President Obama’s extraordinary embrace of Reverend Al Sharpton last week has as much to do with the president’s antipathy for three other black leaders—Jesse Jackson, Dr. Cornel West and Tavis Smiley—as it does with any genuine White House enthusiasm for the controversial New York preacher. Unlike Sharpton, who actually sat in the front row at Obama’s December announcement of the deal to extend the Bush tax cuts, Jackson, West and Smiley have criticized the president’s centrist tilt, alienating themselves from the administration.

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By taking on these critics, Sharpton has become Obama’s go-to black leader, dispatched as a surrogate to several 2010 swing states by the Democratic National Committee, and ostensibly getting ready for a similar role in the 2012 race. Obama appears unconcerned about the ways Republican operatives used Sharpton in television commercials to taint Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

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Ironically, Sharpton for years has had an arrangement with New York mayor Mike Bloomberg similar to the one he now has with Obama—never criticizing what is widely seen as the whitest management team in modern city history and enjoying access at City Hall.

The late philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor had a "very nice, cordial relationship" with her son, Anthony Marshall, said Linda Gillies, longtime director of the now-defunct charitable foundation set up by Ms. Astor's husband, Vincent Astor. “They spoke, they laughed together and they worked together."

Yet, mother and son inevitably had their moments. Ms. Gillies recalled a particular comment that Ms. Astor made about her son's new $2 million apartment on East 79th Street. “She said, ‘Tony bought a new apartment,’ rolled her eyes, and said, ‘Guess who paid for that?’"

Ms. Gillies was the first witness called to testify in the case against Ms. Astor's son, who is charged with stealing from his elderly mother's reported $200 million fortune. Future witnesses in the high-profile case are expected to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Annette de la Renta and Barbara Walters.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Loewy opened her case against Mr. Marshall on Monday, April 27, charging that the 84-year-old ex-Marine had essentially rerouted some $60 million intended for Ms. Astor's favorite charities into his own pocket.

Among the many allegations, Mr. Marshall is also accused of tricking his mother into thinking she was running out of money in order to convince her to sell one of her beloved Childe Hassam paintings for a reported $10 million, with her son earning a cool $2 million commission on the deal.

“She was crazy about that picture," Ms. Gillies told jurors on Wednesday, April 29. The charity director recalled how Ms. Astor would always comment on the painting whenever the pair walked into her library. “There’s the Childe Hassam," Ms. Astor would say. "Isn’t it beautiful?”

A day earlier, Mr. Marshall's attorney, Frederick Hafetz, launched his defense, arguing that the renowned philanthropist had only donated money from her late husband's charitable foundation, never her own funds, until changing her will in 1993 out of dislike for her son's wife, Charlene Marshall. (Ms. Astor later revised her will to include Ms. Marshall.)

A key point of debate in the case surrounds Ms. Astor's mental state as she repeatedly made changes to her will. Ms. Astor, who suffered from Alzheimer's, died in 2007 at the age of 105.

Taking the stand on Wednesday, Ms. Gillies, dressed in a white jacket and pastel scarf, recalled an incident in 1995 when Ms. Astor had requested a meeting with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Mr. Jackson would later show up, but, according to Ms. Gillies, “It was clear Ms. Astor couldn’t remember why she had asked him there.”

The charity director nonetheless described her former boss as hugely generous. Prior to dissolving the foundation in 1997, after donating almost $195 million over a span of nearly 50 years, Ms. Astor one day picked up a vase and presented it to Ms. Gillies as a present. “I think it was an expression of affection on her part," Ms. Gillies said.

The defense immediately seized upon that anecdote as an example of Ms. Astor's mental capability to give things away as she pleased.

“What we are doing right now doesn’t fully make sense,” Thompson said.

“We have to make sure access to credit isn’t just for the big businesses, it’s for the smaller businesses also,” Thompson said, speaking at the Rainbow Push Wall Street Project Economic Summit in midtown, hosted by Jesse Jackson.

