Al Sharpton

Fun Fact: From 1973 to 1980 Sharpton worked as soul legend James Brown’s tour manager.

Claim to Fame: In 1985, Sharpton organized protests in the Bernard Goetz case where a white Subway rider shot four black kids out of fear of being robbed.

Alfred Charles "Al" Sharpton, Jr. is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and radio talk show host. In 2004, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election. He hosts his own radio talk show, Keepin? It Real, and he makes regular guest appearances on Fox News CNN, and MSNBC.

Sharpton's supporters praise "his ability and willingness to defy the power structure that is seen as the cause of their suffering" and consider him "a man who is willing to tell it like it is".

His critics describe him as "a political radical who is to blame, in part, for the deterioration of race relations". Sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to him as a racial arsonist, while liberal columnist Derrick Z. Jackson has called him the black equivalent of Richard Nixon and Pat Robertson. He preached his first sermon at the age of four and toured with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

In 1963, Sharpton's father left his wife to have a relationship with Sharpton's half-sister. Ada Sharpton took a job as a maid, but her income was so low that the family qualified for welfare and had to move from middle class Hollis, Queens, to the public housing projects in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Sharpton graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, and attended Brooklyn College, dropping out after two years in 1975. He became a tour manager for James Brown in 1971, where he met his future wife, Kathy Jordan, who was a backup singer. Sharpton and Jordan married in 1980. The couple separated in 2004.

Sharpton was licensed and ordained a Pentecostal minister by Bishop F.D. Washington at the age of nine or ten. After Bishop Washington's death in the late 1980s, Sharpton became a Baptist. He was re-baptized as a member of the Bethany Baptist Church in 1994 by the Reverend William Jones and became a Baptist minister.

During 2007, Sharpton participated in a public debate with Christopher Hitchens, who is an atheist, and Sharpton defended his religious faith and his belief in the existence of God.

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