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By Ron Howell, author of “King Al: How Sharpton Took the Throne” (Fordham University Press, 2021)
In the long and painful history of Black people in America, one man -- still among us -- stands out for boldness and drama in rising to the top against all expectations.
Renowned Black theologian/historian Dr. Cornel West put it this way:
“Brother (Al) Sharpton is a unique figure in American history, a figure who brings together so many different elements . . . He has unbelievable energy and vitality and consistency in regard to being there at all the critical times,” told me in an interview for my recent book "King Al: How Sharpton Took the Throne."
“Critical times" refers to life and death moments, which for Black Americans has extended from centuries of slavery into the present.
Using his popular MSNBC PoliticsNation show as a podium over the past decade, Sharpton has displayed an association with “critical times” that has identified him for four decades: Race-related killings of Blacks.
On the evening of Feb. 5 -- the first week of Black History Month -- Sharpton featured Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, father and mother respectively of the late Trayvon Martin.
That was poetic.
It was during Black History Month one decade ago, on Feb. 26, 2012, that a white Latino named George Zimmerman took advantage of Florida's Stand Your Ground law and killed 17-year-old Trayvon. Zimmerman was a civilian watchman for his gated community in Sanford, Fl., and Martin was walking to the nearby home of relatives. Zimmerman stopped and questioned Trayvon, who had no criminal record and was unarmed, and then tussled with him and shot him. Zimmerman was acquitted in what most Blacks considered a cold-blooded murder. (The Stand Your Ground law, which has been called racist by many, says a person can use deadly force against another when feeling threatened.)
The Trayvon Martin killing is generally acknowledged as the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Sharpton was there, front and center, for the protests that displayed outrage at what happened to Trayvon. It was during that time that Sharpton began partnering with Ben Crump, the Florida lawyer that Sharpton soon began calling the Attorney General for Black America. (It should be pointed out, however, that while an attorney general is tasked with prosecuting cases, Crump has been heavily involved in civil suits seeking money damages for offenses.) 
Over the ten years since Trayvon Martin’s death, Crump has been side by side with Sharpton, as Sharpton has led demonstrations and given eulogies following racially charged killings of numerous other Blacks.
[caption: AP photo of Sharptron, Crump, and the parents of Trayvon Martin.]
Perhaps the crisis that came to define Black mass protesting was the killing of George Floyd, captured on video for the world to see. On May 25, 2020, Floyd lay on a street in Minneapolis as white police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd's neck, Floyd pleading for help, calling out his dead mother's name, saying he couldn't breathe, all as Chauvin stared dismissively at the camera filming him. Millions have called it a modern-day lynching.
After Floyd's death, Sharpton gave eulogies for Floyd around the country. With his seemingly natural eloquence -- nourished by early years as the "boy preacher" at his family’s Washington Temple Church of God in Christ in Central Brooklyn -- he in effect resurrected George Floyd, who will live long in the minds of justice seekers in America.
Sharpton's "Get Your Knee Off Our Necks" March on Washington in August of 2020 drew tens of thousands of mask-wearing protesters to the Lincoln Memorial.
[caption: AP photo of Sharpton at "Get Your Knee Off Our Necks" rally, Aug. 2020.]
It could reasonably be said that Sharpton, more than anyone else, was responsible for the conviction last year of Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd and of Chauvin's sentence of two decades in prison. That was like the fulfillment of a dream for many injustice-weary Blacks.
And that dream was made all the more real on Feb. 22, when a federal jury found that three white men guilty of a hate crime when they murdered Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who had been jogging through their Georgia neighborhood.
Last year Sharpton had led protests outside the courthouse where the three men had been on trial on state charges; and his televised denunciations clearly raised the PR stakes for the white prosecutor and judge in that case, which had also ended with convictions.
“No one would have thought, going back to the ’80s, that he (Sharpton) would ascend to the heights where he is today,” scholar/theologian West told me.
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Oh the ‘80s.
Back then, the biggest weight keeping Sharpton from the heights where he is today (apart from his torso, which was double the size it is today) was the white press, especially the New York City tabloids. I know a bit about this because I was myself a tabloid scribe, albeit a Black one, having reported for Newsday (which then was published in New York City and not just Long Island as now).
The 1980s controversy that brought me to Al Sharpton was the 1988 blockbuster New York Newsday story revealing he had been working as an informant with the FBI. I was with the foreign desk of Newsday at the time. In 1987 I had gone to Cuba and interviewed Assata Shakur, previously known as Joanne Chesimard, who had been convicted in the 1973 killing of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. In 1979 she escaped from prison and soon was at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Her whereabouts were unknown until I interviewed her in Cuba and wrote a Newsday story “On the Run with Assata Shakur.”
