Sharpton Tells Gangs Votes Control Turf

Calling on gang members to control their turf not with guns, but votes, the controversial Rev. Al Sharpton of Brooklyn announced a plan Saturday to forge a new political power from Los Angeles’ mean streets by registering 25,000 youths and gang members for the November election.

“If they really want to control their turf, they have to vote,” Sharpton said at a press conference Saturday at the Biltmore. “Just to tell them to be goody-goody is silly. They have to feel involved and part of the system.”

The plan to register 25,000 minority youths will partly rely on a series of rap concerts at which the only price of admission will be registering to vote.

Sharpton was joined at the press conference by Rev. Charles Mims of Los Angeles, who has been active in organizing “peace summits” between warring gangs; Lenora B. Fulani, the independent New Alliance Party gubernatorial candidate in New York, and Elizabeth Munoz, the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for California governor.

The press conference followed several days of talks with gang members in Los Angeles. Six former or active gang associates appeared with Sharpton on Saturday and registered to vote.

Sharpton rose to national notoriety three years ago when he served as a close adviser to Tawana Brawley, the black teen-ager whose claim of being raped by a group of whites in the town of Wappingers Falls, N.Y., was rejected by a New York grand jury.

Sharpton’s flowing, shoulder-length hair, glistening gold chains and booming rhetoric became frequent fixtures in newspaper and television reports, transforming him overnight into one of the nation’s most popular objects of both ridicule and applause.

Reporters once dubbed him “Reverend Sound Bite” for his theatrical, attention-getting statements.

Since the Brawley case, the 35-year-old, Brooklyn-born Baptist preacher without a pulpit has continued to startle and infuriate with demonstrations attempting to shut down the Miss America Pageant because of poor living conditions in Atlantic City, N.J., and to close the Statue of Liberty to mark the 27th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The plan to register gang members in Los Angeles is part of a national program to involve minority youths in the political process that he already has started in New York City and Chicago.

“Really controlling your turf means walking into a councilman’s office and saying, ‘I’ve got 10,000 votes here,’ ” he said.