I would not. Though I disagreed with the Minister on many issues, I refused to repudiate him because doing so meant repudiating the Black community, something I will never do, no matter the price.

First Independent Presidential Run

In 1988, Rev. Jackson decided to try it again. He entered the Democratic presidential primaries for a second time. That was the year I put together my first run for the presidency. I ran — not as a Democrat — but as an independent. I became the first woman and first African American to get on the ballot in all fifty states. I was the first Black woman to qualify for federal primary matching funds. I received nearly a million dollars from the government in that campaign.

I polled nearly a quarter of a million votes — many from Black students who I spoke to as I toured college campuses in nearly every state. Many of my voters had been Jackson supporters in the Democratic primary, people who had become disillusioned with the two party system after Jackson was deliberately humiliated by the party for a second time, even though he doubled his vote to 7 million.

My campaign, unlike Jackson’s, was not a campaign designed to win. It was, rather, about exposing the injustices and inequities that exist in our bipartisan electoral process. I had to go to court more than a dozen times to assert my right to be on the ballot as an independent. I sued the League of Women Voters and later the Commission on Presidential Debates for excluding me. I championed all kinds of structural political reforms to open up the process to independents because I believed both in the principle of fairness and in the need to create new political alternatives usable by African Americans to empower ourselves.

In 1988, when I was running for the presidency as an independent, no one knew what the word independent meant. In 1992, as I began my second campaign the political universe transformed. Ross Perot — a Texas billionaire with a populist bent — ran for President as an independent. (Keep your eye on those white billionaires. They may not like it, but I’ve harnessed them as the engine for some of the most important shifts in the Black political paradigm in the last 20 years!)

The Perot Partnership

Twenty million Americans voted for Perot — mainly white folks. He got 7% of the Black vote and 22% of the youth vote. And he put independent politics on the map as a major new force in America. My contention, from that point forward, was that Black people had to have a connection to that movement. That movement represented a big and significant paradigm shift in American politics.

Suddenly independents were setting the national agenda. I wanted to make sure that we would grab a big piece of the action. And so I began a process of creating a connection, by taking all that I had built through the New Alliance Party and my two runs for the presidency and linking it to the Perot movement. I was looking for new political partnerships for Black America, partnerships that broke with the liberal coalition that had betrayed Jackson and kept us tied to the Democratic Party.

This strategy of mine was pretty controversial. Just about everyone — except for the rank and file of the Perot movement and rank and file Black independents — hated the idea. The white liberal Democrats were infuriated. They called me every name in the book. Communist. Fascist. Brainwashed. Opportunist. The Black Democrats, meanwhile, thought I had gone crazy. The media said I was a charlatan, a snake oil saleswoman. The liberal independents told Perot to get rid of me. The Black left told me to get rid of Perot. I didn’t listen to any of them.

I would put meetings together involving white Perot independents — the “radical white center,” as they were called — and Black “Fulani independents,” as they became known. These were some pretty wild meetings. While they were set up to talk about issues of common concern, they were also part of a process of creating a new political culture that came complete with new language. We sometimes talked about ourselves as a coalition of the “overtaxed and the underserved.” It was always interesting and challenging.

There were many political initiatives that emerged organically from this process. One evolved into an effort at creating a national independent party — the Reform Party – -which blew apart during the 2000 presidential season. That experiment was a complete failure. Another attempt evolved into an effort to build an independent party in New York State — the Independence Party. That one succeeded! And it is the Independence Party which evolved as the political fulcrum of the mayoral upset this past November which has reinserted Black New York into the political game in a whole new way.

The New York Model

The Independence Party was created in 1994. That year it got something called “ballot status.” That means a permanent spot on the ballot — which means being a recognized political party that runs candidates for office on a par with the major parties. In New York, minor parties can do something called cross-endorsement, or running candidates who are also running as Republicans or Democrats. On this scenario, candidates run on more than one line, and their name appears on the ballot several times — once with each party they’re running on.

