Al Sharpton

Activist

• Born: October 3, 1954
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York

Activist

An effective organizer and communicator, Sharpton led numerous demonstrations to protest hate crimes and violations of civil rights, ran for elective offices several times, and hosted a national radio program.

Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Government and politics; Radio and television

Early Life

Alfred Charles Sharpton, Jr., was born October 3, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, a successful contractor, deserted the family in 1964, forcing Sharpton’s mother, Ada, to go on welfare and move into a public housing project. Sharpton was a precocious child who delivered his first sermon at age four and came to be known as the “Boy Wonder Preacher.” Starting at the age of seven, he accompanied singer Mahalia Jackson on several gospel tours.

In 1969, the Reverend Jesse Jackson appointed Sharpton youth director of the Brooklyn branch of Operation Breadbasket. The next year, Sharpton participated in a sit-in at New York City Hall to demand more summer jobs for teenagers, an incident that resulted in his first arrest. In 1971, he resigned from Operation Breadbasket to begin his own organization, the National Youth Movement, with the mission of fighting illegal drugs.

While still attending the Samuel Tilden High School in Brooklyn, Sharpton established a close relationship with the famous singer and entertainer James Brown. Brown’s son, one of Sharpton’s friends, had died in a car accident. Brown employed Sharpton as a bodyguard and concert promoter. From Brown, Sharpton took his flamboyant hairstyle and learned how to attract attention. One of Brown’s backup singers, Kathy Jordan, later became Sharpton’s wife. After graduating from high school in 1973, he took classes at Brooklyn College but dropped out after two years to work as Brown’s touring manager.

In 1974, Sharpton made news when he led a group into the New York City deputy mayor’s office to protest the shooting of a Black teenager. That same year, while in Africa making arrangements for a Brown tour, he met boxing promoter Don King, with whom he worked for a few years. During that time, Sharpton gained insider information about some of King’s illegal activities.

Life’s Work

In 1985 and 1986, Sharpton first gained national attention when he led protest marches demanding a murder indictment for Bernhard Goetz, a White man who had shot four unarmed Black teenagers on a New York subway train. In subsequent years, Sharpton would often attract national publicity by leading protests in response to discrimination against African Americans. In December 1986, when a mob of White men chased three Black men in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, one of the African Americans, Michael Griffith, was struck and killed by a passing automobile. A week after the event, Sharpton led more than one thousand demonstrators on a protest march in Howard Beach. Some White residents fueled tensions—and drew more media attention—by shouting racial epithets at the demonstrators. The publicity encouraged the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the incident, and three White youths were found guilty of manslaughter.

Sharpton became a magnet for media attention. Audiences reacted to his outspoken personality with either admiration or disdain, but rarely with indifference. When a reporter for the Washington Post later asked him how he had established his leadership, he replied that he had followed the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., by “marching, by putting people in the streets. Tell me when in the history of the civil rights movement the goal wasn’t to stir things up.” In an Ebony interview in 2001, he said, “People think that we only jump on big cases. Ninety percent of the cases that are big, we made them big. People would have never heard of these cases if we had not marched.”

In 1987, however, Sharpton’s reputation was damaged when he became the major adviser and spokesman for an unstable African American teenager, Tawana Brawley, who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by six White men in upstate New York. Sharpton continued to stubbornly defend Brawley’s story, even after the state’s attorney general, a grand jury, and most newspapers concluded that it was a hoax. He also endorsed Brawley’s accusation that local prosecutor Steven Pagones had been one of the attackers. When Pagones later sued him for defamation, a jury ordered Sharpton to pay sixty-five thousand dollars in damages, a sum that eventually was paid by attorney Johnnie Cochran and other admirers. Although Sharpton continued to claim that he believed that Brawley had been assaulted, he apparently learned from the controversy to be more cautious in his rhetoric and choice of campaigns.

Sharpton experienced another crisis in 1988, when it was revealed that for five years he had provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with information about Don King and other associates. Two years later, the state attorney general charged him with stealing almost a quarter of a million dollars from the National Youth Movement. Sharpton was acquitted in a criminal trial.

Sharpton did not allow legal problems to interfere with his determination to lead protests. In 1990, he was the force behind a controversial ten-month boycott of Korean-owned businesses accused of discriminatory acts against African Americans. In 1989, he responded to a hate crime in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in which a gang of about twenty White youths badly beat up four Black teenagers, resulting in the death of Yusef Hawkins. Sharpton led protestors through Bensonhurst, where some residents reportedly greeted him by holding up watermelons and shouting racial slurs. When several of those responsible for Hawkins’s death received light sentences in January 1991, Sharpton organized another demonstration. Minutes before it began, an intoxicated Bensonhurst man, Michael Riccardi, stabbed him in the chest, almost killing him. Sharpton recovered and asked that Riccardi be given a light sentence. Shortly thereafter, Sharpton established the National Action Network to coordinate civil rights activities.

That same year, a Hasidic Jewish driver struck and killed a Guyanese boy, Gavin Cato, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, triggering three days of destructive riots that culminated in the murder of a Jewish student. Shortly after the riots, Sharpton marched through Crown Heights with about four hundred protestors chanting, “No justice, no peace!” Then at Cato’s funeral, he further inflamed passions by speaking of “diamond merchants” with close relations to Israel. The Anti-Defamation League accused him of anti-Semitism, an accusation he denied during a heated debate with his critics on The Jackie Mason Show.

