• 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

Alfred Charles Sharpton is a civil rights activist known for his racially charged, incendiary rhetoric. He currently hosts his own radio program, which airs for three hours each weekday in New York.

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 (NAN), 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 -- along with such notables as Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama -- helped organize Minister Louis Farrakhan's October 16 Million Man March.

Also 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.

In December 2007, teams of FBI agents delivered subpoenas to ten of Sharpton's close associates, ordering them to testify in a federal grand jury investigation of whether the clergyman had improperly misstated the amount of money he raised during his 2004 presidential campaign -- so as to illegally obtain federal matching funds. In addition, federal officials demanded access to Sharpton's financial records in a tax fraud probe to determine whether he had commingled funds from his nonprofit National Action Network with some of his for-profit ventures.

In March 2008, Sharpton, a strong supporter of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, stated that he was accustomed to speaking with Obama on a regular basis -- "two or three times a week." Sharpton also said that he had told Obama four months earlier, "I won't either endorse you or not endorse you. But I will tell you I can be freer not endorsing you to help you and everybody else."  According to Sharpton, Obama protested and asked for his public support: "No, no, no. I want you to endorse."

In April 2008, almost 50 major corporations plus a number of labor unions sponsored the annual conference of Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN). Among the sponsors were PepsiCo, General Motors, Wal-Mart, FedEx, Continental Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, Colgate-Palmolive, Macy's, Pfizer, and Chase. Many of these companies gave tens of thousands of dollars to NAN. Some gave six-figure amounts.

These corporate donations were part and parcel of what has become a recurring pattern: Sharpton threatens to organize black boycotts of companies on grounds that they supposedly discriminate in some way against African Americans, and those companies, in turn, try to pacify Sharpton with cash. As a June 2008 New York Post report stated:

"Terrified of negative publicity, fearful of a consumer boycott or eager to make nice with the civil-rights activist, CEOs write checks, critics say, to NAN and Sharpton -- who brandishes the buying power of African-American consumers. In some cases, they hire him as a consultant. The cash flows even as the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn has been conducting a grand-jury investigation of NAN's finances." (At the time, NAN owed the IRS some $1.9 million in payroll taxes.)

There is much evidence to support the Post's assertions. For example:

• In June 1998 Sharpton threatened to call for a consumer boycott of Pepsi, alleging that blacks were underrepresented in the company's advertising. Less than a year later, Pepsi hired Sharpton as a $25,000-per-year adviser until 2007.
• In November 2003, Sharpton threatened to lead a boycott of DaimlerChrysler over the allegedly pervasive "institutional racism" in the company's car loan practices. Within six months, Chrysler began supporting NAN's conferences.
• Also in 2003, Sharpton complained that American Honda had too few blacks in management positions. Company executives met with Sharpton, and within two months they began to sponsor NAN events. To this day, says a Honda spokesman, the company continues to pay "a modest amount" to NAN each year.
• According to one General Motors spokesman, NAN had repeatedly asked his company for contributions every year from 2000 through 2006, and GM each time had declined to pay anything. Then, in December 2006 Sharpton picketed outside GM's New York City headquarters and threatened to call a boycott to protest the carmaker's closing of an African American-owned GM dealership in the Bronx. In 2007 and 2008, General Motors made monetary donations to NAN.

"I think this is quite clearly a shakedown operation," said Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center in Virginia. "[Sharpton is] good at harassing people and making noise. CEOs give him his way because it is a lot easier than confronting him."

In April 2009, Sharpton and his NAN were fined $285,000 for having violated election rules during Sharpton's 2004 presidential bid. Sharpton's campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), illegally accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from private sources. In addition, his campaign "kept poor records of its activities and expenditures" and commingled funds with NAN. All of these activities are prohibited under the Federal Election Campaign Act.

During the 2004 campaign, Sharpton at one point had accumulated $509,188 in expenses on his American Express card. According  to the FEC, Sharpton's campaign committee only paid $121,996 toward those expenses. The remainder was paid by the NAN and two private corporations controlled by Sharpton, in violation of FEC rules.