I was with the Independence Party from the beginning, having taken my New York base and activist following with me. In the first year of the party’s existence, I registered thousands of people from Black and Latino neighborhoods into the Independence Party.

My early registration drives in Harlem and Brooklyn and elsewhere were really critical because they established something very important about the nature of the party from the “get go.” Black people were in on the ground floor. We were its founders; its shapers; its movers and shakers. The Democratic Party, in contrast, was founded when slavery was legal. The Democrats supported slavery. We weren’t in on the ground floor there. We were slaves.

The Independence Party has a different history — one which we’ve been a part of from the very beginning. The character and the culture of the party reflect that. You can stand on any street corner in Harlem today and you will soon find Independence Party members. You can go to any meeting of the Independence Party — be it statewide or in New York City — and you’ll find significant numbers of Black Independents in the mix. During the seven years since its founding, the party has grown rapidly. By last year it was closing in on a quarter of a million members statewide. And it has worked its way up the minor party ranks to become the third largest party in the state — ranking directly behind the Republicans and the Democrats and well ahead of the other five minor parties in the state.

That made it an attractive and sought after commodity in the world of New York politics. And so, when Michael Bloomberg, white billionaire businessman, decided he wanted to run for mayor, he did two things. He took a look at the Democratic Party and decided it was too corrupt and controlled by the political machine, so he changed over and decided to run as a Republican. Since he was not a politician, not a part of any political machine and wanted to reach voters who were independents, he came to the Independence Party — to my party — to seek support.

The Bloomberg Option

On our side, Bloomberg was an attractive candidate. He was liberal on every social issue — more liberal even than the Democrats. He supported our political reform agenda and agreed to campaign on it. But most importantly, his candidacy gave us the opportunity to strike a blow to the Democratic Party machine, which had sold itself to special interests and empowered itself by playing the worst kinds of racialistic games. The New York Democrats and their relationship to Black leaders and the Black community make the insults to Rev. Jackson look like compliments!

Here’s how we looked at the Bloomberg race. If Bloomberg — a 20-to-1 underdog — could beat the Democratic mayoral candidate with the help of the Independence Party, and if I could bring significant numbers of Black voters into that anti-Democratic Party, pro-independent coalition, that would be a huge breakthrough for a new kind of Black empowerment. Why? Because it would mean that Black people no longer had to rely on the Democrats for our political voice. And it would mean that our voice would be louder, clearer and more effective if we weren’t Democrats, but Independents.

The story of the mayoral race must be understood in this context and against this backdrop. And it was an extraordinary sequence of events — some have called it a “perfect storm.”

The moment the Independence Party announced its endorsement of Bloomberg, the media ran articles and editorials attacking him for his association with me. The Democrats — all four of the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination — publicly attacked me and denounced Bloomberg for taking the Independence Party endorsement. The day that Mike and I met for the first time — we shook hands and chatted for two minutes at a breakfast in Harlem — the TV news ran film of the handshake complaining what an odd partnership it was and once again criticized me for being a friend of Farrakhan’s. I have to say, I almost felt a little sorry for Mike. I’m used to taking the heat. Mike’s used to being treated like a billionaire. It was definitely a baptism of fire.

I went out into the streets to campaign for Mike. I stood on street corners and talked to ordinary citizens about how important it would be for Black New Yorkers to vote for Bloomberg.

Again, the Black Democratic leadership thought I was crazy. New York’s premiere Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, suggested I was on the take. Rev. Sharpton, a Democrat, was talking about a Black-Latino coalition to back Fernando Ferrer, one of the Democratic candidates. Other Black Democrats, including former Mayor David Dinkins, were campaigning for Mark Green, a white liberal Democrat who was the frontrunner. I toured the city’s Black churches advocating for Bloomberg. Mike kept his distance from me — he was afraid of the media. That just made me work all the harder for him. I wanted to keep raising that contradiction.

