Al Sharpton had an interview with Salon.com.

You write in your new book that Martin Luther King may have been a great man, but his example rarely helps you in New York in the 1990s. What do you mean by that, exactly?

I think Dr. King’s general principles are universal — you can use them anywhere. But the things he confronted took place in another era. You have to deal with things, certain strategic things, differently than in his time. Just like he had to deal differently than Gandhi did. I mean, he used Gandhi’s overall commitment to non-violence, and to passive resistance. But he tailored it to the American South. A march to the sea wouldn’t have done Dr. King much good.

How is this era different?

Well, I’ve had to deal with the media in ways he didn’t. I’m also dealing with different ethnic groups that King didn’t have to deal with. In the South, blacks were blacks and whites were whites. In the North, blacks are Caribbean, they’re African, they’re Dominican, they’re southern. Whites are Irish, they’re Italian, they’re Jewish. So there’s a difference — it’s not just black and white like in the South.

Do you really believe, as you write in your book, that New York city today is in some ways as bad as Missisippi in the 1950s and ’60s in terms of racial prejudice?

I think when people turned on the television, when we marched in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, and saw people holding watermelons and calling people “niggers” — they never imagined that could happen in Brooklyn. If you had taken some people, brought them in a room and showed them tapes of those marches, they would have thought it was Birmingham in ‘63, or Selma. No one would have believed it was New York. I think that’s one of the problems the media has with me — that I was able to tear the veil off racism in New York. The civil rights issues of the 1950s and ’60s never reached New York as a movement. The city sort of assumed this liberal image without ever going through the catharsis the South did.

Speaking of New York’s “liberal image,” do you think there’s a racial element to all the glowing coverage Rudy Giuliani is getting for cracking down on crime?

Sure there’s a racial element. But first of all, you need to look at the facts. The extra police that have come in were hired by [former New York mayor] David Dinkins. And how can you give Giuliani credit for community policing when he inherited it? He didn’t institute that. And the fact that you have more police brutality complaints now — even according to the police — than you’ve had in the past decade, shows that on one level crime has gone down but on another level allegations of police crime have gone up. You see the round-up of kids off the street for line-ups, and you see the increase of police brutality complaints. These things are the fault of Giuliani’s exclusionary policies and his hostility. I’ll give you an example: the fire and shooting down the block at Freddy’s. [Sharpton and others had endorsed picketing Freddy’s, a Harlem store owned by a Jewish man, whose plans to expand would have displaced a black record store. Soon afterwards a street vendor named Roland Smith burned Freddy’s down, killing eight people, including himself.) Giuliani blames that on the activists, including me, who endorsed the picket lines. With no evidence. The D.A. comes back and says there’s no evidence to support that.

And look at the Bernhard Goetz case. He’s back in court. Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney I met with, eleven years ago, to investigate Goetz because there were allegations he’d made racial remarks, and that he was unstable. Giuliani defended Goetz and refused to investigate. Now Goetz goes on civil trial, and 11 years later he admits that he did use the term “nigger,” admits he was a former angel dust user. And you don’t hear Giuliani coming out and saying anything about that. He has laryngitis about Bernhard Goetz. Imagine if a black gunman had shot four white kids and admitted, “Yeah, I called people ‘honky’” and “Yeah, I was a cocaine user.” Giuliani would be all over TV condemning this guy on a daily basis.

Your critics have accused you, in the store burning and several other of the controversies you’ve been involved in, of employing rhetoric that helps manufacture rage — rhetoric that doesn’t exactly help find common ground.

I think that’s absolutely unfair. Take Howard Beach. When you look at the fact that when we got out to Howard Beach there were hundreds of people there with watermelons, screaming “nigger.” Same at Bensonhurst and other places. How did I manufacture that? I mean, what did I do — go out and buy watermelons and pass ‘em out the night before, saying: “When I get here, call me ‘nigger?’” [Laughs] These were the feelings of the people who were already there. No one wanted to bring these feelings, these attitudes, to the forefront. So what we were doing is just what King did. How did King win in Birmingham? Well, people around the world started seeing women bitten by police dogs. People started saying, “We’ve got to do something about that.” Well, we did the same thing in New York. And one thing people never talked about, after the marches, was how we were able to take such hostility and not respond. I’ve marched 29 times, with a minimum of 500 people, through Bensonhurst, to be castigated and spat on, and not one of them ever hit back.

Your book talks at length about your unusual childhood — you were preaching at the age of four, and you were an ordained minister at age 10. How did you discover you had this calling?

I just felt the compulsion, the calling. And fortunately we had a pastor who gave me the opportunity. I just went full-steam ahead, thanks to Bishop F.D. Washington. I guess I was too young to even think about it, because he allowed me to do it and by the time I got old enough to think about it, I had already been doing it for years. I guess that’s one of the underlying themes of the book, that many people have tried to say, “He does what he does for the attention.” But I’ve never done anything else in my life other than preach and be an activist. Way before I was known. I was the youth leader of Operation Breadbasket with Jesse Jackson when I was 14.

