Sharpton Visits, Pledges Support For Mayor

Mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs welcomes Rev. Al Sharpton Friday.

A city nightclub became an amen corner Friday as supporters of Mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs shouted praise for Rev. Al Sharpton's defense of her 2010 stand against gangs and gun violence.

Sharpton appeared at the Sunday, Aug. 1, 2010 Town Meeting which was broadcast over radio stations WBLS and WLIB and later became the focus of a City Council investigation over a $20,000 fee.

"I didn't get a dime," Sharpton thundered. "Nobody gave me a dime."

Sharpton said the station lost money on the three-hour broadcast, but said, "Didn't nobody, especially me, come down for a fee. We lost money - you know, preachers make their money on Sunday."

He called criticism of the mayor a "shame and a disgrace" because she put the safety of the city first and deserved support. Throughout the investigation and at an NAACP meeting Sunday, Robinson-Briggs said the 2010 broadcast saved lives.

"I want to get those local Negroes straight," Sharpton said. I hope they don't like it, because I'm coming back.."

He said rather than give the mayor credit, critics tried to "hustle it."

"This woman did what they couldn't do and wouldn't do," he said. "Our children were being shot down. Women were afraid, and you were trying to make a scandal out of it."

Sharpton said he had received an email saying if he knew the facts, he wouldn't come to Plainfield. But he said, "I take it seriously when I see a woman stand up like her."

While it was the subject of an investigation in 2012 which led to a reprimand for the mayor, her challenger in the June 4 primary, Councilman Adrian Mapp, did not raise it specifically as a campaign issue. The mayor herself brought it up at the NAACP meeting, which was supposed to have been a candidates' forum but which Mapp did not attend due to a prior commitment. On Wednesday, the mayor did not attend another candidates' forum organized by the Friends of Sleepy Hollow and the Plainfield League of Women Voters, instead sending a note that she was ill.

The large crowd of supporters tonight at Faraones night club on Front Street included many present and former PMUA employees who are backing the mayor, perhaps in response to Mapp's support of a study on disbanding the authority, which provides sewer and solid waste services to the city. Though the Democratic Party backed the mayor for her first and second terms, this time the party line went to Mapp, who on Friday was about half a block away at a Democratic City Commitee meeting called by Chairman Jerry Green.

Sharpton recalled coming to Plainfield when the late Mayor Richard L. Taylor was in office 20 years ago.

"We know this community," he said. 'We need to have a summer of peace this year."

He said he wants to make Plainfield an example of cooperation and partnership and called for an end to bickering.

Robinson-Briggs said she hopes to establish a chapter here of Sharpton's National Action Network. Sharpton said he will be back and will bring the radio show, adding, "I got a television show now."

To those who got upset with the radio show, he said, "Well, maybe I will bring in the TV show and say, 'how you like me now?'"

--Bernice