Sunday, December 14, 2003

By Dennis B. Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

NEW YORK -- After church on Sundays, little Alfred Sharpton Jr. had a routine. He would slip into his mother's bathrobe, line his sister's dolls along the edge of a bed and preach to them.

"My father would be irate, 'Stop him!' And my mother said, 'It's something he's compelled to do. Let's see where it goes,' " Sharpton said.

John Heller, Post-Gazette Al Sharpton Age: 49. Political experience: Failed to win Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1992 and 1994 and for mayor of New York in 1997. Education: Aattended Brooklyn College for two years. Profession: Baptist minister. Marital status: Married Kathy Lee Jordan, former backup singer for James Brown, in 1983. Children: Dominique, 17, and Ashley, 16. Money raised: $283,529 (Oct. 15 report). Rank in fund raising: Last, behind former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun. Biggest contributors: Officials, employees of Radio One network, totaling $13,200. Signature issues: Would withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, eliminate Bush tax cuts and spend $250 billion on public works projects. Quote: "Instead of the Christian Right, we need the right Christians." Website: www.sharpton2004.org Click photo for larger image. Index to all Democratic candidate profiles

It went straight into the office of Bishop Frederick Douglass Washington of the Washington Temple Church in Brooklyn. At the age of 10, Al Sharpton was ordained a Pentecostal minister. In gospel circles he was called "The Wonderboy," and traveled the preaching circuit around the East.

Sharpton spent Sunday afternoons in Washington's church study, where the pastor underlined passages in theological texts. Sharpton mimicked the older man, underscoring paragraphs in books he didn't yet comprehend.

"I liked that style," Sharpton said. "Here was a guy who had just finished energizing and mesmerizing 1,500 people on Sunday morning. Now he's in a quiet, sedate office, reading and studying and underlining. The contrast just struck me as something that was very attractive to me."

Forty years later, decked out in a tailored suit, gold links setting off monogrammed French cuffs, Al Sharpton is counting on style and contrast as he vies for the presidency. By his own admission, he is part showman, part statesman -- a candidate in love with hyperbole, and equally quick to hunt out pulpits or TV cameras.

Sharpton's candidacy has certainly enlivened the Democratic primary debates. His lines skewering George W. Bush draw the loudest applause from Democratic partisans. But if his politics are impolitic, it could be because no other candidate learned political theater from Adam Clayton Powell and personal grooming from James Brown. Both men have been surrogate fathers to Sharpton, whose own dad walked out on the family when Al was nine.

Sharpton knows, too, that he has brought some mighty baggage to the contest. If he is the only candidate who always generates enthusiasm, he is also the only candidate jailed for trespass, convicted of failing to file his state income tax return and defeated in a defamation lawsuit -- losing to a onetime prosecutor he accused, absent any evidence, of raping a girl named Tawana Brawley.

Sharpton has been blamed for sharpening racial divisions in New York, as well, stoking passions to a level some blame for the 1995 shootings and arson at Freddy's Fashion Mart, a white-owned Harlem shop whose owners Sharpton had blasted as "white interlopers" during months of incendiary picketing outside the store.

Sharpton can inflame race relations one moment and ally himself with natural enemies in the next. He can reach out in one sphere and widen divisions in another.

"I think his Christianity and his intelligence are at war with his resentments, and that every so often it's almost as if something bitter from his past reaches out and grabs him by the scruff of the neck and drags him back," said Jim Sleeper, a Yale University lecturer who has followed Sharpton's rise.

Sharpton's father, Alfred Sr., abandoned Alfred Jr. and the rest of his family after impregnating his wife's daughter by a previous marriage. The elder Sharpton moved out, casting the family into poverty. He now drives a taxi in Orlando, Fla., a vehicle witnesses say is bedecked with photos of the famous son he abandoned.

Young Sharpton brought in money with fees as a preacher. In high school, he joined in the radical ideas of the time, even once toting Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book" around, quoting its epigrams.

He spent formative years following Adam Clayton Powell, the flamboyant preacher and U.S. congressman from Harlem, and cut his organizing teeth by joining in sit-ins at corporate offices to demand the hiring of blacks.

Sharpton has been vilified, jeered, lampooned, dismissed, jailed and even stabbed, but his stature as an icon of militant activism and his polling appeal among black voters seem to assure he'll stay in the presidential race through to the Democratic Convention in late July.

Al Sharpton, former Wonderboy preacher, is now a player in national politics. If he does not become president, he expects to influence what gets discussed. With typical bravado, he predicts both.

"I definitely want to be president. I also want to shape the debate. To me it's not either-or. It's both-and," he said.

Winning attention, not stature

Ed Koch was in his first months as mayor of New York in 1978 when Sharpton led a delegation of ministers to City Hall and presented the new mayor with a huge petition they wanted him to sign.

"Can I read it first?" Koch asked. The proclamation called for $50 billion in reparations for slavery and an order for all summer jobs in the city to be set aside for black youths. Koch declined to sign.

"He said, 'Then we'll sit down. Nobody will get into your office,'" Koch said. They sat down, blocking Koch's office. Koch called a city officer and ordered him to remove the blockade.

"The cop says, 'What if they resist?' " Koch said. "I said 'Have you ever heard the word arrest? Arrest them.' "

It is hard to know which man enjoys that story more. Koch marvels at the then-24-year-old Sharpton's brass. Sharpton revels in the memory that he first wore handcuffs on order of the mayor of New York.

"He says 'I'm the one who first arrested him. I made Al Sharpton.' And we laugh about it," Sharpton said.

The men have been bitter rivals. Sharpton has called Koch a racist. Koch has called Sharpton "Al Charlatan." But they still speak.

