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Rev.
Alfred (Al) Sharpton, Jr., is a Pentecostal minister, political
and civil rights activist, first African American candidate
for the New York State Senate. Al Sharpton has made a career
of placing himself at the front line of the struggle against
injustice by lower and middle-income African Americans.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Sharpton began preaching at
the age of four and spent his early years as a "wonder
boy" sensation on the Pentecostal preaching circuit.
In 1964, when he was ten years old, Sharpton was ordained
as a minister and preached on a tour with famed gospel music
performer Mahalia Jackson. But also that year, the divorce
of his parents propelled Sharpton from middle-class comfort
in Queens to public welfare and a housing project in Brooklyn.
Having lived in better circumstances, he knew that black
poverty was not inevitable and he vowed to fight for improved
living and working conditions for African Americans. In
1969 civil rights leader Jesse Jackson appointed Sharpton
as youth director for Operation Breadbasket, an organization
that boycotted and demonstrated against businesses that
were not hiring blacks.
After
high school and a few years at Brooklyn College, in 1971
Sharpton began his own organization, the National Youth
Movement. After meeting soul singer James Brown in 1973,
Sharpton became his touring manager and continued in this
role until the early 1980s, all the while continuing his
political activism.
Sharpton
formally entered politics in 1978 as the first African American
to run for a seat in the New York State Senate. In the 1980s
Sharpton became involved in a series of racial incidents
that occurred in various New York neighborhoods. In 1986
he organized demonstrations and called for a special prosecutor
in the aftermath of the Howard Beach incident, in which
a crowd of whites chased a black man named Michael Griffiths
onto a highway, where he was struck and killed by a vehicle.
Two years later Sharpton served as an adviser to Tawana
Brawley, a black teenager who claimed she had been abducted
and raped by a gang of whites. Sharpton's credibility came
into question when a grand jury found no evidence of any
crime against Brawley. Sharpton also played a prominent
role in the protests that followed the 1989 shooting death
of Yusuf Hawkins, a black youth who was attacked by a white
mob in the Bensonhurst section of New York City. In January
1991 Sharpton was preparing to lead a protest march in Bensonhurst
when a drunken white man attacked Sharpton and stabbed him
in the chest. After this incident, Sharpton began to refine
and tone down his controversial public image.
In
1991 Sharpton founded the National Action Network, a civil
rights organization that seeks economic justice and political
empowerment for the disenfranchised. Continuing to pursue
a career in politics in the 1990s, Sharpton ran unsuccessfully
in the 1992 and 1994 Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate
from New York. Meanwhile, in 1993 he served a well-publicized
45-day jail sentence resulting from a 1987 protest march
that shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1997 Sharpton made
an impressive showing in the city's Democratic mayoral primary,
winning 32 percent of the vote. More recently, Sharpton
led large demonstrations against police brutality in the
New York Police Department following the police torture
of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997 and the shooting
of unarmed Ghanaian immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New
York City policemen in 1999.
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