Today's Birthdays

one click shows all of today's celebrity birthdays

Browse All Birthdays

43,625    Actors
27,931    Actresses
4,867    Composers
7,058    Directors
842    Footballers
221    Racing drivers
925    Singers
9,111    Writers

Get FamousLikeMe on your website
One line of code gets FamousLikeMe on your website. Find out more.

Subscribe to Daily updates


Add to Google

privacy policy



Famous Like Me > Actor > S > Al Sharpton

Profile of Al Sharpton on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Al Sharpton  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 3rd October 1954
   
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
 The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see discussion on the talk page.
Reverend Al Sharpton

The Reverend Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. (born October 3, 1954) is an American politician, minister, and civil rights activist. A Pentecostal, Sharpton was the first major black presidential candidate of the 21st century to run for the Democratic Party nomination, doing so in 2004.

Early years

Al Sharpton was born in 1954 to a middle-class family in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a boxer and landlord, owning several buildings in Brooklyn. Until the age of ten, Al lived a comfortable life in a ten-room house in Queens. He preached his first sermon at the age of four, and soon became famous in Brooklyn as the "wonderboy preacher," even touring with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. By the age of nine, he was a fully ordained minister.

In 1963, his parents separated. Sharpton recalls in a 2002 interview "My daddy walked out on us, and he married my half-sister, Tina. Tina was my mother's daughter from a previous marriage." Al's mother took a job as a maid, and went on welfare; the family moved from their middle-class home in Queens to the projects in Brownsville.

Sharpton's first attempts at protest were in high school, where the minister protested cafeteria food and the dress code. In 1969 he was appointed as youth director of Operation Breadbasket by Jesse Jackson, a group that focused on the promotion of new and better jobs for black Americans through negotiations and community-wide boycotts. He has also spoken out against cruelty to animals in a video recorded for People for The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

In the 1970s after two years at Brooklyn College, Sharpton dropped out to be a tour manager for James Brown, where he met his future wife, Kathy Jordan, a backup singer for James Brown. Sharpton and Jordan married in 1983. In 1971 Sharpton founded the National Youth Movement to fight drugs and raise money for impoverished youth.

Later years

In June 2005, Sharpton signed a contract with Matrix Media, Incorporated, to produce and host a live two-hour daily talk program for the EBN Radio Network. The program will debut in August 2005.

Candidacies

Sharpton has run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate seat from New York in 1988, 1992, and 1994. In 1997 he ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City. Some have criticized Sharpton for only running races he knows he can't win while shunning those he could. He has never held elected office.

On January 5, 2003 Sharpton announced his candidacy for the 2004 presidential election as a member of the Democratic Party. Precisely one year later, days before the Iowa caucus, reports of connection between Sharpton's campaign management and entrenched Republican Party organizers surfaced.

Sharpton has been critical of the news media, charging it with ignoring his campaign due to deep-seated racial prejudice.

Sharpton's platform includes 10 key issues:

  • Increase voter registration.
  • Increase political consciousness and awareness.
  • Stimulate more people to get involved in the political process.
  • Raise issues that would otherwise be overlooked—for example, affirmative action and anti-death penalty policy.
  • Strengthen our national security by fighting for human rights, the rule of law, and economic justice at home and abroad.
  • Fight to ensure women's rights.
  • Deliver Universal Health Care for the nation, not hidden benefits to the health care industry.
  • Provide a solution to the current educational crisis in the nation caused by Bush.
  • Help working people by giving them the biggest tax cuts - not the rich.
  • Fulfill American democracy by supporting voting rights or statehood for the 600,000 disenfranchised citizens of the District of Columbia.

On March 15, 2004, Sharpton announced his endorsement of leading Democratic candidate John Kerry. However, Sharpton did not withdraw from the race, continuing instead to campaign and striving to win delegates for the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Controversy

Rev. Al Sharpton at protest rally againt NYPD

Critics of Sharpton accuse him of being a profiteering racial agitator, as evidenced by the Tawana Brawley hoax, and Hurricane Katrina accusations, inserting himself into instances of racial tension in order to increase his own popularity, often making situations more tense.

However, to his supporters Sharpton is a loyal defender of the under-represented poor and disenfranchised who has been supporting his community for 30 years.

