Rudy Giuliani by Andrew Kirtzman

Author:Andrew Kirtzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

10

“Happy King Day!” Giuliani and the Black Community

The streets of Brooklyn were still thick with slush from a week-old snowstorm when the Reverend Al Sharpton and a crowd of followers moved toward the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Bundled up in dark coats and long scarves, they were preparing to commence an annual ritual, the traffic-halting march across the bridge to honor the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

On this cold January morning in 1996, however, they were greeted by a battalion of New York City police officers, stationed to prevent the reverend and his group from taking over the bridge’s roadway. The orders had come from One Police Plaza that Sharpton would no longer be allowed to paralyze traffic.

The new year had not been treating the reverend well. A public that was forever taking his measure had seen him at his worst, caught on videotape exhorting a Harlem audience to boycott a “white interloper” who operated a store on 125th Street. Three months after the speech, a street activist walked into the store with a gun, told all the blacks to leave, sprayed the remaining employees with gunfire, doused the store with paint thinner, turned the .38-caliber pistol on himself, and pulled the trigger. Eight people died in the inferno that followed.

The debacle was another nail in the coffin that Rudy Giuliani was building for Sharpton’s career as a civil rights leader, a confirmation that he was the same old race-baiter in a three-piece suit. The mayor was rubbing his contempt in Sharpton’s face this morning.

Faced with the prospect of mass arrests, the minister had another idea. As cops in riot helmets looked on, he waved his minions away from the bridge and turned them around, soldiering them through the streets of downtown Brooklyn without telling them where they were being led. As befuddled officers and reporters ran alongside, Sharpton brought his cavalry to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the mayor of New York was scheduled to speak. Wearing a three-piece suit under his dark wool coat and silk scarf, his long mane of hair shimmering in the sunshine, Sharpton stormed into the grand old building and walked down the center aisle with a few dozen people in tow, chanting, “You say get back, we say fight back!” The audience of perhaps a thousand middle-class black residents, most of them decked out in their Sunday best for the Brooklyn borough president’s annual salute to King, had come to hear the day’s keynote speaker, Rudy Crew, the African American schools chancellor. Some clapped as Sharpton and his renegade crew threw the proceedings into chaos. The invading army lined up with their backs to the stage, a short distance away from Giuliani, who was standing in the wings awaiting his turn to speak. “You let us say something and we’ll leave you—or you want us to sit in?” Sharpton asked the flustered emcee, who capitulated to the threat and gave him the microphone to scattered applause.

“We hope you listen to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.