When racial justice becomes lucrative: Al Sharpton's $1 million compensation

1. For Al Sharpton, the business of racial justice has been very lucrative — his compensation has grown fourfold since the Black Lives Matter movement was founded, tax records show.
2. Sharpton and his tax-exempt National Action Network 501(c)(4) organization have been fierce opponents of "threats to racial justice" since the tragic death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
3. That same year, Sharpton received over $1 million — more than triple the amount Color of Change paid its leader and more than eight times what MoveOn.org paid its highest earner.
4. Sharpton and his National Action Network (NAN) hosted press conferences and staged rallies for the deaths of multiple young men and women killed by police, and Sharpton often attends and speaks at their funeral services — including multiple appearances to honor George Floyd.
5. When asked about his large salary, Sharpton said, "It's a six-day-a-week job and several hours a day, and when [the compensation firm] compared it to other companies, other non-profits, that's the salary that they would get." But a review of executive salaries at similar nonprofits found that Sharpton’s is well above average.
6. Sharpton was paid a total of $1,238,704 between January 2003 and December 2012, according to a review of National Action Network’s publicly available financial records.
7. Al Sharpton drew $1,046,948 in compensation in 2018, a fourfold rise since the Black Lives Matter movement started and well above executives at similar organizations.
8. Color of Change is a social justice organization founded by James Rucker and Van Jones in 2005 and was modeled after MoveOn.org. (Color of Change board member Alicia Garza — unpaid — is credited with coining the term #blacklivesmatter and co-founding the movement in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013).
9. That was the year that the Black Lives Matter movement was founded after the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the controversial 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
10. In 2014, Sharpton was paid $412,644 — a more than 70% increase over the previous year — and NAN’s total revenues approached $7 million.
11. NAN's most recently available financial report is for the year 2018, and it lists Sharpton's salary as $1,046,948 — a four-fold increase from 2013.
12. It now has 93 chapters across the United States and hosts radio stations in Birmingham, Cincinnati, Detroit, Tallahassee, and Washington, D.C. NAN's about page, titled "No Justice, No Peace," lists seven areas of action: criminal justice reform, police accountability, crisis intake and victim assistance, voting rights, corporate responsibility and pension diversity, youth leadership, and bridging the digital divide.
13. The death of Martin was only the beginning in a long line of tragedies to which Sharpton and his network have brought national media attention, becoming in the process among the most outspoken critics of police brutality.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/al-sharpton-drew-1046948-salary-2018-fourfold-rise-black-lives