Tawana Brawley

In the Tawana Brawley case, a 15-year-old black girl was found smeared with feces, lying in a garbage bag, her clothing torn and burned and with various slurs and epithets written on her body in charcoal. Brawley claimed that she had been assaulted and raped by six white men, some of them police officers, on November 28, 1987 in the town of Wappingers Falls, New York.

The FBI was called in, and Brawley was questioned about what had happened. She claimed she had been raped by unidentified white men. When a rape test came back negative, she changed her story, saying that she hadn't been raped, but had been sexually abused. Further examinations revealed that Brawley had received no real injuries, nor did she show signs of exposure. Testimony from her schoolmates also indicated that she had been at a local party during the time of her supposed abduction.

The incident made headlines nationwide, and her cause was taken up by Sharpton, along with Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason. The three turned the incident into a media sensation, and began making outrageous statements. For instance, they identified New York prosecutor Steven Pagones as one of the men involved, despite the lack of any evidence to this, and they likewise attempted to implicate higher officials in the State government.

Accusations flew in both directions; an ex-boyfriend of Brawley's told Newsday that Brawley had made the attack up, and admitted so to him. A grand jury was convened, and after seven months of examining police and medical records, the jury determined that Brawley's assault was a hoax.

The reason Brawley faked the attack is not known for sure, but the most likely explanation is that Brawley, who skipped school to visit her incarcerated boyfriend the day of her disappearance, staged the abduction to avoid punishment from her stepfather.

In 1998 Pagones was awarded $150 million in a suit for a defamation of character that he brought against Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason.

Alleged bigotry

It is alleged that Sharpton throughout his political career has called whites "crackers" and Jews "diamond merchants," "white interlopers," and "bloodsucking Jews." Sharpton's criticism of black Marxists extended to them carrying "that German cracker's book under their arms."

It is also alleged that after calling a Jewish shopkeeper a "white interloper," he looked on while an associate of his suggested the Jew's shop should be burned down. When a black member of the crowd did so, killing several including himself, Sharpton initially denied having been present. When confronted with a video tape showing his presence, he said: "What's wrong with denouncing white interlopers?" Other such controversies center on purported offenses by Jews against black Americans, although in one case it is alleged he verbally attacked Korean shopkeepers.

Celebrity status

Because of his demeanor and personality, Sharpton has become something of a minor celebrity and has been featured in many movies and television shows. He had cameo appearances in the movies Cold Feet, Bamboozled and Mr. Deeds and in episodes of the television shows New York Undercover, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Girlfriends, My Wife and Kids, and Boston Legal. He also hosted the original Spike TV reality television show, I Hate My Job. He also played a small role in the Spike Lee movie, Malcolm X. He was recently a guest on Weekends at the DL on Comedy Central.

Quotes

Al Sharpton giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston

"I mean, Dwight Eisenhower was never elected to anything before he was elected president.... In a time that we no longer have a Cold War, there is no real threat to American security."
— on Fox News August 2001 (a month prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks)

"Now that they have achieved the capture of Hussein, they should appeal to the UN to come in with a multilateral redevelopment plan. This is all the more reason this war should come to an immediate end."

"I believe something happened to Tawana Brawley.... I think it is absurd that someone would say that a 15-year-old girl could have made all that up, including fooling a hospital."
— regarding the 1987 Tawana Brawley scandal, later shown to be a hoax

"Who defines terrorists? Today's terrorist is tomorrow's friend. We were the ones that worked with Saddam Hussein. The United States worked with bin Laden."

"That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres.

We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us."
— Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention referring to the slave compensation commonly known as 40 acres and a mule.

"But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody."
— Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention

"I suggest to you tonight that if George Bush had selected the [Supreme] court in '54, Clarence Thomas would have never got to law school."


—Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention

"Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
—To Vicente Fox, President of Mexico, after remarks Fox made that seemed to disparage African Americans

Works

  • Sharpton, Al, Go and Tell Pharaoh (hardcover), Doubleday, 1996. ISBN 0385475837
  • Sharpton, Al, Al on America (hardcover), Dafina Books, 2002. ISBN 0758203500
  • Sharpton, Al, Al on America (paperback), Dafina Books, 2003. ISBN 0758203519

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Al Sharpton