In his sixth Orangeburg County appearance in as many months, the Rev. Al Sharpton exhorted an audience at South Carolina State University on Wednesday to exercise the right to vote.

American society is "uneven, unequal and unfair" to minorities and to change it, "you must register and you must be heard," said Sharpton, a Pentecostal minister from New York.

Sharpton is one of nine candidates for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. He expressed irritation that people keep saying he might lose the race.

"I'm not the only one that might lose. Eight of them are going to lose!" Sharpton said. "Life is not about risking losing, it's about risking winning." He said he's not "too scared to fight."

Sharpton spent all day Wednesday visiting college campuses, including an estimated 500 people at Voorhees College in Denmark in an appearance sponsored by Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Then he spoke to about 300 people in the Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium at S.C. State in an appearance sponsored by the university's NAACP chapter.

Some have told him that visiting colleges is a waste of time, but Sharpton says he is able to speak the language of college students and evoke a positive response in them.

Young people drove the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protest movement, Sharpton said, adding that the dozens of students who registered to vote at his appearances Wednesday will make a difference, too, in their own way.

The great civil rights pioneers of the 20th century suffered dog bites, fire hoses and even death to win the right to vote, Sharpton said.

They "never imagined ... a generation that's too busy playing games" and "shaking their booties" and couldn't be bothered to vote, he said.

This generation has an abundance of technology -- cell phones, fax machines or the Internet -- not available to the civil rights pioneers. "We've got more to work with and we're getting less done," an exasperated Sharpton said.

Too many youths admire the "thug, hoodlum, street life" with its "bling-bling" -- eye-catching jewelry, fancy cars and fancy clothes.

It's OK to be stylish, Sharpton said, if you've got substance too. And that includes self-respect and intolerance for put-downs.

Referring to women as "whores" and calling men "niggers" or getting shot or jailed "won't make you a hero," Sharpton lectured sternly.

The real heroes are the American troops in Iraq who fought, risked injury and even gave their lives "to preserve our right to question our government," he said.

"I'm not against the troops. The troops didn't send themselves to Iraq," said Sharpton, who saved his criticism for the Bush administration.

"We're in a war but we don't know why we're in it or how to get out of it," Sharpton said.

"They said we were in imminent danger, right now, immediately," Sharpton said. Then no weapons of mass destruction were found, he added, and the administration said it didn't matter.

"It does matter!" Sharpton thundered. "To risk lives and lose lives for a strategy based on a false premise, that alone is enough for everyone to vote!"

"You can't just dislike President Bush out of office," Sharpton said. "You've got to vote him out."

But in case his audience needed some more reasons, Sharpton brought home the reasons for registering and voting:

-- Blacks are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed.

-- Blacks make less income, on average, than whites.

-- Blacks are three times more likely than whites to get jail time for a crime.

-- Blacks are less likely than whites to get a bank loan.

This is not "some lecture about civics," Sharpton said. The civil rights movement is "not a style like bell bottoms" and it's "not for somebody else; it's for you."

Many blacks join the military "because they see it as an economic way to sustain themselves, a way to get education," Sharpton said in an interview with reporters from this newspaper, the SCSU newspaper and The Christian Science Monitor.

So it's no surprise that blacks suffer disproportionate losses in wars.

"These are not just little pieces on a checker board," Sharpton said. "These are people's lives. These are somebody's son, somebody's husband, somebody's father or their uncle."

"I preached the funeral down here of a young man on Saturday," said Sharpton, referring to Orangeburg County native Spec. Darius Jennings, 22.

Sharpton said Jennings' mother asked him if he could deliver the eulogy and he agreed. Jennings was the third Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School graduate to die during the war in Iraq.

"I'm coming to Charleston to eat with the homeless on Thanksgiving morning," Sharpton said. "I'm probably going to visit the families of two or three of those victims who are having their first Thanksgiving dinner without their kid at the table."

"I'm trying to put a human face on what's happening here," he said. "I think there is a real concern and I'm trying to deal with that concern as I also address the fact that I've been opposed to the war."

In the last six months, Sharpton has made as many visits to Orangeburg County as all of the other presidential candidates combined.

"You've got to make yourself available to people if you want people to be supportive of you," Sharpton said.

"But I also think that I've probably been to Orangeburg before I was running for president more than they have," he said.

"I've preached here. I've been here down through the years. I'm not a Johnny-come-lately," he said.

"And I won't be one that, after Feb. 3, won't be back. Hopefully I'll be back as the nominee of the party."

T&D Staff Writer Lee Hendren can be reached by e-mail at lhendren@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5552.

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