Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954, the Reverend Alfred "Al" Sharpton has been
preaching since age four. He was licensed and ordained at age nine. In 1971, he
founded the National Youth Movement and for seventeen years led the
organization, registering young people to vote and giving them job
opportunities. His direct-action and civil disobedience campaigns have brought
attention to injustice in many areas.
Sharpton has pursued other interests while continuing to preach: in his teens,
he established a close bond with James Brown and developed a father-son
relationship, eventually recording the record God Smiled on Me with him. In the
1970s and early 1980s, he worked as a youth organizer with boxing promoter Don
King while learning more about African American politics and entertainment.
However, Sharpton never strayed far from activism. He formed the National
Action Network in 1991 to fight for progressive, popular-based social policies
by providing extensive voter education and registration campaigns, economic
support for small community businesses, and by confronting corporate racism.
That same year, Sharpton was stabbed in a Bensonhurst schoolyard. This
represented a turning point for him. Eventually, he met and reconciled with his
attacker.
Sharpton has never hesitated to act in support of African Americans, from
candidates for public office to Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant brutalized by
Brooklyn police in 1997. Now he is also seeking to build a national
multicultural, multiracial movement addressing a range of issues. To that end,
in 1999 Sharpton, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch and Harvard Law School
professor Charles Ogletree formed Second Chance, a program to serve nonviolent
felony offenders after their release from prison. Sharpton also orchestrated a
massive protest when police shot unarmed Amadou Diallo 41 times in 1999. In
2001, Sharpton protested the U.S. Navy's bombing of the Puerto Rican island of
Vieques. Attempting to fight injustice wherever he finds it, Sharpton is
following in the footsteps of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
Reverend Jesse Jackson.
