A stunningly dishonest article in the New York Times attempts to rehabilitate Al Sharpton.  The title, Al Sharpton, Reconsidered, reveals the goal of restoring Sharpton to polite company.  It begins with an interview placing Sharpton in a grand setting:

Folded into a far corner of the Grand Havana Room, a private Midtown cigar club on the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, Mr. Sharpton looked downright stately.

Feigning balance, the article covers Sharpton's support of Tawana Brawley hoax, calling it:

... the worst thing he's done: His loud support of Tawana Brawley, an African-American teenager whose claims of abuse and rape by a gang of white men turned out to be a hoax.

While his support for Brawley was bad – and even worse was his refusal to pay a judgment against himself for libel, absurdly claiming poverty and that he didn't even own the suits he  wore – Sharpton has actual blood on his hands for provoking two fatal race riots in New York City.

In 1991, a three-day riot – actually a pogrom consisting of attacks on Jews by blacks – took place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, following a car accident in which:

... two children of Guyanese immigrants were accidentally struck by one of the cars in the motorcade of rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of Chabad, a Jewish religious movement.  One child died and the second was severely injured.

In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured and one Orthodox Jewish man was killed.  Two weeks after the riot, a non-Jewish man was killed by a group of black men; some believed that the man had been mistaken for a Jew. 

What fanned the riots were false claims that a Jewish-owned ambulance took away an injured Jew and left the black children behind.  Tensions were further aggravated at a funeral for the dead child.  City Journal reported:

At the funeral of Gavin Cato, banners commemorating the accident victim shared space with others that said things like "Hitler did not do the job," while Al Sharpton caricatured Jews as "diamond dealers." ...

The Times reported Sharpton's "diamond dealers" slur, but it ignored his other incendiary remarks at the funeral, where he compared Gavin Cato to slain civil rights leaders and drew parallels between the Hasidim and supporters of apartheid.  According to the Long Island edition of Newsday, Sharpton "seemed to scoff ... at labeling Gavin's death an accident."  This observation, however, was excised from the same story in the tabloid's New York City edition.

The other race riot fanned by Sharpton was even more fatal.  Via American Renaissance:

[On] December 8, 1995,  Al Sharpton incited the violent firebombing of Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem, causing the the [sic] deaths of Angelina Marrero ... Cynthia Martinez ... Luz Ramos ... Mayra Rentas ... Olga Garcia ... Garnette Ramautar ... Kareem Brunner. ... names forever linked together as the seven victims of the Sharpton-caused massacre at Freddy's Fashion Mart.

It all started as a rent dispute in the summer of 1995:

The United House of Prayer, a large African-American church was also a major landlord in Harlem.  They raised the rent [of]Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store which had operated from the same Harlem location for over 40 years.  In turn Freddy's had to raise the rent on its sub-tenant, a black-owned record store.  A landlord-tenant dispute ensued.  As he has done so often in his life, Al Sharpton turned this non-racial economic dispute into a racial conflict. ...

The Sharpton-led protests began in August and came to a head on the morning of Friday, December 8th when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of the Sharpton's [sic] protests, walked into Freddy's Fashion Mart, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire – a fire that resulted in killing 7 people plus Smith.  The only African American left in the story was Freddy's security guard Kareem Brunner, 22-years-old, who was ordered to stay by the mass murderer Smith.

At the time the faux-preacher claimed he wasn't involved in the protests, he was only there to mediate.  He also claimed there was no Antisemitism involved in the protests, but he has been proven to be a liar.

Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes and transcripts of several of Sharpton's weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor's Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy's.  Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.

"We are going to see that this cracker suffers," Powell is heard telling a crowd in one broadcast on  Aug. 19.

"Reverend Sharpton is on it.  We have made contact with these crackers.  We don't expect a lot out of them.  They haven't seen how we feel about anything yet.  We are going to show them."

He also said

They think they gonna drive this man out of business, they gotta be out of their minds.  We are not gonna stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in Black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street.  If we stand for that, we'll stand for anything.  Which we've been doing.

At a rally recorded on Sept. 9, Sharpton is heard telling a crowd:

"I want to make it clear to the radio audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street."