Posted on 01/04/2004 3:14:32 PM PST by schaketo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Before he traded his jogging suits and bronze medallion for business attire in the U.S. presidential race, Al Sharpton was a scrappy street activist with a knack for thrusting himself into the center of New York's most highly charged racial incidents.
From the Crown Heights riots to the Tawana Brawley case, which resulted in a defamation judgment against Sharpton, the Pentecostal preacher has used fiery rhetoric, a flamboyant and confrontational style and lots of media attention to become a player in New York Democratic politics.
Although Sharpton is a longshot to win the Democratic presidential nomination against eight rivals, his campaign seeks to energize minority voters and pull the party to the left and away from the centrism of the Clinton era.
His platform includes constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right to education and health care, and support for affirmative action to promote minority hiring and abolishing the death penalty.
"The majority of Americans have been left out of the political dialogue," Sharpton said last January after filing papers for his presidential bid with the Federal Election Commission in Washington.
"The Democratic Party cannot win unless we expand our base and get those who have been disaffected."
Despite the racially tinged rhetoric that made him famous, Sharpton became a political force in New York, where he won 32 percent of the vote in the 1997 Democratic mayoral primary with a strong showing among African-Americans. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 1992 and 1994.
His freewheeling appearances in a series of fall Democratic debates bolstered his reputation and earned him a slot in December as a guest host on "Saturday Night Live," and he could win enough black votes in key states like South Carolina to influence the outcome.
He has campaigned hard and made frequent appearances in black churches in South Carolina, which holds an early Feb. 3 primary and where at least 40 percent of the Democratic voters are expected to be African-American.
PRESCHOOL PREACHER
Sharpton, 48, says he began his life of public activism when other children were still in preschool. Sharpton was born Oct. 3, 1954, in Queens and delivered his first sermon when he was four and was ordained at 10, the standard Sharpton biography goes. As a teenager, he worked for Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket, organizing protests against companies that discriminated against black people.
In the early 1970s, Sharpton joined James Brown's entourage, accompanying the soul singer on tour. The two became close and Sharpton identifies Brown as a mentor and father figure. Sharpton entered the national scene in 1985 as an itinerant preacher and activist with the Bernhard Goetz case, demanding the white man who shot a black gang of young muggers receive a stiff sentence.
His most notorious case came in 1987, when Tawana Brawley, a black teenager from Poughkeepsie, New York, said she had been abducted, raped and smeared with feces by white men.
Sharpton accused Steven Pagones, a young assistant district attorney, of being a participant in the rape. A grand jury later found Brawley's charges were phony and the crime had never occurred.
Pagones successfully sued Sharpton for defamation and in 1998 was awarded $65,000.
The Brawley case did not deter Sharpton. After the 1991 Crown Heights riots in New York City, in which a black mob killed a Jewish man and injured about 100 others, Sharpton spoke of "diamond merchants," a reference to Orthodox Jews in the neighborhood.
In 1995, Sharpton denounced a Jewish store owner in Harlem as a "white interloper." After weeks of protests against the Jewish owner, an arsonist set fire to the store, killing eight people.
Five years later, Sharpton's newfound status as a Democratic power broker was ratified when 2000 presidential candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley and Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred with him.
He is married to Kathy Jordan and they have two teenage daughters.
One has to wonder just what it is that the Democrats DO believe in when a racist, murder-inducing jackass like Fat Albert is invited to share a stage with the rest of the Shameless Dwarfs.
We have nothing to worry about so long as they continue to field candidates of hate like him.
You owe me $19.95 for a new keyboard. I just spit cocoanut cream pie and milk all over the new one I just got from Dell Friday!
Dammit, LOL, and I'd just figured hot how to use all the speaker, movie, and navigational short-cut keys.
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