Thompson is hardly the first to complain that bailout funds are going to the financial industry, and not more directly to the arts, homeowners, or business owners.

“Small businesses, African-American businesses, Latino businesses, women-owned businesses, have gone through a credit freeze for years now. They haven’t had access to capital. We need to make sure that that changes now,” Thompson said.

“[R]ight now the people at the front of the line for the first $350 billion of your tax money have been the people who failed." He went on, "It is absolutely astonishing that they are the first ones in line, the first ones to say, ‘Bail us out, make us whole, pay us bonuses,’ or ‘pay us bonuses out of your tax money,’ And in fact, they’re the ones who made billions of dollars before, exhibiting bad behavior, and they’re somehow being rewarded now.”

Jackson warned federal officials not to overlook minority and women-owned businesses.

“One of the challenges we put before the officials in Washington about the first phase of the bailout was in the name of being in a hurry, [they] didn’t have time to take into account EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission], contract compliance, or any of the civil rights provisions made for inclusion,” Jackson said. “They could not honor them because they were in a hurry. And we cannot allow ‘in a hurry’ to rush past 40 years of civil rights laws of inclusion and diversity and protections for those that have been locked out.”

Fitzgerald, at his press conference, said that this is because aspersions shouldn't be cast on individuals whose names get dragged into recorded conversations, and that public finger-pointing should be focused only on Blagojevich and John Harris, his chief of staff, who was also arrested and charged. But he also said his office would investigate any potential wrongdoing by others suggested by the recordings of Blagojevich and Harris.

Much of the complaint is focused on years-old corruption allegedly committed by Blagojevich, but the latter half deals with his efforts to leverage his authority to pick Barack Obama's Senate successor for his own personal gain.

Despite their official anonymity, some of the six prospective appointees that Blagojevich was recorded discussing are easy to identify.

"Senate Candidate 1" is mentioned the most frequently and is clearly Valerie Jarrett, Barack Obama's longtime confidante and, according to early post-election reports, his preferred choice to replace him in the Senate. Never in the indictment is there any hint that Jarrett or Obama or anyone immediately around them engaged in quid pro quo negotiations with Blagojevich or his office to win Jarrett the appointment. (In fact, at one point, Blagojevich is heard saying that, in exchange for picking Jarrett, Obama and his team are "not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.")

Still, much of Blagojevich's scheming revolves around Jarrett, and his hope that could push Obama into some kind of deal on her behalf. For instance, on November 6, Blagojevich instructed his spokesman to leak a story to a Chicago Sun-Times columnist that "Senate Candidate 2" was under serious consideration in order "to send a message to the [President-elect's] people."

The resulting item, written by Michael Sneed, ran in the Sun-Times on November 7 and reveals that "Senate Candidate 2" is Lisa Madigan, Illinois' attorney general.

"Is Gov. Rod Blagojevich toying with tossing Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat to [Madigan], who wants Blago's job?" Sneed wrote, before outlining several reasons why Madigan might make a sensible pick. "Hmmm," Sneed concluded, "Even though this sounds like looneyville...stay tuned."

"Senate Candidate 3" makes only a passing appearance in the indictment, his or her name is casually tossed out by Blagojevich in a conversation in which he outlined potential strategies for securing a deal with Obama. Likening himself to a sports agent, he said: "How much are you offering, [Obama]? What are you offering, [Madigan]? . . . Can always go to. . . [Senate Candidate 3]."

"Senate Candidate 4" is identified as a deputy governor of Illinois, and entered the action in a November 10 conference call, when Blagojevich told advisors that he'd rather put "[Senate Candidate 4]" in the Senate "before I just give fucking [Jarrett] a fucking Senate seat and I don't get anything."

