Background

Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. was born on October 3, 1954 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, to Ada (née Richards) and Alfred Charles Sharpton Sr. He preached his first sermon at the age of four and toured with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

In 1963, Sharpton's father left his wife to have a relationship with Sharpton's half-sister. Ada took a job as a maid, but her income was so low that the family qualified for welfare and had to move from middle class Hollis, Queens, to the public housing projects in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Education

Sharpton graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, and attended Brooklyn College, dropping out after two years in 1975.

Career

He was a commanding figure, even as a youth and was ordained as a Pentecostal minister at the age of 10. He used to travel to other places to deliver sermons, and once teamed up with the acclaimed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

From a very early age, Sharpton was active in religious and political causes. He joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and worked for one of their divisions called “Operation BreadBasket”. This was a program aimed at encouraging businesses to enhance diversity in the workplace. Another such cause was organizing protests against a supermarket chain called A&P. He started working as the youth director for the presidential campaign of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and also served as the tour manager for famed musician James Brown.

In 1971, Al Sharpton founded an organization known as the National Youth Movement, which collected funds for the betterment of disadvantaged youth. He has worked to raise awareness and bring justice for many racially motivated hate crimes such as the Bernhard Goetz shooting incident. Goetz shot four African American men on a New York City Subway. The case was dismissed as a self-defense incident and Goetz was cleared of all charges. Another such incident was when three African American men were assaulted by a group of white men in Howard Beach. Sharpton organized rallies and protests against the incident. He then founded a group called “National Action Network” which deigned to educate voters of their rights and responsibilities and to support small businesses.

Sharpton was also actively involved in the Tawana Brawley case. Brawley was an African American teenage girl, who claimed that she had been raped by a group of white men, including some police officers. The case was tried but dismissed by a grand jury, concluding that the girl had invented the story for attention. Sharpton was involved in sparking media attention to the story and organizing protests and rallies in her support. Sharpton has vied for a government position, running for the New York State Assembly in 1978, a seat in the U. S. Senate in 1992 and 1994, the mayor of New York in 1997 and a Democratic Party Presidential Candidate in 2004.

Al Sharpton has a horde of supporters as well as a large number of critics. His outspoken nature and tactics often leads people to comment that he strays from the actual cause and uses it to further his own agenda. He was close friends with Michael Jackson and led a memorial service for him at the Apollo Theatre in New York. One of his recent cases has been Trayvon Martin, an African American teenager, shot to death in Florida by George Zimmerman, a member of the neighborhood watch. Sharpton organized movements to bring Zimmerman to justice, who was tried for second degree murder, but acquitted of all charges. Sharpton hosts a television talk show called “PoliticsNation” as well as a radio show called “Keepin’ It Real”.

Achievements

• He is a rabble-rousing racial ambulance chaser who never met a video camera he didn't like. To others Al Sharpton is a voice for the disenfranchised, an intelligent, articulate activist who knows how to play the media and speak for the underclass.
  
  The Reverend Al Sharpton has emerged as a voice that people listen to—even if they don't like what they hear. Sharpton, a Pentecostal minister without a parish, uses his theatrical style and inflammatory rhetoric to make himself as familiar a front-page figure as New York City residents Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley. The self-declared civil rights leader injected himself into many of the city's stickiest issues—the Tawana Brawley case, the Bensonhurst racial murder trial, the Bernhard Goetz shooting— often making himself part of the controversy.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Al On America

    (The controversial founder and president of the National A...)

  • James Brown: The Godfather of Soul

    ( A man of many names: The hardest working man in show bu...)

  • The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership

    (Lord knows, Rev Al has had his personal and very public u...)

  • Go and Tell Pharaoh

Religion

Sharpton was licensed and ordained a Pentecostal minister by Bishop F. D. Washington at the age of nine or ten. After Bishop Washington's death in the late 1980s, Sharpton became a Baptist. He was re-baptized as a member of the Bethany Baptist Church in 1994 by the Reverend William Augustus Jones and became a Baptist minister.

During 2007, Sharpton participated in a public debate with atheist writer Christopher Hitchens, defending his religious faith and his belief in the existence of God.

Politics

His critics describe him as "a political radical who is to blame, in part, for the deterioration of race relations". Sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to him as a racial arsonist, while liberal columnist Derrick Z. Jackson has called him the black equivalent of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan.

He has derided moderate black politicians close to the Democratic Party as "cocktail sip Negroes" or "yellow niggers. "

Views

Quotations: “What I do functionally is what Dr. King, Reverend Jackson and the movement are all about; but I learned manhood from James Brown. I always say that James Brown taught me how to be a man. ” - Sharpton on Brown as a father figure.

Membership

Sharpton is an honorary member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.

Personality

After being obese for decades, Sharpton lost over 100 pounds in the four and a half years ending October 2014.

Connections

In 1971 while touring with James Brown, he met future wife Kathy Jordan, who was a backup singer. Sharpton and Jordan married in 1980. The couple separated in 2004. In July 2013, the New York Daily News reported that Sharpton, while still married to his second wife (the first being Marsha Tinsley ), now had a self-described "girlfriend", Aisha McShaw, aged 35, and that the couple had "been an item for months. .. . photographed at elegant bashes all over the country. " McShaw, the Daily News reported, referred to herself professionally as both a "personal stylist" and "personal banker. "

Father:

Alfred Charles Sharpton Sr.

Mother:

Ada (née Richards)

Spouse:

Kathy Jordan

Spouse:

Marsha Tinsley

Daughter:

Dominique

( July 31, 1986)

Daughter:

Ashley

( September 1987 )

References

• Al Sharpton: Civil Rights Leader (Black Americans of Achievement)