The Democratic Meltdown

The September 11 attack came on what was supposed to be primary day. The elections were called off and pushed back and all campaigning stopped as the city grieved and tried to recover. The campaigning resumed several weeks later and the Democratic primary turned fierce as Green and Ferrer fought with each other and forced a head-to-head runoff in October.

Then the gloves came off and it was Democratic Party racialism par excellence. Green, the white candidate, began to attack Ferrer for having Sharpton’s support. The right- wing media joined in. Scurrilous racist leaflets were circulated that many people believed were done with the knowledge of the Green campaign. Ferrer became a cause celebre in the communities of color, but in the final round he lost to Green.

That set up the general election. It was Bloomberg versus Green. Only now, tens of thousands of African Americans and Latinos were furious at Green and the Democrats. They were disgusted by the racialism of the campaign and by Green’s arrogance in refusing to accept any responsibility for what had happened.

And there I was. With Bloomberg and the Independence Party. The Black media — enraged over the Democrats behavior — turned to me and to Bloomberg. Black radio talk hosts and deejays started advocating on the air for Bloomberg. The Amsterdam News — which had forcefully criticized him just a few months earlier — endorsed him, along with nearly every Black and Latino publication in the city. My phone was ringing off the hook. People wanted buttons, literature, signs. They wanted to vote for Mike — but they didn’t want to vote for him as a Republican. They wanted to vote for him as an Independent! And because of the Independence Party, they could.

The streets were wild on Election Day. I worked a poll in Central Harlem from 6AM to 9PM. There was a fever in the streets. Yeah, Green was getting a lot of Black votes. The Democratic machine was still very powerful. But something else was happening, too. You could feel it. A new politic was coming into existence that we created. A new paradigm was breaking through.

When the votes were counted that night, the story could be told. Mike won in an upset! He won by only 35,000 votes; 59,000 votes had come on the Independence Party line. The Independence Party had won it for him. But there was more. The next day the exit polls came out. Between 25% and 30% of Black voters had gone for Bloomberg. The Black independents at the grassroots had elected the mayor of New York City. That fact has altered the dynamics in New York politics. I’ve begun holding a series of town hall meetings — the first was in Harlem, where 400 people from the Black community came out to hear me and some of the city’s most popular Black radio personalities talk about the results and where we go from here. The Black community has begun to establish itself as an independent political force. If we keep building that, we will be able to set the agenda on political process and social policy in the years to come.

Looking Ahead

That’s what you call a paradigm shift. That’s what you call a new political modality. And that — sisters and brothers — is what we must build off of in the months and the years ahead.

Is the Democratic Party still powerful in our community? Of course it is. Look at Rev. Sharpton. He’s thinking of running for President and he’s thinking of running as a Democrat. I disagree with that strategy. I think that’s a dead end road for him and for us. We’ve been over that ground and we’ve moved ahead. We don’t need to go back.

What happened on Election Day in New York is really a little bit like what happened that fateful day in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 when seamstress Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. She wasn’t famous then. No one outside her own family and friends knew her name. But on that particular day, she decided she was too tired from work and too worn out from years of abuse to sit in the colored seats. Her decision helped to propel a new and independent movement of Black people that changed America.

That’s what happened on November 6. A lot of ordinary Black working folks — enough to make a very big difference — decided they weren’t going to sit in the back of the Democrats’ bus anymore. Nobody knew their names. But it’s because of them that Mike Bloomberg is the 108th mayor of the City of New York today. And it’s because of them that we see an opportunity for a new and independent political movement of our people.

We must go forward — independently. And I invite all of you to join with me in doing that. New paradigms need new leaders — new builders — and new thinkers. We need your creativity and your commitment to our people and our cause.

Come speak with me or my colleague, Omar Ali so that we can talk more about how we can work together and bring independent politics to your campus.

I’d like to end with a quote by Dr. King. It’s from his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, written in 1967:

“In the future we must become intensive political activists. We must be guided in this direction because we need political strength more desperately than any other group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economic power and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any tradition of power. Necessity will draw us towards the power inherent in the creative uses of politics.”

