Sharpton group welcomed
[color="SlateGray"]Activist joins forces with local leaders

By Megan Twohey | Tribune staff reporter
10:49 PM CDT, August 1, 2007

With a splash typical of the outspoken New York activist, Rev. Al Sharpton arrived in Chicago on Wednesday, saying he is here to fight police brutality and offensive music lyrics.

And at least publicly, many local activists who have long campaigned against excesses in the Chicago Police Department say they welcome Sharpton and the bright spotlight that follows him.

"For the local activists like us who have no name recognition or high profile, it's often an uphill battle," said Rev. Ira Acree, the pastor of Greater St. John Bible Church in Austin who is also a leader of clergy fighting for police accountability. "With more pressure, with someone with higher status, more can happen."

Sharpton, who has generated national headlines for fighting police misconduct, created a buzz when he announced the launch of a Chicago chapter of his National Action Network. Some activists have questioned whether the city is big enough for both Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson, the city's most prominent civil rights leader.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070801sharpton,1,3165277.story

Ol' Al "Diamond Merchants" Sharpton is still at it I see! :krofl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Sharpton#Accusations_of_racism_and_homophobia "Sharpton was quoted as saying to an audience at Kean College in 1994 that, “White folks was in caves while we was building empires ... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” Sharpton defended his comments by noting that the term “homo” was not homophobic but added that he no longer uses the term."

It would have taken no great effort for the reporters covering the Apollo debate to have walked across 125th Street from the theater to visit Freddy's Fashion Mart, where in 1995 eight people died in a murderous rampage inspired by Mr. Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton is best-known for the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he insisted that a 15-year-old black girl had been abducted and raped by a band of white men practicing Irish Republican Army rituals. In fact she had made up the story to protect herself from her violent stepfather. But at Freddy's, Mr. Sharpton was even more malevolent. He turned a landlord-tenant dispute between the Jewish owner of Freddy's and a black subtenant into a theater of hatred. Picketers from Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, sometimes joined by "the Rev." himself, marched daily outside the store, screaming about "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards" and threatening to burn the building down. After weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, took Mr. Sharpton's words about ousting the "white interloper" to heart. He ran into the store shouting, "It's on!" He shot and wounded three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew. Then he set the fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one African-American--a security guard whom protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover." Smith then fatally shot himself.
http://www.nationalreview.com/20Mar00/nordlinger032000.html adds, There was more, of course-always more. In the spring of 1989, the Central Park “wilding” occurred. That was the monstrous rape and beating of a young white woman, known to most of the world as “the jogger.” The hatred heaped on her by Sharpton and his claque is almost impossible to fathom, and wrenching to review. ...Outside the courthouse, they [Sharpton and his entourage] chanted, “The boyfriend did it! The boyfriend did it!” They denounced the victim as “Whore!” They screamed her name, over and over (because most publications refused to print it, though several black-owned ones did). Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the trial one day, to show her, he said, the difference between white justice and black justice. He arranged for her to meet the jogger’s attackers, whom she greeted with comradely warmth. In another of his publicity stunts, he appealed for a psychiatrist to examine the victim. “It doesn’t even have to be a black psychiatrist,” he said, generously. He added: “We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl — if there was this damage.” ...But the torching, so to speak, continued. In 1995-four years into the putative New Sharpton-there was another, fatal case in which Sharpton had a guilty hand: Freddy’s Fashion Mart. In Harlem, a white store owner — no, worse: a Jewish one — was accused of driving a black store owner out of business. At one of the many rallies meant to scare the Jewish owner away [can anyone say, "burning crosses meant to scare the Negro owner away?"], Sharpton charged that “there is a systemic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business off 125th Street. I want to make it clear . . . that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s colleague, Morris Powell, said of the Jewish owner — Sharpton’s “white interloper” — “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it.”

-Jim