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In 2001, I visited with Al Sharpton for a wide-ranging conversation. Al Sharpton Ten years ago, Reverend Al Sharpton was regarded by the establishment as a bad joke. Sharpton was almost comically short and heavyset with long processed hair; given to wearing powder-blue leisure suits and a faux gold medallion around his neck.Writers for the NewYorkTimes dismissed him as a “rotund preacher with a semi-automatic mouth” who “straddled the worlds of news and entertainment,religion and community activism,the media and the mob.”Even within the black community,criticism was harsh. One of America’s leading black educators, Mary Frances Berry, called Sharpton “a charlatan.” Respected journalist and scholar RogerWilkins labeled him “a black buffoon.” Times change. For a lot of people, there’s still a threshold issue regarding Sharpton. In 1987, he took up the cause of a fifteen-year-old girl named Tawana Brawley, who claimed she had been abducted and raped by a group of white men who smeared her body with racial slurs written in excrement. Sharpton made Brawley an icon of victimization for a crime that most investigators believe never occurred.And until Sharpton admits that his Tawana Brawley crusade was a hoax, many observers say that they will never be able to fully respect him. “I hear that all the time,” says Sharpton.“And my position is, if I were going to be politically expedient, I could have said a long time ago that I was duped. But I do not believe that Tawana made it all up. I believe she was violated. I believe something happened, the details of which Tawana has given.” Does Sharpton believe that “something” happened with white aggressors? “That’s what Tawana said,” he answers.“And I don’t disbelieve her. There may be some things that I said about people in the case that got in the way of the broader cause of what Tawana Brawley represented.And clearly, it has cost me some political capital. But I can live with myself.” 118 THOMAS HAUSER Regardless,Al Sharpton is now a major player in the human rights movement and the point man on a host of issues in the black community. It’s a remarkable road that he has travelled. Sharpton was born in 1954 to a middle-class family in New York. “My parents were very religious,” he remembers,“so I grew up in the church. Before I began to form values and beliefs of my own, I was in an environment where the assumption was that God exists.” Sharpton gave his first sermon at age four at the Washington Temple Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant.At age nine, he was ordained as a Pentecostal minister.“Then, when I was ten,” he recalls,“my parents had an ugly separation that was very traumatic for me.We’d lived in Queens in a comfortable middle-class environment.And all of a sudden,I found myself with my mother in Brooklyn. She went on welfare and worked part-time as a household domestic.And I had to appeal to the God I’d been taught to believe in. It forced me to confront my own beliefs, and that faith sustained me.” After his parents’ separation, Sharpton turned to political activism.At age fifteen, he was chosen by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to serve as youth director for Operation Breadbasket in NewYork City. Two years later, while still a student at Tilden High School, he founded an organization known as the NationalYouth Movement. In 1978, still operating beneath the media radar screen, Sharpton made his first run for public office, campaigning in Brooklyn for a seat in the New York State Senate. However, he was removed from the ballot after a court ruled that he was not a resident of the district in which he was campaigning. Nonetheless, he remained a loud presence, with his battle cry of “No justice; no peace” resounding through the streets of NewYork.In 1986,when a young black man named Michael Griffith was struck and killed by a car while trying to escape from a mob of clubwielding whites in Howard Beach, Sharpton was the most visible and vocal of those demanding justice. Several months later, when NewYork City mayor Ed Koch held a NewYear’s Day meeting with twenty-three black leaders at City Hall in an attempt to ease racial tensions, Sharpton condemned the occasion as“a coon show.”Shortly thereafter,he denounced New York City police commissioner...

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