a small dose of reality

* Racial agitator and Founder of the National Action Network

* Incited an anti-Jewish riot in Crown Heights in 1991 in which a Jewish student was lynched

* Convicted of libel for his role in the Tawana Brawley hoax

* Incited anti-Semites against Freddy’s Mart which was burned by one of Sharpton’s followers killing seven people

* Democratic Party presidential candidate, 2004

Al Sharpton was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1954, to comparatively prosperous parents. He demonstrated considerable verbal dexterity at an early age and was touted as "the Wonder Boy Preacher" by age 7, when he toured with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and F.D. Washington, the Pentecostal minister of the Washington Temple Church of God in Christ in Brooklyn. Washington personally ordained Sharpton a minister at age 9.

Sharpton’s parents divorced when he was 10, leaving Sharpton and his mother impoverished. While in high school, he organized his first protests – against cafeteria food and the school’s dress code. In 1969 he began his affiliation with Jesse Jackson, being appointed youth director of Operation Breadbasket, a group that boycotted businesses that refused to hire blacks. In 1971, Sharpton organized the National Youth Movement, an organization with the entirely laudable goals of fighting drug use and raising money for impoverished youth. He headed the group for the next 17 years. He dropped out of Brooklyn College after two years; he has enjoyed the benefit of no additional higher education or formal seminary training since. Upon the completion of his academic career, he began working for the entertainer James Brown and, later, for boxing promoter Don King. He made an unsuccessful run for the New York State Senate in 1978.

In a video shown on HBO’s Real Sports with Brian Gumbel, Sharpton appeared in a 1983 FBI videotape discussing the laundering of drug money with mobster-turned-informant Michael Franzese, one-time captain for the Colombo crime family. Sharpton appears on the tape to offer to broker a meeting between Don King and a South American drug lord. No indictments were filed, but they do suggest the nature of Sharpton’s relationship to King.

Sharpton made his first appearance on the national stage during the 1985 trial of Bernhard Goetz, a white man who, the previous year, had shot and wounded four black teens who threatened him on a New York City subway. Sharpton focused not on the fact that the youths were preparing to assault and rob Goetz, but rather on the allegation that Goetz used a racial epithet when shooting his tormenters.

But Sharpton truly entered the national consciousness in 1986. A group of whites, led by a South African teenager who had recently immigrated to the U.S. from England, attacked four black men whose car had broken down in the Howard Beach section of Queens, New York. One of the blacks, 23-year-old Michael Griffith, was struck and killed by a car as he ran into the road to escape the mob. The car was driven by Dominick Blum, a court reporter and the son of a policeman. Sharpton was one of a number of black politicians and clergy who rightly protested the racial beating, but Sharpton and activist attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox then claimed that the police were engaged in a cover-up to protect Blum, whom they alleged was part of the conspiracy. The evident stupidity of their position notwithstanding, the three insisted that Blum, the driver of the car, was in some way involved with the gang of white youths. Maddox admitted that his goal in the case was to develop an agenda

that was "bigger than Michael Griffith’s," in order to further polarize New York along racial lines.

The three men found their next opportunity to create racial discord in the Tawana Brawley case, arguably the greatest media circus of the 1980s. Brawley claimed that she had been abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a mysterious gang of six white law-enforcement officers. Brawley’s account was demonstrated to be without basis when extensive testing and investigation by law-enforcement officials demonstrated that no rape had ever taken place, and a grand jury eventually dismissed Brawley’s accusations. Despite the lack of evidence, Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason used the hoax to make increasingly wild accusations, culminating in accusations that then-Duchess County assistant prosecutor Steve Pagones was one of Brawley’s assailants. They further alleged that in addition to participating in the gang-rape, Pagones had arranged the murder of Harry Crist, a part-time police officer who had taken his own life after a series of career setbacks and the end of a romantic relationship. Sha rpton appeared on the Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera programs, Nightline, and other local and national television shows repeating his claims about Pagones and calling him a sexual predator. Brutal anti-Semitic statements were made by both Sharpton and Maddox about New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams.

