His behavior particularly alienated two young professors who helped coordinate the event. James L. Taylor, an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, drove Sharpton across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and said his guest barely responded as he tried to describe the social and economic malaise confronting poor Bay Area communities.
"People like Al Sharpton tragically disappoint you," said Taylor, who is thinking of backing Dean. "You think they can come out and represent the people, but instead of using their position for the people, they seem to use it for themselves."
Sharpton became angry on being told last week of the complaints. He said he left the Oakland event quickly because he had to attend a meeting with antiwar protesters in San Francisco. And he said he had been specifically asked not to make political appeals to the group, which might threaten its nonprofit status. Sharpton said that after a career of being chided as being too political, he was perplexed to now hear that he had not been political enough.
"This all sounds very trivial to me," Sharpton said.
He and his campaign say there have been no shortage of instances when he has brought comfort and inspiration to people he's met.
Indeed, on a warm Saturday in South Carolina this month, Sharpton drove down a narrow country highway -- dotted with the occasional Confederate flag and fluffy white remnants of the cotton harvest -- to console the family of Army Spc. Darius T. Jennings. Inside a packed high school gymnasium, Sharpton eulogized the 22-year-old soldier, killed when his helicopter was shot down in Iraq.
"Everybody loved the service," Elaine Johnson, Jennings' mother, said later. "People are still talking about it. Young children are talking. It gave them some direction in their life."
African American audiences like the one at the service in Cordova, S.C., welcome Sharpton like a visiting celebrity. No one seems to talk about his past, or Tawana Brawley, the black teenager who claimed in 1987 that she was raped by six white men. Sharpton was an advisor to the girl.
Sharpton remains unapologetic about his support of the 15-year-old, despite a grand jury's ruling that the case was a hoax and despite his payment of a $65,000 judgment for defamation -- falsely accusing a New York prosecutor of participating in the alleged attack. "We believed her story and represent her story and still do," Sharpton told moderator Tom Brokaw during a televised debate in Iowa on Monday. "I've never [advocated] a case that everybody believed in and everybody agreed with. And I'm willing to pay the penalty for what I believe."