I invite you to join me in the creative building of a new political movement in this country so that we can live up to our vision and our history as the conscious of America.

Thank you.

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The Emergence of the Beltway

A fundamental restructuring was affected in the early 20th century, which further entrenched the power of the major parties as they became increasingly corporate and centralized in both their structure and character.

In the 1930s, faced with massive economic collapse following the stock market crash and the ensuing Depression, the government intervened to create a safety net – not just for the poor, but for the free enterprise system itself. The Democrats and Republicans transformed the federal government from a kind of coordinating body to an extremely centralized regulatory body that provided welfare for impoverished Americans and for corporate America. During this time the federal government became far more extensive, invasive and powerful than even the staunchest Federalists could have imagined.

This change to a highly regulated system of government also created significant changes in the political economy of the country. With regulation becoming a key avenue for businesses to improve their competitive edge, corporate boards began to transform from groups of manufacturing and industrial magnates to pools of lawyers expert in navigating government regulations for the maximum profitability of their companies.

Political influence over the two major parties became more important than ever, since elected officials (invariably from the two major parties) were the ones who enforced the regulations. Tragically, the legislature, which had in the earliest stages of American history been the most populist, democratic and responsive to the people, was becoming one of the most partisan, most corrupt and top-down controlled institutions of American government.

Throughout the rise of these regulatory trends, and in the throes of the Great Depression, independent mass movements were organized – which took the organizational form of unemployed councils, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the black Sharecroppers Union, all of which fueled support for a flurry of independent parties. The Democratic Party and President Franklin Roosevelt moved effectively to capture that political ferment and convert it into an electoral base which allowed them to dominate the Republicans at the national level for some time and gave them the imprimatur of being the “party of the people.”

Still, both the Democrats and the Republicans kept close guard on protecting their two party system. They took serious measures to ensure its stability and their shared control of the governmental process. Ballot access regulations, designed to protect incumbency and favor the two parties, restricting and discouraging independents, were quickly enacted in state legislatures across the country. (Where once voters simply wrote the names of candidates or brought their own ballots on the day of the election, a highly discriminatory set of ballot access regulations – documented by Ballot Access News editor Richard Winger – were written by major party legislators to remove any independent threat to their bipartisan monopoly).

Over the course of the century, campaign finance laws were written and rewritten, largely as a function of two party rivalry, but always with an eye toward repressing the rise of independents. Reapportionment and redistricting were implemented by bipartisan legislatures. Bipartisanism, as opposed to nonpartisanism – in the conduct of elections was institutionalized, for example with the Federal Election Commission in 1975, and then with the pseudo-governmental Commission on Presidential Debates in 1987. Thus, the two parties took more direct control of the election process, the legislative process, and thereby the policy-making process, all of which have been customized by the two parties over the last seventy years to suit their interests.

As independents were being systematically rooted out of the electoral sphere, along with the advent of television in politics (which, in part, necessitated the centralization of parties since the cost and access to such technology requires a strong national party fundraising effort in order to be competitive) a distance grew between the major parties and their rank and file supporters. Costly television-based media campaigns became increasingly important in deciding election outcomes. As a consequence, the grassroots organization that was once the foundation of, for instance, the Democratic Party structure, disintegrated, leaving those who constituted its political base with less and less of a direct connection to their own party.

The union movement – or more accurately the union bureaucrats – played their mediating role between the party and their members, rallying them as troops and voters on Election Day (although unionized workers comprise only 13% of the workforce today). Black elected officials, primarily of the Democratic Party, came to play that role within African-American communities. Layers of bureaucrats mediate the Democrats’ relationship to their base, while the so-called “party of the people” enhances its own political power largely at the expense of the people.

Is it any wonder then, that when Ross Perot announced his independent run for the presidency, and tens of millions of Americans answered his call to take back our government, that the two party establishment panicked?