Despite his intemperate rhetoric during the Crown Heights riots, Sharpton was mellowing with age, and he decided to expand his influence by entering the electoral arena. In 1992, describing his opponents as “recycled white trash,” he mounted an aggressive but futile campaign for the US Senate. He finished third out of four Democrats in the New York primary. Two years later, he entered another lively primary campaign, gaining a respectable 26 percent of the vote against incumbent Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His most impressive showing came in the Democratic primary for New York mayor in 1997, when he took about one third of the vote. In 2003, he announced that he was entering the Democratic primary for the presidency. Attempting to capture the party’s left wing, he called for constitutional amendments to guarantee education and health care as basic human rights. Despite his candor, witty statements, and populist appeal, his earlier militancy made it impossible for him to be a viable candidate, and he dropped out of the race in March 2004. A few years later, he suggested that he had never expected to win the presidency, but that he had entered the race to raise issues of social justice and to force the party to become more progressive.

Sharpton’s political campaigns did not keep him from continuing to lead protests to address perceived wrongs done to African Americans. In 1995, during a landlord-tenant dispute in Harlem, he called on demonstrators to support an African American business owner who was being displaced by a “white interloper.” One of the protestors entered the white landlord’s store, Freddie’s Fashion Mart, and launched an attack that left seven people dead. Afterward, Sharpton expressed regret for using the term “white interloper” but denied that his inflammatory rhetoric had encouraged the violence. In 1999, after four White policemen were acquitted for having killed an unarmed Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo, Sharpton led two thousand marchers in a highly publicized demonstration in Manhattan.

By the end of the twentieth century, Sharpton had moderated his confrontational style and was attempting to build alliances among disparate groups to achieve common goals. While retaining his left-wing ideology, he frequently appeared as a guest of conservative talk shows, particularly The O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel. He also continued to lead protests. In 2001, after entering the Puerto Rican island of Vieques to protest against its use for naval bombing practice, he was arrested for trespassing and served thirty days of a ninety-day jail sentence. In 2005, he debuted a national talk radio program titled Keepin’ It Real with Al Sharpton. In 2007, when white radio host Don Imus referred to Black female basketball players as “nappy-headed hos,” Sharpton led a successful campaign to have him fired. The next year, following the acquittal of three police officers who shot and killed Sean Bell, an African American man in Queens, hundreds of protestors took to the streets in a “slowdown” campaign organized and led by Sharpton and his National Action Network. Sharpton began hosting a news program called PoliticsNation on the left-leaning news network MSNBC in 2011. He also remained active in the Black Lives Matter movement and the increasing number of protests in response to the killings of unarmed Black men, mostly by police, that began with the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida in 2012. Sharpton led protests in Florida in response to that incident, as well as in New York City to protest the 2014 death of Eric Garner following the use of a chokehold by police attempting to arrest him. After the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, Sharpton became an outspoken critic of Trump and his supporters. In August 2017 he organized the Ministers March for Justice, an anti-Trump demonstration that brought together thousands of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh religious leaders. During the march, Sharpton, who had previously apologized to Jewish leaders for his past actions, highlighted the need for African American and Jewish people to work together against White supremacy. Sharpton was an active presence following the 2020 death of George Floyd and the resulting widespread protests, delivering the eulogy at Floyd's funeral and calling for the conviction of the police officers involved in his murder.

Significance

Sharpton’s critics accused him of race-baiting and inflammatory rhetoric, while his many supporters considered him an articulate advocate for social justice. He tapped into a strong undercurrent of Black discontent and frequently helped to publicize instances of racial violence. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, he was among the most powerful and respected African American leaders in the country.

Bibliography

Levenson, Eric, et al. "The Rev. Al Sharpton Remembers George Floyd As an 'Ordinary Brother' Who Changed the World." CNN, 9 June 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/george-floyd-funeral-tuesday/index.html. Accessed 19 July 2021.

Mallin, Jay. Al Sharpton: Community Activist. New York: Children’s, 2007. Print.

Mandery, Evan. The Campaign: Rudy Giuliani, Ruth Messinger, Al Sharpton, and the Race to Be Mayor of New York. Boulder: Westmont, 1999. Print.

Saslow, Eli. "The Public Life and Private Doubts of Al Sharpton." Washington Post. Washington Post, 7 Feb. 2015. Web. 9 Mar. 2016.

Shapiro, Edward. Crown Heights, Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2006. Print.

Sharpton, Al. Go and Tell Pharaoh: The Autobiography of Reverend Al Sharpton. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Print.

Sharpton, Al. The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership. New York: Simon, 2013. Print.

Sherman, Scott. “Just Keep Talking,” Transaction 91 (2002): 62–86. Print.

Stein, Perry, and Julie Zauzmer. "Dueling Clergy Protests over the Trump Presidency Converge on Washington." The Washington Post, 28 Aug. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/28/religious-leaders-gather-in-washington-to-show-unified-moral-opposition-to-trump/. Accessed 2 Nov. 2018.