Who is Al Sharpton?
An Overview Al Sharpton is a distinct occupational type: the black civil-rights leader. Like past and present figures such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond, Sharpton’s job is to press grievances on behalf of his people. The inevitable frame of reference is black victimization at the hands of whites. This frame, in a contemporary context, is a distortion of reality. Systematic denial of rights to blacks, in the South or anywhere else in America, is a decades-old relic. Since the mid 1960s, blacks in no meaningful sense can claim they have been relegated to pariah status, a fact in large measure owing to generally tolerant white attitudes.5 Moreover, white victimization at the hands of blacks is also real—and indeed much worse, using crime rates as a basis.6 Most black civil-rights leaders are fully aware of this. But they know that to retain their political credibility (especially to their black audiences), they
The Rev. Al Sharpton says he became an activist very young. When he was a child, his parents separated. His mother was left with no money. She and her two children were forced to move into a much poorer neighborhood. It was his firsthand experience with a lack of public services as a child, the Democratic presidential candidate says, that led him toward political activism. “I was outraged they didn’t pick up the garbage on time or that you would call for an ambulance, and it wouldn’t come for another hour. Or you’d call for the police, they didn’t come. Because I had lived in a neighborhood where I knew they picked up the garbage every day. And the police did come, and the ambulance did come.” “The difference gave me a sense of outrage that probably fueled me at 12 or 13 to join the civil rights movement,” he said. “Because I knew people were being treated unfairly, ’cause I had directly lived it.” Mentors and Father Figures He learned about manhood, he says, from several men. One was
