- FEDS INVESTIGATE SHARPTON FINANCES
- Racial agitator and Founder of the National Action Network
- Helped incite anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights, New York in 1991 in which a Jewish student was murdered
- 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
"The FBI and IRS are investigating whether Sharpton improperly misstated the amount of money he raised during his 2004 White House run to illegally obtain federal matching funds, a source familiar with the probe said. Sharpton, although forced to return $100,000 in matching taxpayer funds after an investigation two years ago, denied any wrongdoing at the time. The feds are also looking into allegations of tax fraud, including whether Sharpton commingled funds from his nonprofit National Action Network with several of his for-profit ventures, the source said.
Alfred Charles 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. In 1969 he began his affiliation with Jesse Jackson, who appointed him youth director of Operation Breadbasket, a group that boycotted businesses which did not hire blacks.
In 1971 Sharpton established the National Youth Movement, an organization that sought to fight drug use and to raise money for impoverished youth. He would lead the group for the next 17 years.
Sharpton dropped out of Brooklyn College after two years and has had 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.
A 2002 telecast of HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel showed a 1983 FBI surveillance video in which Sharpton was taped discussing a money-laundering scheme with mobster-turned-informant Michael Franzese, onetime captain for the Colombo crime family. On the tape, Sharpton appeared to offer to broker a meeting between Don King and a South American drug lord. No indictments were filed.
Sharpton first entered the national consciousness in November 1987, when he injected himself into the case of 15-year-old Tawana Brawley, who claimed that she had been abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a mysterious gang of six whites that included some law-enforcement officers in Dutchess County, New York. Despite a complete absence of any credible evidence, Sharpton (along with attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason) made increasingly wild accusations, culminating in charges that then-Duchess County assistant prosecutor Steve Pagones was one of Brawley's assailants. Sharpton 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.
Brawley's account was eventually demonstrated to be without basis by extensive testing and investigation by law-enforcement officials; a grand jury dismissed Brawley's accusations.
When Pagones sued Sharpton for defamation of character in 1997, the latter portrayed himself as a wrongly persecuted man of honor who, mysteriously, could "no longer recall" having made a number of his slanderous accusations against Pagones and other law-enforcement officials years earlier. When asked whether he had made even the slightest attempt to verify Brawley's allegations about Pagones before going public with them, Sharpton self-righteously retorted, "I would not engage in sex talk with a 15-year-old girl." Pagones won a court judgment against Sharpton for $345,000, which Sharpton never paid. Moreover, during the decade prior to Pagones' long-awaited vindication in court, the former prosecutor had suffered constant stress and anxiety (exacerbated by numerous death threats from Sharpton's credulous followers) that contributed heavily to the devastating dissolution of Pagones' marriage and the virtual ruin of his life. Sharpton has never acknowledged or apologized for what he did to Pagones.
In 1991 Sharpton formed the National Action Network, whose platform "revolves around activism against racial profiling, police brutality, women's issues, economic reform, public education, international affairs, including abolishing slavery in Africa, job awareness, AIDS awareness, and more."
That same year, 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. Within three hours, a black mob had hunted down and killed an innocent rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum. 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." He organized angry demonstrations and challenged local Jews -- who he derisively called "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, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took violently to the streets for three days and nights of rioting. Sharpton reacted to chaos 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 New York City.
In 1995 Sharpton led his National Action Network in an ugly boycott against Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy's owners announced that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. 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 menacing in its 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.
In 2001 Sharpton's 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, reversed his ground in 2002.
A harsh critic of the war in Iraq, Sharpton has called for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the region. "Mr. Bush put the honor of this nation aside when he deceived the public by putting us in harm's way with no weapons of mass destruction," he said. Sharpton is also opposed to the Patriot Act, which in June 2003 he characterized as "unpatriotic illegitimate legislation."
Sharpton campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 2004, unsuccessfully. But the Democratic Party establishment allowed him to speak in the 9 p.m. prime-time slot on the third day of its national convention.
In August 2005 Sharpton visited antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas to show support for her anti-war, anti-Bush protest campaign.
Sharpton has been a featured speaker at the Socialist Scholars Conference, which is held each year by the City University of New York's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Past speakers and panel members have included Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Stanley Aronowitz, John Bellamy Foster, Ron Dellums, Jerrold Nadler, and Major Owens.
Sharpton currently hosts his own radio program, which airs for three hours each weekday in New York.
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