In 1995, Sharpton incited the shooting and arson murder of seven employees of Freddy’s Fashion Mart. When a black Pentecostal Church, the United House of Prayer, which owned a retail property on 125th Street, asked Fred Harari, a Jewish tenant who operated Freddie's Fashion Mart, to evict his longtime subtenant, a black-owned record store called The Record Shack, Sharpton organized a protest, at which he announced:
"
We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."
Sharpton stood by and nodded in agreement as speakers and the crowd shouted: "
Burn down the Jew store!" "
We’re going to see that this cracker suffers."
A protester shot four employees and set fire to Freddy’s. It burnt to the ground and seven employees, all of them minorities, died.
Crown Heights Riot
The Crown Heights Riot began on August 19, 1991, after a car driven by a Jewish man, and part of a procession led by an unmarked police car, went through an intersection and was struck by another vehicle causing it to veer onto the sidewalk where it accidentally struck and killed a seven-year-old Guyanese boy named Gavin Cato and severely injured his cousin Angela. Witnesses could not agree upon the speed and could did not agree whether the light was yellow or red. One of the factors that sparked the riot was the arrival of a private ambulance which, on the orders of a police officer worried for the Jewish driver's safety, removed the uninjured driver from the scene while Cato lay pinned under his car. Cato and his cousin were treated soon after by a city ambulance. Caribbean-American and African-American residents of the neighborhood rioted for four consecutive days fueled by rumors that the private ambulance had refused to treat Cato.
During the riot blacks looted stores, beat Jews in the street, and clashed with groups of Jews, hurling rocks and bottles at one another after Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting student from Australia, was stabbed and killed by a member of a mob shouting "Kill the Jew."
Sharpton, who arranged a rally in Crown Heights after Cato's death, has been seen by some commentators as inflaming tensions by making remarks that included "
If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house" and referring to Jews as "
diamond merchants."
Sharpton marched through Crown Heights and in front of "770", shortly after the riot, with about 400 protesters (who chanted "Whose streets? Our streets!" and "No justice, no peace!"), in spite of Mayor David Dinkins' attempts to keep the march from happening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Sharpton