Rev

To one America, he has long been a beacon of the civil-rights movement the man met Dr. King! To another, he was a loudmouth in a tracksuit, surrounded by controversy and shady friends the man knows Don King, too. Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell S. Jackson tailed AI Sharpton around the country to find out why he keeps going, what he's still doing, and where his place in history will be.

- ANDRE D. WAGNER

WASHINGTON, D.C.
AUGUST 26, 2023

Can't tell you what Martin Luther King Jr. was doing in the hours, minutes, before he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, but I can tell you that sixty years later, Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. is sitting in an upholstered wooden chair in his trailer, parked on a fence line behind the Lincoln Memorial, fielding calls on his cell phone about today's rally, at which he will deliver his own speech. Can't tell you the logistical concerns MLK solved himself in the minutes before he gave his most famous public address, but I can tell you that Sharpton's cell is ring ring ringing with handlers and schedulers panicked about the lineup, about having the event shut down by the National Park Service for the bureaucratic alibi that it has run past its permitted time.

On the umpteenth such call, Sharpton, who's about as calm as an August breeze, tells the anxious messenger to get ahold of Stephen K. Benjamin, a senior advisor to President Biden, and have him handle it.

There were 250,000 people at the original March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But today's continuation-that's what he's calling it, a continuation, not a commemoration-appears not to reach the 75,000 estimated by Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, two of its chief organizers. Still, King is present with his wife and their daughter, MLK's only grandchild. And Sharpton? Coretta Scott King herself once described him as a leader "in the spirit and tradition of Martin Luther King Jr." Nonetheless, over his long career as a rabble-rouser, there have been no few folks naysaying how well he has bent the moral arc of the universe toward justice, who've questioned whether he's deserving of inclusion on the esteemed short list of civil-rights icons.