The independent movement exploded onto the national political scene in 1992, unearthing a sleeping giant of popular discontent with the political status quo. By the spring of 1992, Perot was at 40% in the presidential polls. The ‘American independent’ was the country’s most coveted and enigmatic voter. Where that movement would go was anybody’s guess. The Democrats and Republicans began immediately to work to stifle and co-opt it, absorbing significant aspects of its agenda into their own political matrix.

Newly elected President Bill Clinton, together with a chastened Congress, balanced the federal budget – the clarion call of the Perot movement’s demand for fiscal responsibility. And the Republicans captured control of Congress in 1994, skillfully – if disingenuously – embroidering the Perot movement’s demand for massive anti-incumbent, pro-democracy political reforms into its “Contract with America.”

Meanwhile the independents – including the progressive African-American Dr. Lenora Fulani who had herself run for the presidency, twice as a New Alliance independent, and Jim Mangia, a California independent active in gay and community causes – both of whom were pioneering the building of left/center/right populist coalitions – joined with leaders of the Perot movement to lobby Perot to run again and build a new national party in the process. That party became the Reform Party, which briefly entered the national political stage offering an extraordinary opportunity to affix onto the political scene a populist independent party oriented to “changing the rules” of American elections and governance. Unfortunately, however, the Reform Party began to lose its populist moorings – its connection to the base of Americans from which it came – and became vulnerable to co-optation and manipulation. Shortly, it – and the opportunity it presented for America – died down.

But there were important lessons learned and new models created off of and during that experience, models for movement and party-building where the organizing is bottom-up, the politic is based on creating left/center/right coalitions and the focal point is on political reform, i.e. changing the rules through which the two parties cling to their massive power. Built along these lines, the independents cannot be co-opted by the Democratic and Republican parties because changing the rules involves undercutting their power.

When Professor Muzzio observed,

“He who determines the rules, rules,” he was commenting on the activities and influence of the Independence Party of New York, which has been effectively challenging the rules that govern traditional partisan politics. The New York Times piece on the Independence Party, in which Muzzio was quoted, captures some of the party’s populist and unique character:

Despite its associations with eccentric, controversial and wildly divergent public figures, the party has maneuvered itself into positions of influence in both the governor’s race and on the city’s Charter Revision Commission.

And that, political analysts say, is something of a trick, given that the party, an amalgam of Reform refugees, New Alliance converts and a host of others frustrated with conventional politics, is not really a party in the traditional sense.

It does not exactly lean to the right or left. It does not take positions on issues like education, housing, crime or taxes. Indeed, its own literature acknowledges that many of its members sign up believing they are registering as unaffiliated with any party.

Even that phenomenon sits just fine with Independence leaders, who have worked to create a tent so big, in their description, that it verges on the metaphysical.
“The people who wanted to be independent are as much our constituency as the people who wanted to be in the Independence Party, because we’re kind of an anti-party party,” said Jacqueline Salit, a city party spokeswoman.

Nevertheless, of late it has been acting every inch the political player. A longtime supporter of nonpartisan elections, the party endorsed the candidacy of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, after he committed himself to their position, and brought him more than 50,000 votes in last November’s election – well over his margin of victory.

The process of building a populist independent movement is well underway. The fact is, in New York we ran people for office for years, where we got ten votes; for years we lobbied, with little success. But our years of work of immersing ourselves in politics as independents, reaching out to other independents, and learning the rules that keep us out by challenging them on the ground, has created new coalitions and has uniquely and potently positioned independents, and specifically the Independence Party, in the state of New York. We do have “fusion” in New York – which permits cross-endorsement allowing independent parties to endorse candidates running in other, including major party-lines, which the Independence Party has used effectively to bolster the power of independents. But in any state – indeed, in every state – we can organize and build and participate as independents. We can all build local clubs and immerse ourselves in local elections as independents.