Did you ever have time for a “normal” childhood?

No, I didn’t. One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children’s childhoods is that I’m having my first childhood myself. I try to do things with them that I didn’t get to do myself — even things like games at home and watching certain TV shows. I didn’t do that as a child.

You write that as a kid you’d watch The Ed Sullivan Show and wait for black entertainers to come on. That must have been a long wait.

Absolutely. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan. I remember seeing Nat King Cole go on — because my mother was a Cole fan — and I remember later in the ’60s seeing James Brown go on, who later became like a father to me. But I mean, those were few and far between. And Ed Sullivan was the epitome of American television at that time. And he was based in New York, so I think the exclusionary line-up of Ed Sullivan also reflected what was acceptable in chic New York circles. We’re not talking about Ed Sullivan broadcasting out of the South — he was right there on Broadway in New York, and it was acceptable that blacks were excluded from the show.

How did other kids treat you, being “the boy preacher”?

There was a mixture of amusement and deference. It was strange for them that I’d play stickball on Friday night and on Sunday their parents were going to hear me preach. So there was a mixture of “That’s the preacher” — snicker, snicker — and deference. But there wasn’t the same culture of meanness that you see today. I think the only abuse I got was when I was around 10 and my parents separated. And you’d hear the taunts and whispers about my parent’s separation and what happened with my father and my sister. [His father left the family to begin a relationship with Sharpton’s half-sister.]

The divorce of your parents seems to have been doubly hard on you. On one hand, there was the particular awfulness of the situation. But on the other, your family fell economically as well.

Our family’s income went through the floor. It was very traumatic. You’re trying to comfort a mother who, very understandably, is on the edge of a nervous breakdown because of incest in the family. You go from a two-car garage, a 10-room house in Queens with a basement, to a housing project. I had never, until I was 10 years old, lived in a house my parents didn’t own. I’d never been in a community where the garbage wasn’t picked up on time, where the police didn’t come if you called. And now I was in a housing project where people were stacked up on top of one another. And I knew that there was a better life than this. And that was probably what made me start seeking, to ask: How do you make things fair? Because I knew this was unfair, better than my playmates, because they knew of no other life.

You first met James Brown shortly after this time. How did your relationship begin?

Well, when James Brown and I first hooked up, his son had just been killed in a car accident. And he said he wanted to do some benefits for my youth group. And he started telling me what to do, how to promote, and I did it. Then he’d take me on the road with him. And little by little, I would stay with him and fly around with him on his jet. I would do everything with him. And that’s how he became my father. He would talk to me the way a father talked to a son: “Watch this on the road, don’t deal with these kind of girls, dress like this, eat this.” I mean, literally, like a father. And I guess because I’d never had that kind of relationship with anybody, he became the father I never had. To another degree, Jesse Jackson was, too. But James more than Jesse.

Are you still close to Jackson?

Oh, we talk every day. I’d say James Brown was my father, Jesse Jackson was my teacher. Jesse helped me with political and ministerial issues. James Brown was more personal. I would talk to James Brown about a girlfriend, or what clothes to buy. So there was a big difference.

You were radicalized fairly young. I enjoyed reading that, when you were in high school, you’d call a strike if the cafeteria food was bad that day.

That was the era I grew up in. Everybody was into something. I go to schools today and I’m amazed at how few students are politically involved. When I was growing up, it was the anti-war movement, the black movement — everyone was into something. All my friends were either SDS or anti-war or Operation Breadbasket. We would argue about who was right. Today they argue about why no one’s involved. So it’s amazing how the times have changed.

Where has that political instinct gone?

I think a lot of people got complacent; they assumed we’d arrived in certain way. And I think some people got overwhelmed during the Reagan years — they thought that they couldn’t fight back, that it was useless. People gave up. What I’m doing now would not have appeared extreme in the 1960s. The reason it appears extreme in the ’80s and ’90s is that nobody else is doing it.

What did you mean when you wrote that the Tawana Brawley case (in which a young black woman accused white policemen to abducting and raping her; a grand jury ultimately declined to issue indictments) was the O.J. case before O.J. happened?

I meant that Tawana Brawley brought all of those sexual and psycho-racial feelings about the criminal justice system to the front. Here was a young black woman accusing adult white male law enforcement officers. It had all the elements, the passion and emotion that America and the state didn’t want to deal with. And I think they decided, before all the evidence was in, never to let it go to trial. And it didn’t. The same kind of issues were involved with O.J. If O.J. had been accused of killing his black wife, you would not have seen the same passion stirred up. The sexual and racial psychodrama captivated a nation that’s still dealing with the whole interracial aspect. These cases have all the taboos.

Are you ever sorry you got involved in the Brawley case?

No. I think if I had to do it again I’d do it in the same way. I probably wouldn’t have gotten into such a personal pissing contest with [New York State Attorney General] Robert Abrams. But I would do the whole thing again.

Clearly, you still don’t think her story was fabricated.

