Reverend Alfred Charles Sharpton, Jr. (born October 3, 1954) is a famous United States Pentecostal reverend and civil rights activist. Sharpton was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1980s he was known as the well-fed preacher in the brightly colored jogging suit with the lacquered pompadour hair-do who was involved in the racially charged Tawana Brawley rape hoax. Since the mid 1990s, the former child preacher has tried to moderate his rhetoric in the hopes of becoming a respected statesmen; in 2003 he announced his intent to run for president.
Al Sharpton began preaching at the age of four, and was ordained and licensed as a Reverend in 1963. At the 1964 New York World's Fair Sharpton belted out sermons, billed as "The Wonder-Boy Preacher". Until the age of ten, Al lived a comfortable life in 10-room house Queens, New York owned by his father, who Sharpton described as a "slumlord". Then his mother kicked his father out of the house for impregnating his step-daughter (his wife's daughter from a previous marriage), who his father eventually married. Unable to support herself on her own, Al's family eventually had to move to a housing project.
As a child Sharpton was obsessed with preaching, going on tour with Mahalia Jackson and others. In school Sharpton would sign his school assignments as "the Reverend Al Sharpton". Sharpton's first attempts at protest were in high school, where the Reverend protested cafeteria food and the dress code. In 1969 he was appointed as youth director of Operation Breadbasket by Jesse Jackson.
In the 1970s after two years at Brooklyn College, Sharpton dropped out to be a tour manager for James Brown, where he met his future wife, Kathy Jordan, a backup singer for James Brown, who he married in 1983. In 1971 Sharpton founded the National Youth Movement to fight drugs and raise money for impoverished youth.
In 2002 HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" aired a 1983 FBI videotape in which Al Sharpton, wearing a large cowboy hat and chewing on a cigar, is seen talking former mobster turned FBI informant Michael Franzese talks laundering drug money. Sharpton is never charged, although many believe that Sharpton, then associated with boxing promoter Don King, went undercover for the FBI. Sharpton threatened to sue HBO for a billion dollars, claiming that the video was shown to deflate his chances as a presidential candidate.
Sharpton rose to prominence as a civil rights activist in New York City in 1986 after a black man was hit and killed by a car while fleeing a white mob. Sharpton launched protests in Howard Beach (where the incident occurred) and called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Newspapers such as the New York Times loved the brash and outspoken Reverend, and wrote glowingly of his exploits.
Sharpton's most controversial incident came in 1987 when Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason, and Alton Maddox acted as advisor for Tawana Brawley. Brawley was a black teenager from Wappingers Falls, New York who claimed that she was raped and sodomized for several days by six white police officer before being covered in excrement and placed in a trash bag. These claims were later proven to be completely untrue. Following the incident, although Brawley refused to speak to the media or authorities, Sharpton and the other advisors began to make wild claims. Sharpton said that to cooperate with the state Attorney General Robert Abrams, a Jew, would be "to sit down with Mr. Hitler". All three implied that Mario Cuomo was tied to organized crime. Sharpton has never recanted any of the allegations he made surrounding the incident and maintains that he has always believed Brawley.
In 1998 Sharpton was ordered to pay Steven Pagones $65,000 in damages for slander for explicitly implicating the young prosecutor in the rape of Tawana Brawley. Before the trial Sharpton had said, "We stated openly that Steven Pagones ... did it ... if we're lying, sue us"[1]. Sharpton refused to pay. In January 2001 after Pagones had collected only $15,000 from Sharpton's garnished salary, a group of wealthy African Americans stepped in to pay.
In 1991 a Hasidic Jew, Yoseph Lisef, ran a red traffic light and hit a young black child, Gavin Cato in Brooklyn's Crown Heights. A private ambulance from a Jewish association evacuated the lightly-injured driver on the orders of the police officer at the scene, who feared that Lisef would be attacked by the angry bystanders. A city ambulance arrived moments later to treat Cato. In the violence that followed on that night, Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish rabbinical student, was stabbed to death.
At Cato's funeral, Sharpton spoke out against "diamond merchants", which is the occupation of many of the Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights. Sharpton mobilized hundreds of demonstrators to march through Crown Heights, chanting, "No justice, no peace." Sharpton flew to Israel to personally serve papers to Lisef for a civil suit.
On January 12, 1991 Sharpton was stabbed while organizing a demonstration in Bensonhurst. At the hospital when Sharpton learned the doctors intended to cut off his leather jacker Sharpton, "made them stop and hauled myself off the gurney and took my coat off". The event was turning point for Sharpton who saw first hand the violence that "loose language" could incite. Years later Sharpton met with his attacker and reflected "what poison am I putting in my environment ... where a kid feels he'll be a hero if he kills somebody".[1]
In 1995 Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish owned stored, was picketed by Sharpton's National Action Network when it raised the rent on a black subtenant. Sharpton proclaimed that "We will not stand by, and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." On December 8, one of the protesters entered Freddy's, shot four employees, and set the store on fire, killing seven. Sharpton denied his involvement had anything to do with the incident.
After the acquittal of the policemen who shot Amadou Diallo in 2000, Sharpton led the marches and rallies. Unlike the Sharpton of old, he moderated his rhetoric and called for nonviolence, saying, "Let us not throw one brick".
Sharpton has run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate seat from New York in 1978, 1992, and 1994. In 1997 he ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City. Some of have criticized Sharpton for only running races he knows he can't win while shunning those he could. He has never held elected office. On January 5, 2003 Sharpton announced his candidacy for the 2004 presidential election as a member of the Democratic Party.
Sharpton has been critical of the news media, charging it with ignoring his campaign due to deep-seated racial prejudice. [1]
To his supporters Sharpton is a loyal defender of the underrepresented poor and disenfranchised who has been supporting his community for 30 years. Critics of Sharpton accuse him of being a racial agitator who inserts himself in any instance of racial tension in order to increase his own popularity while often making situation more tense. Many Jews see him as anti-Semitic.
Sharpton, on Fox News August 2001
Quotes
I believe something happened to Tawana Brawley....I think it is absurd that someone would say that a 15-year-old girl could have made all that up, including fooling a hospital.
I mean, Dwight Eisenhower was never elected to anything before he was elected president....In a time that we no longer have a Cold War, there is no real threat to American security.
Now that they have achieved the capture of Hussein, they should appeal to the U.N. to come in with a multilateral redevelopment plan. This is all the more reason this war should come to an immediate end.
