What He Knows for Sure.(Tavis Smiley)(Brief biography)

Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for twelve years, "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" came to a halt so that Tavis Smiley could hold forth. The show, which supplements R. & B. songs and comedy skits with listener call-ins and lots of good-natured banter, claims to have eight million listeners, making it the most popular radio broadcast in black America. Joyner, who once sang in a group with Lionel Richie, is a gregarious host with a high, wheezing chuckle, and he presides over a gently irreverent gang. Smiley, who hosts his own nightly talk show on PBS (in many markets it airs after "Charlie Rose") and a weekend radio show distributed by Public Radio International, is a gifted orator and a budding media mogul: in an era that would seem to have little need for an old-fashioned black advocate, he has made himself just about impossible to ignore. On the "Morning Show" his job was to provide the uncomic relief. He said, "When I come on, they stand down." The sidekicks were shushed, the sound effects silenced, and the music faded out so that Smiley could deliver a secular sermon, a rat-a-tat treatise on politics and the black community.

Smiley's first commentary of the year was broadcast on Tuesday, January 8th, and his subject was Senator Barack Obama, who had won the Iowa caucuses the previous week. Joyner had emerged as an ardent Obama supporter, but Smiley, in his commentary, urged listeners not to be taken in by "the hysteria and the hype." He said, "You can't short-circuit the process of holding folk accountable just because you fall in love."

The phone calls and e-mails started immediately. Listeners couldn't understand why Smiley was speaking out against a man who could be the first black President. On his next show, he acknowledged the "pain, anguish, anger, and disappointment," but he didn't back down. And although he criticized Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign in the following weeks, dissatisfaction with Obama was often the focus of his commentary. He was disgusted by the idea that the Senator "transcends race"--"Nobody asks white candidates to transcend their race," he said. And he worried that, for some people, "voting for the guy who happens to be black might be the easy way out."

On February 11th, Obama called in to the show. He seemed to be stifling a sigh when Joyner asked him about Smiley's criticism. "I'm gonna have to call Tavis up and straighten him out on this," he said. "I don't know why he hasn't called me directly." The Senator added that he was a supporter of Smiley's agenda: "There is no issue that he's discussed--whether it's health-care discrepancies for minorities or what have you--that isn't central to my campaign."

At the end of the month, Obama declined to attend the State of the Black Union symposium, an annual gathering of thinkers and politicians which Smiley has organized for a decade, and which this year was held in New Orleans. The event, which is broadcast on C-SPAN, is meant to publicize the concerns of black America, while providing a forum for leaders to discuss solutions. The symposium also underscores Smiley's role on the political stage. This year's participants included civil-rights veterans (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton), academic celebrities (Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West), congresswomen (Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee), and one Presidential candidate: Hillary Clinton. "It was a bad decision for him not to show up," Smiley later said of Obama.

Some of Smiley's critics voiced a suspicion that pride, not principle, was motivating him. In a much debated column published by TheRoot.com, an online African-American magazine owned by the Washington Post Company, Melissa Harris-Lacewell accused Smiley of "throwing a temper tantrum." Above a rather unflattering photograph of Smiley on the set of "Meet the Press," a headline evoked not only indignation but puzzlement, too: "Who died and made Tavis king?"

On April 10th, Joyner got a phone call from Smiley, who said he wanted to leave the show. "It hit me so hard," Joyner says now, and after a sleepless night he took to the airwaves to blast his listeners for driving Smiley away. Joyner turned this soliloquy into a blog post. "He can't take the hate he's been getting regarding the Barack issue," Joyner wrote, and he asked his listeners to persuade Smiley to stay: "I want you to call him, e-mail him, text him, hug him, kiss him, get him in a corner and wrestle him."