In a 30-year career as a professional activist, Sharpton has worked with Koch on legislation, Mario Cuomo on state appointments. He has worn a wire for the FBI. One of the more startling photographs in his autobiography shows him with singer James Brown standing with the onetime segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond and the senator's Washington staff.

"He's not lacking in perseverance," said the Rev. William A. Jones, Jr., pastor of Bethany Baptist Temple in Brooklyn. "He has an audacity that is rare."

It was Jones who granted Sharpton and Tawana Brawley "sanctuary" in his church when the girl was ducking subpoenas from a state grand jury investigating her claims that she had been raped and abused by white law enforcement officers in 1987.

The Brawley case, a flashpoint in racial politics in New York in the mid-'80s, put Sharpton in the headlines daily as he essentially took charge of the publicity machine built around the 15-year-old's account. But while Sharpton got public attention, he did not necessarily enjoy public stature.

After a grand jury dismissed Brawley's claims as a fabrication, Sharpton faced three trials. He was acquitted on fraud charges, admitted to not filing state income tax in 1986 and, in the third, was called to answer for the near-destruction of a deputy prosecutor he identified as Brawley's "rapist."

Steven Pagones learned he'd been called a rapist when a reporter telephoned him in 1988.

When Pagones turned on the television, he learned that Al Sharpton was stating publicly that Brawley had fingered the young assistant prosecutor as one of the men who raped her.

No law enforcement agency believed her, Pagones was never charged, and a special grand jury later found no evidence to support Brawley's claim of being raped, beaten, smeared with dog excrement and having had racist graffiti drawn on her.

But Sharpton would not back down, especially on Pagones.

"He was going on talk show after talk show after talk show daring me to sue him," Pagones said. "I think Sharpton was so used to bullying people ... he was used to wearing people down."

Pagones, a Republican, has been unsparing in his criticism of Sharpton, who still bristles at the mention of his name.

"One of the things I think is most disingenuous about Pagones' statements is he never answers, 'Then why did Tawana identify you?' ... So his grievance is with her if he has a grievance at all," Sharpton said.

A civil jury later ordered Sharpton to pay Pagones $65,000 as his share of a four-way judgment against Sharpton, Brawley and two others in the case. Sharpton, to this day, insists he believes Brawley's story.

Tactical transformation

Some candidates have a moment around which their lives pivoted and from which some epiphany took form. For Sharpton, that day came Jan. 11, 1991, when, leading a march in the racially torn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, he stepped out of a car, got a few steps across a parking lot and felt a five-inch kitchen knife slide under his left shoulder blade.

Michael Riccardi, a 27-year-old alcoholic, later said he thought the act would make him a hero in his community, where, 17 months earlier, Yusuf Hawkins, a black youth, had been shot to death after being chased by a bat-wielding mob of young whites.

Sharpton left the hospital convinced he needed to turn down the rhetorical volume and pick his battles more selectively.

"It sobered me a lot," Sharpton said. "I said I don't have a lot of time for personal vendettas and personal attacks, just the things that made me flippant because I wanted to get a nice shot at somebody I don't like. I really have to be more substantive. That's when I decided to engage in more long-term political organizing and start running for office to help change the debate."

He ran twice for the U.S. Senate, pulling 166,000 votes of 1.2 million cast in the 1992 Democratic primary, and 187,000 of 700,000 votes cast in the 1994 primary. Political observers took notice because Sharpton, until then viewed as a marginal figure in New York politics, pulled two-thirds of the black vote and attracted some white support.

"I got a whole lot of whites to vote for me in New York City. And I think that a lot of people that I've encountered in white middle America no longer see me as a wild man," Sharpton said.

Gone were the ever-present jogging outfits. Instead, he donned crisply tailored suits, cufflinks. As a decade passed, his carefully conked hair -- still straightened in honor of James Brown -- has grown shorter. After a 90-day stint in a federal jail for sitting down on a Naval bombing field in Vieques, Puerto Rico, Sharpton emerged thinner.

During a 90-minute interview, he lunched on a single egg roll, talked domestic policy and ruminated on his transformation.

"You know I was in the Midwest last week," he said. "A lady said to me 'I support your positions, I like you, I'm even going to vote for you' -- and it was a white voter. She said, 'The only thing I hold against you is Tawana Brawley.' I said, 'Well, let me ask you a question, you held against me that I believed this stuff for a young lady? Maybe if I had fondled her and 14 other women, y'all would have made me governor of California.' "

As Sharpton spoke, an aide, Wes Wilson, rushed in to clear a statement with the candidate. A poll had just shown Sharpton with an overwhelming lead among black Democrats, and the campaign was keen to put the best spin on the good news.

It raised the obvious question of whether, as a black candidate in a nine-person field, Sharpton could reach beyond his natural base.

"You're going to find a lot of whites, many who will never tell a pollster, that are going to support us. A lot of journalists say, 'How does Al Sharpton get the majority of the white vote?' The fact of the matter is no Democrat, including Bill Clinton, got the majority of the white vote in the last 30 or 40 years," Sharpton said.

Whether Sharpton can win the nomination as such a Democrat is questionable. His agenda -- which includes withdrawing quickly from Iraq, eliminating the Bush tax cuts and spending $250 billion on public works -- is a hard sell to moderate voters.

For the 10th time, Sharpton's cell phone announced, "You have an incoming call."

Someone was making plans for that weekend's rally against the Iraq war. As ever, Sharpton was to be a centerpiece of the street action.

Whether he can walk down Pennsylvania Avenue a year from now and into the White House remains an unlikely prospect, even for someone who began life as "Wonderboy."

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