That process of building locally, which is hard work, but important work, is exactly what we need to be doing all over the country to grow our movement. Independents must become activists across the country – forming independent clubs, getting involved in local elections as independents; running in campaigns as independents, or supporting candidates in other parties, including major parties – depending on what the conditions are; participating in government in various ways, including in public hearings and testifying at local events; meeting other independents and meeting elected officials. We can make independents a part of the process with a strong and distinct voice; we can champion the cause of reform by challenging the existing rules of the political game to make it fair and democratic.

What do we want? We want a substantial increase in democracy. The major parties have clearly written the rules to keep most of us out. That’s their edge. Just imagine a situation where 90% of Americans participated in elections. It’s hard to do so, since the change would be so radical, so dramatic, that the political landscape would be virtually unrecognizable. Our political culture, our economic culture, our international culture, and all the policies that are created within these spheres, are simply determined by who participates. That’s why the major parties work so hard to keep us “outsiders” to the best extent that they can.

At this point in our movement’s development it’s not enough to simply talk about taking on the special interests, to talk in populist language, as Ralph Nader has been doing. On the one hand, I agree with what Nader and the Green Party have been saying about corporate special interests. But while their rhetoric is populist, their organizing has been exclusive and ideologically driven. In doing so they’ve effectively abandoned the tens of millions of Americans who are not leftist in their political orientation, but are independents nonetheless. Such populist rhetoric renders itself politically irrelevant, whether from Nader or from Al Gore, if it’s not connected to broadly organizing Americans, free from ideological categorization. That’s populism in practice! Most people aren’t interested in just switching parties, as the Perot phenomena should have taught us, they’re rejecting “partyism” and all the constraints that come with it. At the end of the day, any political direction that narrows the organizing of independents to party-building as an end in itself misses what Americans are looking for.

As independents, what we must be concerned with is the overall movement, not any single party, or any single issue as such. Democracy, the participation of ordinary people in the decisions that shape their lives, underlies all issues. It’s the issue of issues! Without meaningful participation in our political system by Americans, America will not be for its citizens but for the special interests that govern it – the most powerful of all special interests being the major parties.

Towards growing the independent movement as a whole, the Committee for a Unified Independent Party is holding a national conference for all independents on January 19th where delegates of organized local groups will come together to dialogue and discuss what is in the best interest of our total movement. We’re looking to bring together a body of people who report on what they’re doing locally. We don’t just want people with ideas, but people who are working and building their presence as independents locally, which undoubtedly looks different from place to place and from person to person.

The context for independent politics has never been so ripe. The responses thus far to my national lecture tour have been but one small indication of the potential for the growth of our movement around the country. The desire for new options, new choices, new ways of doing politics, has only grown over the last decade, not diminished. A decade ago independent politics was hardly known, but now it’s in the air. We’ve been through a process, a history – rough at times as it has been. We’re better known as independents now than ever before. But we can’t bypass the critical step of building locally and participating in local politics as independents to further our growth.

So come join me, and the millions of independents in America ready, willing, and able to organize our movement.

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If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. There, on national TV, was the Reverend Al Sharpton announcing that he is a centrist. Referring to the Democratic Party, Sharpton told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, “I would argue that I would try to move it to the center. I think that’s where I am, many Americans are and, I would argue, most Democrats are.”

Al Sharpton, centrist. Al Sharpton, overcome and over determined by the imperatives of Democratic Party politics. Al Sharpton, overwhelmed by the institutional game to which he swore he’d never succumb.

Watching Sharpton skillfully wend his way through Russert’s predictable questions (Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Tawana Brawley, reparations, anti-Semitism, i.e. “Black Issues for Dummies”), I remembered back to a community forum Sharpton and I did together in Brooklyn in the early 90’s when we were partnering on civil rights and racial justice campaigns. I hosted a public dialogue on Black-Jewish relations between Sharpton and my political mentor, Dr. Fred Newman, who is Jewish.