No. Everyone’s saying that Tawana Brawley lied, and the evidence they raise is a hypothesis: “We feel she was doing this.” Explain to me how she knew these three law enforcement officers, who admit they were together those three days. How could she just guess they were together? And one of them committed suicide. Why? I mean, there are just too many unanswered questions to say there’s not enough here to go to trial.

Here’s a quote from your book: “I have been guilty of letting ungodly things around me.”

I think that’s from my having been in the music industry, where I saw a lot of corruption — things like record executives cutting deals to get airplay. There was a lot of vile language, a lot of loose morals. In the music industry you meet people who just run through towns meeting a woman a day and dropping them like they were Kleenex. Things like that. And the boxing world is full of all kinds of corruption.

You’ve been criticized for your relationship with Don King.

It’s a strange paradox. On one level they say Don King is corrupt — that he’s a crook, that he’s the worst thing that ever happened. And that Sharpton should never have been seen with him. On the other hand, it was reported that I gave information to the FBI on Don King. So why criticize me? If they believed I was helping “get” Don King, then what is the criticism? You can’t criticize me on both ends of the argument.

You seem to have a flair for getting criticized on both ends of every argument. The right doesn’t like you, but neither does the establishment left.

Which is why I don’t try to please either.

Here’s another quote from your book: A black leader must be “part religious leader, part social leader, part social worker and part entertainer.” Do you feel like you’ve leaned too far towards the entertainment part of that equation?

I think sometimes, in my younger years, I gave in to being flippant, to shooting from the hip, to overplaying the theatrics and not the issues. And I think that’s one of the things I reflected about in the hospital, after my stabbing, that I should discipline myself. You can honestly be committed, but if you play the theatrics too much, you give people a better sense of the theatrics than the cause. And you get in the way of your own cause.

Your stabbing, you write, was a real turning point for you. You seem to be on a mission to be taken more seriously.

You know, everybody grows. And I think everybody has certain turning points. For some it’s graduation from school, for others it’s when a child is born. The stabbing, for me, was a turning point. I had been moving that way anyway; I think the stabbing just consolidated it. It’s time to go to the next step.

Is the media tougher on black leaders, in terms of letting them forget their past mistakes?

I think so. I think we’re not willing to give them second chances because, in most cases, we’re not willing to give them first chances. You have to always prove yourself, you always have to establish your credentials.

You’ve called Bill Clinton “deeply flawed.” Are there things about him you admire?

I think he has an extremely fertile mind; I’ve met with him a couple of times. He’s very charismatic. If there ever was a charming person, it’s Bill Clinton. And I think he’s very articulate and has an uncanny ability to show compassion. I just don’t think he’s consistent and he can do what he says. And I think he lacks courage in some things. Bill Clinton strikes me as the kind of guy who goes wherever the polls lead him, rather than leading the polls.

How do you find him, in terms of racial issues? AS: Well, I don’t agree with him cutting set-aside programs. I liked his speech about affirmative action, but then he turned right around and cut set-aside programs. I certainly don’t think he’s followed up on his commitment to stop police brutality, which was one of his campaign promises in the middle of the Rodney King case in ‘92. We haven’t heard him talk about that since.

You’ve said you were sorry you let a photographer take that famous photo of you getting your hair done. You must get tired of talking about your ‘do.

Yeah, I do. But I just keep talking about it. I’ve always had the feeling that people who are only hair-deep in their analysis are so trivial that I don’t let them bother me. Lately I’ve found myself thinking more about how people will judge this time historically — not how it’s seen in the daily papers. And 50 years from now people won’t remember how I wore my hair or what clothes I wore. Fifty years from now, whether my critics like it or not, people will say I put race on the front burner and got some things done. All of my personality flaws and my style won’t matter. I made some changes happen. Many black kids are killed, but the reason people will remember Howard Beach or Bensonhurst is that we built a movement around it. It’s not like these are the only incidents. History will have to say whether it’s all meant anything. I may not be of King’s stature, but I am in his tradition.

You write that you’re very fond of reading. What do you read?

All nonfiction. I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology. I read a lot of theology and some philosophy. And a lot of current affairs. “Nixon’s Piano,” Kenneth O’Reilly’s book, I love. Recently I read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography and thought it was excellent. The Rev. Samuel Proctor’s autobiography I thought was excellent. I’m reading the Chris Darden book right now. I met him on my book tour, and he gave me a copy of his book and I gave him a copy of mine.

In your mind, what’s the best book out there right now on race in America?

“Nixon’s Piano,” which is about racism and American presidents, is an excellent book. I would tell people to read that. And second to that, I would tell people to read Cornel West’s book “Race Matters.”

Are there any things out there that make you feel hopeful about where we’re heading, in terms of racial issues?

I see people all over our country getting reenergized and re-involved. And maybe I’ve seen too much in life to give up. You know, I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I stood there and watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag. I was there when David Dinkins was sworn in as the first black mayor of New York. So when I’m feeling pessimistic, I think of events like that. And the words of Dr. King come back to me: “The darkest moment is just before dawn.” I’ve seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.