After I returned to New York -- following the revelations of Sharpton’s work with the FBI – some associates of Shakur reached out to me and said Sharpton had suspiciously approached them in the early 1980s trying to learn Shakur’s whereabouts. They asserted their belief that Sharpton was trying to get that information and turn it over to the feds. Sharpton denied to me that he was trying to locate and turn over Shakur, but some of those Black “revolutionaries” remain untrusting of Sharpton to this day.
In the minds of many, it was not the FBI story, but rather the Tawana Brawley story, that stood out as Sharpton’s biggest controversy of the 1980s.
Brawley, then 15 years old, was found in a trash bag in near her home in Wappingers Falls, New York. Feces covered her body. Racist scribblings were said to have been scribbled on her body. The Brawley family maintained a group of white men had assaulted her.
Turning up the volume of protests to an ear-burning level was Al Sharpton. He showed a quick wit, a born ability to extemporize, an ease with spouted alliterations, and a damn-you toughness as he aimed verbal bullets at asserted malfeasors. Partnering with Black attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, Sharpton claimed there was evidence that a cult of white racist law enforcement officers had carried out the attack on Tawana Brawley. 
But later investigative reporting by Newsday columnist/editor Les Payne, now deceased, showed that Tawana Brawley had made up the assertion of kidnapping and rape because she believed her stepfather, Ralph King, who had previously served in jail for the murder of his former significant other, would have been angry with her for returning home so late.
[caption: AP photo of Sharpton with Tawana Brawley in 1988.]
Sharpton, Maddox and Mason in 1998 were ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for having defamed one of the alleged white assaulters. That was former Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones.
Over the coming months, and even years, Sharpton has hemmed and hawed when asked to explain his behavior during that time. (The incident is outlined in the “King Al”, Chapter 2, “Les Payne Sounds the Death Knell on the Tawana Brawley Story.”
Sharpton was in those days a treasure for white newspaper photographers, with his slicked-up James Brown pompadour and don’t-give-a-damn jogging suits around his then 300-pound frame.
But even back then, Sharpton had widespread Black support as he led protests against fatal attacks on Black men by police or white civilian racists.
There was the 1986 killing of Michael Griffith, the 23-year-old Black man who was who was killed in a racially motivated attack in the Howard Beach section of Queens. Griffith was trying to flee and was run over and killed by a car on the nearby highway.
There was the 1989 killing of Yusuf Hawkins, 16, who was in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn with his brother, when a gang of whites went after them with baseball bats and one of the whites pulled out a handgun and shot Yusuf, killing him.
Sharpton had organized one protest march after another, taking busloads of Blacks and sympathizers to Bensonhurst for rallies. At a protest on Jan. 12, 1991, a neighborhood resident, Michael Riccardi, stabbed Sharpton in the stomach and was convicted and then sentenced to five to 15 years in prison. He was released in 2003.
For Sharpton, 1991 was life-altering in another way. It was the year he started the National Action Network, which over the next three decades would become his source of local and national political power and influence. And one guy in particular now stands out among those there during the 1990s, supporting NAN’s asserted fights for racial fairness in policing. That was the politic officer turned politician named Eric Adams.
[caption: AP photo of Sharpton being wheeled by hospital staff after his 1991 stabbing.]
Last Nov. 2, at Carnegie Hall, Sharpton and scores of powerful politicians and activists from New City, New York State and the country celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of NAN. (They also feted Sharpton’s 67th birthday.) Vice President Kamala Harris gave the opening address. Showing up as a special guest was Eric Adams, who was greeted with enthusiasm. It transpired on the very evening of the election that Adams won, making him New York City’s first Black mayor since the late David Dinkins.
Many 1980s tabloid reporters, living and deceased, were surely saying to themselves, “Can you friggin’ believe this?
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Indeed, many New Yorkers, not just old-time reporters, were astounded at the left trajectory of the Rev. Al Sharpton. And a good number of one-time naysayers became Sharpton converts.
“There’s no Black in America now who’s more significant than he is. . . Some question things he’s done in the past, but those are mistakes that so many, the best and most well intentioned, make; and the important thing is keeping our character sincere and being upright. He stood next to Barack Obama during Obama’s time in office and he [Sharpton] rose from the ground levels of Brooklyn to the highest seats in the United States of America.”
Those were the words of one of Black Brooklyn political pioneers, Waldaba Stewart, who was elected to the New York State Senate in 1968 and then became a professor at Medgar Evers College. Stewart saw and heard Sharpton fist-pumping and speechifying at events in Central Brooklyn half a century ago, when Sharpton was a teenager. Stewart was skeptical then, but Sharpton in recent years won him over.
Stewart spoke to me in 2020 as I was writing book “King Al.” He died on New Year’s Day of this year, at the age of 85.
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