Who

The most prominent pastor in Harlem, Butts is the leader of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and a major political player in the city.

Backstory

Butts grew up in the Lillian Wald projects on the Lower East Side and attended Flushing High School, where he was voted president of his senior class. He went on to Morehouse College in Atlanta and the Union Theological Seminary in New York, before becoming an assistant pastor at 200-year-old Abyssinian Church in the late 1970s at age 22. In 1989, Butts became the church's head pastor. He later founded the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a non-profit that has brought more than $300 million in retail development and low-cost housing to Harlem, including the Harlem Center, a shopping/hotel complex on 125th Street.

Of note

Given that Butts has the ear of his huge congregation and, to some extent, Harlem's black community at large, candidates on both sides of the aisle actively solicit his endorsement. But he's something of a political wildcard: although generally partial to Democrats, he threw his weight behind Ross Perot in 1992, Pataki in 1998 and Bloomberg in 2005. Indeed some of the very qualities that make Butts so appealing to white politicians—his willingness to back Republicans, his relative reluctance to engage in Al Sharpton-like racism accusations—have occasionally damaged his credibility in the black community.

For years, many assumed that Butts would eventually throw his own hat into the political ring, and in the '90s he expressly said he'd love to be mayor or senator. But he's yet to trade the pulpit for public office.

On the side

Butts has been active on more than a dozen boards including the Council of Churches of the City of New York, the United Way of New York, the September 11th Fund, and the American Baptist College. He's also the (largely ceremonial) president of SUNY Old Westbury.

Personal

Butts lives in Harlem with his wife Kathy and their three children.

True story

An outspoken opponent of gangsta rap, Butts held a June 1993 rally in which he attempted to literally steamroll a pile of CDs. Rap fans blocked the passage of the steamroller; resorting to Plan B, Butts encouraged the crowd to stomp on them instead.