Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Alfred Charles "Al" Sharpton was born October 3, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York. A social and political activist and religious leader who also hails claim to being the President of the National Action Network also known as NAN.
Al Sharpton began his ministry at the tender age of four, preaching his first sermon at Washington Temple Church of God & Christ in Brooklyn. Just five years later, the Washington Temple church’s legendary Bishop F.D. Washington licensed Al Sharpton, his protégé, to be a Pentecostal minister.
Rev. Sharpton’s civil rights career began almost as early as his ministry. At thirteen, Revs. Jesse Jackson and William Jones appointed Sharpton youth director of New York’s SCLC Operation Breadbasket, an organization founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1971.
SCLC Operation Breadbasket sought to encourage diversity in the workplace by applying social and economic pressure on businesses. In 1969, Sharpton became the youth director for the program and participated in protests against the A&P supermarket chain in the early 1970s. He went on to establish his own organization, the National Youth Movement (NYM) at the age of sixteen.
National Youth Movement, organized young people around the country to push for increased voter registration, cultural awareness and job training programs. From 1994 to 1998, Rev. Sharpton also served as the Director of the Ministers Division for the National Rainbow Push coalition under Rev. Jackson.
Early in his career, Rev. Sharpton set out to stoke the fire of the civil rights movement as “the voice of the downtrodden”, leading marches and rallies to call the public and the media’s attention to racial injustices. As a result NAN came into place.
Rev. Sharpton is the founder and President of the National Action Network (NAN), a not-for-profit, civil rights organization based in Harlem, New York with over 45 chapters nationwide. He is a leader with many issues near and dear to his heart. The issue of education and the fight to ensure that America brings equity to an educational system that, 54 years since Brown v. Board of Education, continues to fail its highest-need student’s wholes the heaviest with him.
Rev. Sharpton’s strong commitment to equality and progressive politics has had an irrefutable impact on national politics.