Maddox and Mason were eventually suspended from the practice of law; all three of the men were sued by Pagones, who won his defamation suit in 1998, Sharpton’s portion of the punitive damages being paid by several of his friends. No amount of money, however, could have adequately compensated Pagones for the incalculable damage that Sharpton’s reckless and vicious charges had done to the young district attorney. During the decade prior to Pagones’ long-awaited court victory over Sharpton, the former prosecutor had suffered through constant stress and anxiety (exacerbated by numerous death threats from Sharpton’s credulous followers) that contributed heavily to the collapse of Pagones’ marriage; the man’s life was virtually destroyed. Sharpton has never acknowledged or apologized for what he did to Pagones.

Sharpton continued his attempts to grab the media spotlight in the 1990s. He formed the National Action Network in 1991; the goals of the group appear laudable (voter registration and education, economic support for small minority-owned businesses), but in reality it has merely provided for Sharpton, a veneer of respectability under which to continue his racially polarizing activities.

In 1991, anti-Semitic riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section erupted after 7-year old Gavin Cato, a black child, was accidentally killed by an out-of-control car driven by a Hasidic Jew. Gavin’s cousin, Angela Cato, was also injured in the same accident. Within three hours, a black mob had hunted down a rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was killed by Lemrick Nelson, who was acquitted of the murder by a jury in New York but later convicted on federal charges of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights. Sharpton criticized the Jewish community at Cato’s funeral, inflaming ethnic hatreds, and organized more demonstrations that turned once again into open rioting. Sharpton fanned the flames of racial hatred by publicly announcing that it was not merely a car accident that had killed Gavin Cato, but rather "the social accident of apartheid." The contentious activist then challenged local Jews –– whom he derisively characterized as "diamond merchants –– to "pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house" to settle the score. Finally he claimed, without proof, that the Jewish driver had run over the Cato children while in a drunken stupor. Stirred in part by such rhetoric and false accusations, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took violently to the streets, pelting Jewish homes with rocks, setting vehicles on fire, and shouting "Jew! Jew!" Sharpton reacted to the rioting by stating, "We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system."

After 1991, Sharpton attempted to magnify his political profile, running unsuccessfully for Senate in 1992 and 1994, and receiving 32 percent of the vote in the 1997 Democratic mayoral primary. In 1995, he led his National Action Network in an ugly boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business that had its rent raised by its black landlord. Freddy’s in turn raised the rent on one of its subtenants, a black-owned music store. Published transcripts of Sharpton’s incendiary radio broadcasts about the Freddy’s boycott were available only through the Jewish press; the mainstream press printed only a few of the less-inflammatory of the Reverend’s comments.

The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s "Buy Black" Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as "crackers," Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly told passersby, "Keep [going] right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don’t give the Jew a dime." Some picketers openly threatened violence against whites and Jews –– all under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton. The subsequent picketing became increasingly violent in tone until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites in the store, and then set the building on fire –– killing seven employees, most of whom were Hispanics.

Sharpton’s humiliation in the 1998 Pagones trial, as well as his efforts to enter the political mainstream, may have caused him to become quieter in recent years, but the radical and ultimately self-aggrandizing nature of his agenda cannot be in doubt. In 2001 the National Action Network urged a boycott of Arab-owned gas stations in Michigan, alleging that Arabs engaged in racial profiling and citing instances of Arab violence against blacks. Sharpton, needing to restore his credentials with the Arab community and indifferent at best to Jewish concerns, reversed his ground in 2002 for purely political motives. Sharpton led a boycott on several news media outlets for failing to devote enough television hours to programs that portrayed blacks in a positive light, and demanding that they carry The Word, a gospel program aimed at black urban audiences. It is worth noting in this connection that Sharpton has been linked to several blacks in the entertainment industry, some of whom paid

the money he owed to Steve Pagones as a result of the Tawana Brawley lawsuit.

Sharpton embraced Yasser Arafat in 2001, again for political reasons as he hoped to unseat Jesse Jackson as the most influential black leftist in the United States. That same year, he led a protest against the U.S. Naval exercises in Vieques, Puerto Rico. He recently was called upon by Marxist and failed revolutionary theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide to attempt to broker a peace deal in Haiti. He has maintained a sharp criticism of the war in Iraq.

Sharpton campaigned for the presidency in 2004. He was roundly rejected by the black community during the primary contest. In South Carolina he garnered only 9% of the vote in a state where 40% of the Democratic primary voters are black. The Democratic Party establishment, which had long lost the ability to maintain any moral standards vis-à-vis racial demagogues like Sharpton, allowed Sharpton to speak in the 9 p.m. prime-time slot on the third day of its convention.

Copywrite 2007  -  Barry G.