Everything about Al Sharpton, the Nation Of Islam, and Chicago’s socialist community organizing, is evil. Any news organization or talk show host that interviews the man, without adding any factual context on the man whatsoever, is a major part of the problem in the main-streaming of his racism.
The Black Hitler of Harlem
The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches outside the stores of Harlem’s dwindling Jewish community.
The cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a pioneering labor leader– but was known back then as the Black Hitler.
A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.
In his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.
He vowed an “an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites.”
Speeches like these earned him the title, ‘Black Hitler’ and intimidated local businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union.
In the winter of 1995, Al Sharpton and his National Action Network went to Harlem to lead a protest against another Jewish store, Freddie’s Fashion Mart. Sharpton denounced Freddie’s owner as a “White Interloper” in Harlem, protesters mimed tossing matches into the store, and one of them threatened to “Burn the Jew Store Down”.
Finally one of the protesters pulled out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set the store on fire. Seven of the store’s mostly Hispanic employees died in the blaze.
Sharpton’s prominence is a testament to how mainstream Sufi Abdul Hamid’s form of community organizing had become. When Obama visited Sharpton to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his National Action Network, he was commemorating not just the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, but an organization which had ominous similarities to Hamid’s own.
