In August 2014, a white police officer shot Michael Brown, a black 18-year old in Ferguson, Missouri, triggering nationwide protests and riots. Ironically, President Obama’s point man from the start was Reverend Al Sharpton, a native New Yorker whose entire career has been about fomenting discord and lawlessness under the guise of black “civil rights.” Sharpton, unapologetically, has been at this for decades. Unfortunately, he has many supporters. And they include people wealthy and smart enough to know better. Only weeks after the Ferguson shooting, Sharpton was feted with a 60th birthday dinner at a swank Manhattan restaurant. Most of the New York political establishment was there, along with singer Aretha Franklin. Big corporations like Walmart, Verizon, and McDonald’s underwrote the party.
How did this street hustler attain this kind of power and respectability? The answers lie within these pages.
Timing is everything. And in this 330-page book, longtime Sharpton watcher and critic Carl F. Horowitz could not be more timely.
The cold-blooded murder of two New York City police officers followed weeks of Sharpton’s vilification of law enforcement. The controversial minister and activist now finds himself front and center, a position he has always sought, but in a way he did not plan.
Horowitz not only explodes the myths about Sharpton by carefully documenting his past, but indicts a political culture that made possible his spectacular rise.
Horowitz is a staff director of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a group that has exposed political corruption since 1991. Through a series of NLPC-filed Complaints to the Federal Election Commission, Sharpton has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
