ArcaMax

But by his own description, a more humble Sharpton emerged after he barely survived a 1991 stabbing by a drunken white man during a march in the Bensonhurst section of New York City.

"Look back," Sharpton told me in a 2001 interview. "My image is no worse than Rev. (Jesse) Jackson's was in 1980," four years before the first of Jackson's two presidential runs.

Even then, he was talking openly about his aim to replace Jackson's prominence as a civil rights leader, although he denied trying to grease the slide.

That seems to describe his status these days as Democratic candidates seek his endorsements and he hosts his own nightly show on MSNBC -- on which, full disclosure, I sometimes have been an unpaid guest.

Also, according to Thrush, his phone calls to the White House are answered more quickly than Jackson's, who played more of a Luther-like insider role in President Bill Clinton's day.

I first saw Luther brought up by Slate's Jamelle Bouie in a clever May essay that applied the fictitious grouch as a good description of Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama's official representative in Ferguson. But even Bouie acknowledged that, as much as Holder's liberal views may enrage the right, he has too much lawyerly cool to show any more public rage than no-drama Obama does.

Sharpton fills that passion vacuum, as he showed at the Ferguson funeral for shooting victim Michael Brown, to which he was invited by Brown's family. His call for justice was laced noticeably with denunciations of "ghetto pity parties." Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, he said, "We've got to clean up our community so we can clean up the United States of America!"

Those are the sort of self-help themes that his conservative critics claim that he and other liberal black leaders never talk about. I won't hold my breath waiting for them to give him much credit. Both sides have their Luthers.

========

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.