The Time Sharpton Got Knocked on His Backside

Niger Innis said Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that his father’s schooling of fellow civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton on national television in 1988 teaches a timeless lesson — one that the African-American community should take to heart in this polarizing political and racial climate.

Innis, the executive director of TeaPartyFwd.com and the national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), recalled the time his father, the late conservative civil rights leader Roy Innis, brawled with Sharpton because Sharpton wouldn’t let him tell a controversial truth. The scuffle, which occurred Aug. 9, 1988, in Harlem’s Apollo Theater on “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” pitted Roy Innis with his unpopular convictions against Sharpton and the vocal sector of the black community.

“It’s like a hate crime to have a different opinion,” Ingraham said.

“But when you dared to disagree back then with the established black civil rights leadership — even if you were Roy Innis, who had done all this work — even if you were Innis, you were on the griddle. And Sharpton wanted to take him out,” LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham said. “This is nothing new that there’s this demand for a black monolith or a ‘Don’t cooperate or don’t engage at all with Republicans.’ This has been going on for decades and decades and decades.”

The controversy surrounded the facts in the Tawana Brawley rape case in 1987-1988. When 15-year-old Brawley accused four white men of raping her, covering her in feces, and stuffing her in a trash bag with racial slurs written all over her body, the black community responded with immediate outrage. But after Innis investigated the dubious facts, he came to the conclusion that Brawley’s allegations were a hoax. A grand jury ultimately concluded that Brawley hadn’t been raped and had instead carried out a ruse.

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“And the fact that my father was the only civil rights leader who, at the time, openly and boldly — after doing an intensive investigation, including talking to Al Sharpton and many of Tawana Brawley’s supporters — came to the conclusion that it was a fraud, and that it was a hoax, and that it was a lie,” Innis told Ingraham.

“And that more than that, it was an insult and a disgrace against the number of black women that had really been sexually abused under racial circumstances,” Innis continued. “And so [my father] said so, as much, and for that, Sharpton was not going to let him tell the truth that night. And my father was not going to be stopped. And that’s how that whole thing proceeded.”

In fact, for most of his career, Roy Innis incurred the wrath of the monolithic, liberal black community for refusing to subscribe to its ideology and advocating for conservatism, instead. Although he served as the national chairman for CORE beginning in 1968 and spent his life advocating for black empowerment, Roy Innis endured scorn for his staunch conservatism.

“You know, I think to myself, how is this new? Look at what your dad endured. Look at what Justice Thomas endured. Look at what Tom Sowell, Walter Williams, Allen West — any African-American, black American, who says, ‘You know? I think for myself. I don’t buy in necessarily to everything you say,'” Ingraham said. “It’s like a hate crime to have a different opinion.”

Ingraham and Innis both noted that the criticism against President-Elect Donald Trump’s “legitimacy” leveled by civil right icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) over the weekend follows this same pattern of liberal black activists working to undermine and reject conservatism.

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“I know that John Lewis was a hero to my dad and he is a hero to me. But, you know, just because he is a civil rights hero doesn’t mean that he’s always right,” Innis said. “But it is the state of our politics today and it is the state of the politics that my father and the Congress of Racial Equality have fought in for 40 years.”

Noting that his father, who died Jan. 8, was one of the few civil rights leaders to support President Ronald Reagan in both elections, Innis said his father faithfully supported the idea that African-Americans need “to participate in the political process fully.”

“And that means that we should examine both political parties and determine [who] has the better policies and the better agenda for black Americans — that there wasn’t a racial partisanship that should take place, but that we should, like any other American and any other ethnic group, religious group, gender, whatever the case may be, pick the party as individuals that makes most sense for us,” Innis said.