Magazines have been writing about Al Sharpton for damn near 40 years. But the Al Sharpton of now is not the Al Sharpton of then, and Mitchell Jackson’s profile gets its arms around the civil rights activist with such totality that it’s hard to imagine anything short of a book-length biography could match it. It’s not the last word on a complicated man, but it’s perhaps the best.
What if Sharpton’s ultimate legacy is not some omnibus writ that the ill-intentioned—looking at you, SCOTUS—will work lifetimes to dismantle but his indefatigable insistence (he logs a staggering 250,000 to 300,000 air miles per year) on the overtruth that there never has been nor will be a post-racial America, least of all in the city that is its locus of power. It’s not the bright, tangible achievements of his forebears but the difficult, often fallible work of steadying a light that won’t let you look away.
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