The next day, in a conversation with Harris (the same conversation in which Blagojevich said of Obama and his team "Fuck them!"), Blagojevich mentioned appointing Senate Candidate 4 as an insurance policy, in case the legislature moved to impeach Blagojevich (an ever-present possibility these past few years). Under such a scenario, Blagojevich theorized, Senate Candidate 4 would then dutifully resign from the Senate and allow Blagojevich to appoint himself to the seat. I can "count on [Senate Candidate 4], if things got hot, to give [the Senate seat] up and let me parachute over there," the governor said. Harris agreed: "You can count on [Senate Candidate 4] to do that."

It appears that "Senate Candidate 4" is either Bob Greenlee, Louanner Peters or Dean Martinez, who are Blagojevich's three deputy governors. Martinez was just appointed to that post a week ago.

The identity of Senate Candidate 5 will probably attract the most speculation. He (we know the gender because the indictment slips and uses a non-gender neutral pronoun twice) is identified only as someone who had been "publicly reported to be interested" in the seat. (Jesse Jackson, Jr.?)

On November 10, Blagojevich told an advisor that he'd appoint Jarrett, but that if the Obama camp failed to offer something in return, "then I'll fucking go [Senate Candidate 5.]"

Blagojevich then conspired with his aides to again plant a story with the same Sun-Times reporter, this time claiming that he had had a "long, productive discussion" with [Senate Candidate 5] about the vacancy. It doesn't appear that Sneed, who wrote the item on Madigan days earlier, followed up with a story, though.

Weeks later, on December 4, Blagojevich told an advisor that he was giving serious consideration to "Senate Candidate 5," because he would "raise money" for Blagojevich's campaign account (a running sub-plot in the indictment is the governor's effort to horde campaign cash before January 1, when tighter fund-raising regulations will kick-in.) Blagojevich was previously heard on October 28 telling an aide that a representative of "Senate Candidate 5" had contacted him. "We were approached 'pay to play,'" the governor said. "That, you know, he'd raise me 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him (Senate Candidate 5) a Senator."

Then, still on December 4, Blagojevich is heard saying that "Senate Candidate 5" has moved up his list and that the two would meet personally in a few days. Then, he reached out to a fundraiser with ties to "Senate Candidate 5," hoping that he would convey to the prospective appointee that he'd need to start raising money for Blagojevich immediately - that "some of this stuff's gotta start happening now. . .right now. . . and we gotta see it. You understand?"

We may never know where that particular exchange would have led. The next day, the Chicago Tribune reported that Blagojevich's calls were being recorded, essentially ending the investigation and leading to today's events.

"Senate Candidate 6" probably was never a serious contender and is described only as "a wealthy person from Illinois." Blagojevich apparently expressed interest in appointing him or her with the hope that he or she, in return, would help endow a new nonprofit organization that would provide Blagojevich with a cushy job whenever he left the governorship. An adviser, though, told Blagojevich that it wouldn't be practical to appoint this individual.

Today, Paterson talked about African-American leadership. Of the civil rights leaders, he said, “These people had to invest their energy on the abolition of slavery, preempting of segregation and the establishment of civil rights when they should have been spending their God-given talents finding new inventions for manufacturing, creating new transportation ideas, medical and scientific research, and perhaps nuclear physics.

"We have just wasted so much of our talent forcing African-Americans, Hispanics and women to invest their great ability in trying to make the Constitution valid and the Declaration of Independence read true," he said.

When Jesse Jackson's recent off-air comments about Barack Obama "talking down to black people,"Paterson said that complaint is essentially beside the point. “We shouldn’t pity [black] communities for not knowing who their leaders are," Paterson said. "We should pity the communities because they need them.

"The reason that there’s been this discussion about whose philosophy is right is because our neighborhoods have been so beset with poor housing, and substance abuse and crime and unemployment and underemployment that we had to find someone to speak collectively for the suffering we all endure."

Specifically addressing Jackson, Paterson seemed, if anything, mildly dismissive.

