To critics, he is known as "Al Charlatan" or "Rev. Soundbite," a rabble-rousing racial ambulance chaser who never met a video camera he didn't like. To others Al Sharpton (born 1955) is a voice for the disenfranchised, an intelligent, articulate activist who knows how to play the media and speak for the underclass.

The Reverend Al Sharpton has emerged as a voice that people listen to--even if they don't like what they hear. Sharpton, a Pentecostal minister without a parish, uses his theatrical style and inflammatory rhetoric to make himself as familiar a front-page figure as New York City residents Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley. The self-declared civil rights leader injected himself into many of the city's stickiest issues--the Tawana Brawley case, the Bensonhurst racial murder trial, the Bernhard Goetz shooting--often making himself part of the controversy.

Even Sharpton's harshest critics admit he touches a nerve by tapping into...