“So he’s caught in a situation in which he’s struggling to determine the best way to leverage the power of his church and who he is, to deliver the best results to his community. Advocacy is expected at Abyssinian because of its traditions. So he’s really got the perfect platform to grab the next step. Except what is that?”

A Butts candidacy would make a clear statement that it’s no longer necessary for a black leader to unfailingly adhere to a rigid ideological line to have credibility in the community -- whether the issue is Louis Farrakhan, Clarence Thomas, or affirmative action. Or he could leave the preeminent position of leadership among New York’s black politicians to the once-again newly ascendant Al Sharpton. Unlike Butts, Sharpton suffers no bouts of ambivalence or uncertainty about his role.

Though he is at the moment scratching his head over whether to challenge Ed Towns for his Brooklyn congressional seat -- to “punish” the recalcitrant Democrat for supporting Rudy Giuliani -- Sharpton knows that his overall success depends on his ability to keep moving forward, to sustain his momentum. It is the Satchel Paige school of political activism: “Don’t look back, ‘cause something may be gaining on you.”

Say what you will about Sharpton -- it’s pretty much all been said already anyway -- but the truth is, he’s committed to what he does. To many people he may be a charlatan and a blowhard, the ringmaster of the racial circus that has played in this city on and off for the last decade, but political and social activism inhabit every cell of his ample body. Like all politicians who rise above the pedestrian, he’s obsessed; he’s willing if not eager to sacrifice just about everything else in his life (again, think Rudy Giuliani).

The night I talked to him about Butts and the future of black leadership, he was at home in Flatbush, where dinner guests were arriving to help him and his wife, Kathy, celebrate their seventeenth wedding anniversary. Sharpton was perfectly happy, however, to talk to me for as long as necessary to answer my questions, to make his points, and to get his fix.

“If Jesse Jackson hadn’t run in ‘88 and we hadn’t had Yusuf Hawkins, then we wouldn’t have had Dave Dinkins,” Sharpton argues. “Social movements are what excite people. You cannot show me any city,” he says, in defense of the social-activist model, “where a guy building supermarkets was elected mayor. If you go to the corner of 125th and Lenox or the corner of Atlantic and Nostrand and talk about black leaders, Butts is probably not a name you would hear. But if you wanna talk about elite white power circles, well, he’s got that access.”

It’s ironic but of course no surprise that the things that would seem to make Butts a strong potential candidate, at least to a white person, are precisely the things that can still cast a shadow over his credibility in the black community. “If he runs he’s gonna have to explain his access to Pataki. He’s gonna have to explain his relationship with D’Amato. He’s gonna have to explain his access to downtown money,” says Sharpton, blithely dismissing the broad significance of residential and commercial development in inner-city communities.

For Butts, perhaps the key lesson about political power and having the means to affect people’s lives was learned on the very block where Abyssinian stands. It was there, on 138th Street, that he learned how wide the chasm is between rhetoric and results.

“When I first came to work at Abyssinian,” says Butts, who lives in Harlem with his wife and three children, “I was on the streets with the kids all the time. I was young myself 22, and I was always playing ball with them, dancing with them, and talking with them. Several of our members lived right across the street, and they were always giving me food. Ernestine Brown would sit at her first-floor window and she’d holler, ‘Reverend, we’re cookin’ -- come take home some food for your family.’ She’d give me fried fish, corn bread, bread pudding.

“And then one day I turned around and nothing was there. The building had been abandoned. I knew the man who owned it, brother Hunter. He and his wife had worked all their lives and they lost the building to rising city taxes.” The same thing was happening all over Harlem. Abyssinian continued to thrive, but by the mid-eighties, nearly half of its 6,000-member congregation drove in on Sundays from the five boroughs and the suburbs.

The buildings opposite the church, once home to proud working-class families, were now burned-out, abandoned shells. Crackheads and drug dealers hung out on the corners. It was a terrible embarrassment for Butts and for the church. What did it say about the impact and the reach of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and its congregation if they couldn’t even take care of their own block?

By the middle of 1986, Butts had finally had enough. He stood in the pulpit at Abyssinian on a Sunday and in a memorable, impassioned sermon he challenged the congregants to join him in a fight to take back 138th Street and eventually the rest of the neighborhood. The result of that plea was the birth of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which now has a portfolio of investments in Harlem totaling $65 million. And the two buildings opposite the church -- which were abandoned in the late seventies -- where Ernestine Brown used to sit by her first-floor window and call Butts to come get some food have been completely renovated. One is now transitional housing for homeless families, and the other is home to the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a childcare center, and low- and moderate-income housing.