During the discussion section a young Black woman, obviously on the left, rose to respond to Sharpton’s narrative on the changing dynamics in Black leadership circles. (Dinkins was mayor. Sharpton was the not-so-loyal opposition. I was the independent.) She asked, “What are you going to do to change the world?” Sharpton answered, “I’ll remain a progressive.”

No doubt, Sharpton would say he has. But no matter how powerful your rhetoric, no matter how powerful you think you are, you become what you do. For many years, I tried to persuade Sharpton to quit the Democratic Party, which I believed would drive him into powerfully compromising conflicts, as it betrayed Black people in favor of the party’s survival. I was unsuccessful. Sharpton instead enveloped himself in the time-worn racialist ritual of Democratic Party politics, which has landed him, now by his own account, at the center.

When Jesse Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 his campaign was an assertion of the power of the forgotten – “the boats stuck at the bottom.” Much of the Black establishment supported Walter Mondale, trying to ward off Jackson’s challenge to their dominant control of the Black vote.

Jackson polled an explosive three million votes, mainly from African-Americans, establishing himself as a major national player but one who had yet to “crossover” to the white voters necessary for a majority, or even a plurality, coalition.

In 1988 Jackson found his road to white America by going left. Identifying as a progressive, he reached out to labor, environmentalists, anti-imperialists, and the white poor. He polled seven million votes in the primary. Yet, it would be for naught, as Jackson found himself locked in a life and death struggle with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Four years later the DLC sponsored the long shot ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and took the White House, complete with a premeditated public humiliation of Jackson and the Black-led left. Centrism ruled, albeit with the populist patina Clinton so masterfully projected.

The ascendancy of DLC centrism inside the national party forcibly altered the strategy for African-American and progressive white Democrats. No longer able to carve out a viable position on the left as Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition had attempted, the next generation of progressives – Black and white – found they had to compete, no longer to be the leftwing of the party but to be the leftwing of the center. Enter, Sharpton, onto the national stage and into this new reality.

Sharpton is now confronting the same question Jesse Jackson did in 1988. He can count on the Black vote, but where does he go for white votes? His answer? To the center. Irony of ironies, Al Gore – a creation of the DLC – is now the “class war” candidate in the Democratic presidential primary running to Sharpton’s left! In the distorting environment of the Democratic Party, Al Gore must become a populist to be competitive while Al Sharpton must become a centrist.

While Sharpton recasts himself (again!) for his national political purposes, he must also grapple with how to maintain the popularity he derives in the Black community from his militancy, particularly in New York. Now that his sometimes adversary and sometimes godfather Charles Rangel joined forces with Jesse Jackson’s old nemesis – Bill Clinton – to elbow Andrew Cuomo out of the Democratic primary for governor, Sharpton has already staked out his new “centrist” position on Carl McCall. Instead of teaching the Black community that Cuomo’s withdrawal was a sign of the acute racial divisions in the Democratic Party – where things are so bad that the Democrats can’t even complete a primary between a person of color and a white candidate – Sharpton is now promoting the illusion that he and the Democratic Party have moved beyond race and racialism. “We would support Carl McCall over George Pataki if he were white. In fact, I would support Carl over Pataki if Carl was white and Pataki was Black,” Sharpton said recently.

Al Sharpton, centrist, makes plain his new politic. He’ll vote for a Democrat, and only for a Democrat, no matter what. Al Sharpton, centrist.

What a waste.

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In ”The Party Should Be Over” (editorial, Aug. 31), you argue that the Independence Party ”should not be on the ballot.” We agree! We think no party should be on the ballot. That’s why we’ve aggressively supported a shift to nonpartisan elections, which you have not.

You promote the idea that state law be changed to prevent minor parties from cross-endorsing in gubernatorial years when every party — major and minor — must poll 50,000 votes to renew their ballot status. We’d support that, too, if every party would have to run a party member for governor but no party could run a sitting governor.

If the minors get a ”leg up” through cross-endorsement, the majors certainly get a ”leg up” through incumbency. When you’re ready to endorse that package, we’ll be the first to sign on.

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