Mayor Bloomberg – An Al ‘Sharpton Fan’?

NEW YORK, NY [CHI] — In effort to win Black votes in the coming city elections for mayor, Mike Bloomberg said that he was a fan of controversial activist and politician Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton is known in the Crown Heights Jewish community circles, as the force who riled up residents in Crown Heights during the 1991 riot. The following is a piece by Eizabeth Benjamin for the NY Daily News Blog.

Appearing at the National Action Network’s annual meeting at the Sheraton New York in midtown this afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg was full of praise for the organization’s founder, the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Bloomberg said Sharpton is a “controversial guy,” but less so than he was when the mayor first took office in 2001.

“In all fairness, Al Sharpton has been an awful lot more of a calming influence on the city and helper to the city than most people give him credit for,” the mayor said. “I don’t agree with him everything, but on balance I’ve become over the years, a Sharpton fan.”


“I met him the first time after I was elected but before I took office,” the mayor continued. “We shook hands and took pictures and that started a dialogue from then on. I’ll work with everybody, but Sharpton is a controversial guy, but he’s a very different guy, I think, today than he was back then. He understands that he has to pull people together rather than divide them, and pretty much he does.”

Bloomberg’s comments came in response to a reporter’s question about whether he supports Sharpton’s ”radical“ stance on Wall Street. (He clearly didn’t want to answer that question).

Sharpton has hardly ramped down his activism.

It was just February that he was leading protests outside of the Post for its dead-chimp cartoon (he managed to extract a rare apology in print from Rupert Murdoch). And last May, he was arrested at a ”pray in“ to protest the verdict in the Sean Bell shooting trial.

At the time, Sharpton was calling for a ”shutdown“ of the city in response to the Bell verdict, and people complied by blocking traffic, which created a headache for law enforcement. But there was no violence.

And he’s certainly come a long way from this.

Sharpton and Bloomberg have been members of a mutual admiration society for a while now. Back when the mayor was mulling an independent bid for the White House, Sharpton said he would make a ”very compelling candidate,“ and ”Ross Perot with a resume.”

This does not mean Sharpton will be endorsing the mayor for re-election any time soon. He backed Freddy Ferrer against Bloomberg in 2005, and this time around would be hard-pressed not to support Comptroller Bill Thompson, who is seeking to become the second black mayor in the city’s history.

Wayne Barrett notes, however, that Thompson does not appear on the NAN meeting’s agenda. But controversial Independence Party member Lenora Fulani, whose allies appear poised to give Bloomberg permission to run on their line yet again, is scheduled to be a panelist.

(Thanks to the DN’s Kate Lucadamo, who covered the NAN event, for the quotes).

UPDATE: A reader who was at NAN’s dinner last night said Thompson was in the house, along with Councilmembers John Liu, Eric Gioia and Bill de Blasio.