“Now, I don’t think the substance of what Reverend Jackson said was much better than the expression," he said. "The point is that what Senator Obama is saying to America is that, 'I’m going to fight for some of these same programs but I’m not going to allow people who are the recipients of these programs to walk around without any responsibility.'

"I think that is really a step toward a new culture and really a higher plane of thinking than we’ve seen in American government in a long time,” Paterson finished.

On Sunday morning, Jesse Jackson helped keep the momentum going. While waiting to make a live appearance on Fox & Friends, Mr. Jackson—apparently thinking his microphone was turned off—leaned over to a fellow guest and suggested that he would like to turn Barack Obama into a, um, late-in-life castrato.  

Mr. Jackson has since apologized.

Last night, Bill O’Reilly aired some of the footage on the O’Reilly Factor. And the clip—like other Fox & Friends-related controversies before it—is now spreading rapidly across the Web.

In Los Angeles, there was celebration, and three thousand miles east in Boston, where “Beat L.A.!” served in the 1980’s as the unofficial motto that “Yankees suck!” became earlier this decade, there was dejection.

But not in all of Boston. In the city’s black neighborhoods, whose children had been pelted by rocks just 12 years earlier when court-ordered busing had transported them to white South Boston, the Lakers tended to be treated like the home team. Boston, after all, was the town that Bill Russell once labeled “a flea market of racism.”

Celtics-Lakers was the N.B.A.’s signature rivalry in the 1980s, and no one can dispute the on-court artistry that defined their match-ups. But the racial polarization it revealed, in Boston and across the country, is also part of the rivalry’s legacy. The Lakers, with Magic, Worthy, Kareem (and one dorky white guy named Kurt Rambis) were the “black” team, while the Celtics, with three white starters (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Danny Ainge) were the “white” team.

These labels may have been grossly unfair (Boston was coached by a black man, K.C. Jones, and the racial record of the franchise’s patriarch, Red Auerbach, was admirable, and wasn’t Lakers coach Pat Riley a star for Adolph Rupp’s whites-only team at Kentucky?) but it also seemed fitting that the city of Boston, where George Wallace had fared disturbingly well in the 1972 Democratic primary, should harbor the unofficial team for white America.

And the N.B.A. of 1987 had profited mightily from this polarization. At the start of the decade, the league had been in decline, an entity made up almost entirely of black players at a time when American cities were emptying thanks to white flight. CBS actually aired the 1981 N.B.A. Finals on a tape-delay, after the late local news and safely out of primetime.

In their suburban havens, white Americans were surrounded by messages that reinforced their decision to remove themselves from “black” cities: soaring inner-city crime statistics, a crack cocaine epidemic, a president who spun apocryphal stories about “welfare queens,” and an entertainment industry that liked to cast the city itself as the villain – typified by the movie “Adventures in Babysitting” and its depiction of the danger and nefariousness that awaited innocent suburbanites in the dark and scary city, which debuted a few weeks after that ’87 series.

Against this cultural backdrop, the N.B.A. badly needed a star like Bird and a team like the Celtics that the denizens of White Flight America could identify with. The caliber of basketball was essential to the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, but the black-vs.-white clash it brought out surely helped the league’s television ratings, which soared in the ‘80s, transforming the N.B.A. into the international corporate behemoth it now is.

At the time, the ’87 series, the third Finals meeting between Boston and L.A. in four years, was supposed to be only the middle chapter of their story. Magic was only 27 and Bird 30. Instead, the Celtics never sniffed the finals again – until now. A masterful trade last summer transformed Boston, the league’s second-worst team in 2007, into an instant contender and once again, it’s a Celtics-Lakers title match.

But it’s different this time.

Celtic pride still lives in Boston’s white neighborhoods, and in suburban towns across Massachusetts. But now you’ll find Celtic jerseys in Roxbury too, and in black neighborhoods across the country. There are Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom jerseys in most cities too, but race is no longer a fundamental component of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry. It’s not surprising that black Bostonians have embraced this team, since every member of the Celtics playoff roster (not to mention coach Doc Rivers) is black. But these all-black Celtics are South Boston’s team, too.

