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Mr. Sharpton is many things to many people a freedom fighter, a boogeyman, a racial opportunist, an aging man just hanging on. But he has used his entire career to tell America a story about itself that it does not want to hear: that racism exists today, and is pervasive outside of the Deep South. And he has worked ceaselessly toward two intertwined, impossible goals. First, the demand for equal rights for all. The second is about securing his legacy as the Martin Luther King of the North.

What I want it to be is I helped urbanize the King movement, Mr. Sharpton said. I was the one that could bring the King movement into the Northern, urban centers. But where Dr. Kings activism led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Mr. Sharptons efforts havent amounted to national reform.

Mr. Sharpton, 63, figured hed be retired by now. He thought hed keep his Sunday-morning MSNBC program, PoliticsNation, and his daily radio show, Keepin It Real. He said he was ready to name a successor to his civil rights organization, the National Action Network, and the marching, strategizing and agitating that came with it. All that was left to do was build a civil rights museum in Harlem. But riding off into a life of punditry isnt an option with Mr. Trump in office. Mr. Sharpton said he and his allies thought they were poised to help a President Hillary Clinton pass national police reform legislation. His mission is now different, and more modest.

Youve got to preserve what youve got done, he said. It will not matter if he revokes the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act of Dr. King. You need to preserve the racial profiling laws, and police reform like stop and frisk, he continued. Otherwise, itll be a bygone era.

Now 133 pounds, Mr. Sharpton is less than half the man he was for much of his life. A morning salad and banana serve as his only real sustenance for the day, and in my time with him, he drank nothing but green tea not even water. His flamboyant conk is now steely gray, slicked back over his thinning crown. Hes quick to joke, but he rarely laughs. He has long since replaced his sweats with bespoke suits.

But the new Al Sharpton is the same person he always was.

Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. was born in 1954 to a middle-class family who had a house in a nice neighborhood in Queens. At 4, before he even knew how to read, young Al began preaching, and often practiced at home in his mothers robe. When he was just a boy, his mother connected Al with two pastors, Bishop F.D. Washington and the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. They called him Boy Wonder, and he toured the country preaching before he was even a teenager. In 1967, Dr. Jones introduced the young preacher to a 26-year-old civil-rights activist named Jesse Jackson. Mr. Jackson took him under his wing, and Al decided he wanted to spend his life like the men who looked after him, fighting for civil rights in the prophetic tradition of Dr. King, who was assassinated when Mr. Sharpton was 13.

In 1971, when he was 16, Mr. Sharpton founded his first civil rights organization, the National Youth Movement, with money from Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. He met James Brown, who adopted him as his godson in 1973; for most of the next decade, Mr. Sharpton was always at the singers side. If Jesse Jackson taught Mr. Sharpton how to organize, it was James Brown who taught him how to perform.

I would watch what moves and what songs excited people, and I would take notes, Mr. Sharpton told me. Because youve got to keep peoples attention.

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Al Sharpton, Reconsidered - The New York Times