That is not all that’s changed since 1987. Just two years ago, Massachusetts elected a black governor, Deval Patrick, for the first time. More surprising: Patrick carried Southie, the same neighborhood whose support George Wallace once liked to brag about.

Something similar has happened nationally, where the forces that exacerbated the country’s racial divide 20 years ago – crime, welfare and their exploitation by politicians and by Hollywood – have weakened dramatically. Fear has ebbed, and white Americans are rediscovering cities.

In 1987, Jesse Jackson set out to run for President for the second time, but few people outside his campaign thought it was more than a symbolic candidacy, its appeal directly linked to the number of black voters in any given state. In 2008, a black man named Barack Obama has just won the Democratic presidential nomination – and he owes it to victories in Idaho, Utah and Alaska.

This country’s racial journey is far from complete. But it only seems fitting that in the year of Obama, there are black kids in Roxbury and Harlem and on the South Side of Chicago cheering for the same basketball team as the kids in Southie.

skornacki@observer.com

Clinton seemed to be encouraging the perception that Obama won because of support from black voters, and that his victory was more about racial allegiances than substance.

He was also misrepresenting history.

It's true that Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. But Clinton failed to mention several key points. For one, the state held caucuses back in those days, not primaries, and they attracted only a fraction of the participation that yesterday's primary did. Also, Jackson is a native of Greenville, South Carolina, which gave him an extra advantage.

Finally, and most importantly, no one campaigned against Jackson either time, and the contests had nowhere near the same significance to the race.

In '84, Jackson, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were the only three viable candidates for the Democratic nomination by the time South Carolina rolled around, although Jackson was not considered a serious threat. The South Carolina caucuses were not a standalone event, as yesterday's primary was. They fell on the same Saturday as caucuses in Michigan, Arkansas and Mississippi, as well as a primary in Puerto Rico.

Neither Hart nor Mondale mounted a serious effort in South Carolina, and the press practically ignored the state. Both candidates were looking ahead to the imminent Tuesday primary in Illinois, the first major test after Super Tuesday (which had been held the Tuesday before South Carolina and which Mondale had used to rescue his campaign with surprise wins in Georgia and Alabama).

Given that Jackson was a native son of the state, that there was a large black vote he would likely attract, the small number of delegates at stake, and the presence of so many other states on the calendar, it made sense for Mondale and Hart to cede the state to Jackson, who "won" the caucuses (he actually finished second, well behind "uncommitted") with 25 percent.

The story wasn't much different in 1988. That year, the caucuses again fell between Super Tuesday and Illinois, and again it made sense for all of the major contenders to leave it to Jackson.

Super Tuesday '88 was essentially a three-way tie between Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and Jackson. When it was over, Dukakis and Gore both turned their attention to Illinois and Michigan (which caucused the Saturday after Illinois). Gore, who had skipped Iowa and New Hampshire, was desperate to parlay his new momentum into a non-Southern state while Dukakis believed Illinois and Michigan wins could seal the nomination for him. So they left South Carolina to Jackson, who improved on his '84 performance by claiming 41 percent of votes. As in '84, the media largely ignored the contest.

Yesterday, more than 500,000 people voted in the South Carolina Democratic primary, a stark contrast to those caucuses 20 years ago. Preparations by the candidates began more than a year ago. The national media camped out in the state for the week. And the candidates (with the exception of Hillary's two-day hiatus) moved in for the week. Jesse Jackson didn't have to do too much work for his South Carolina wins. Barack Obama had to compete with the celebrity of both Clintons and John Edwards' claim to his home state.

“The primary engine driving that campaign really was the black church,” Vann said of the Jackson campaign. “

Vann goes on to say, “Both have charisma, both drew a crowd. Jesse’s crowd was not the magnitude that Barack would draw.”