“The way I’ve been ‘out there’ is by trying to create jobs, by building housing, by bringing investment opportunity, by building bridges to the corporate community. And I would expect,” he says, pausing for a moment to take a deep breath and perhaps not let out his anger, “I would expect that Al would tell people I don’t come to this empty-handed. The same way that I point out the value of his work when people say to me, ‘What’s he done? He’s never run anything, he’s never built anything, and he’s never won anything.’ “

Stripped to its essence, the debate is really about more than who will run for what particular office in any given election. At its core, this debate is about who will set the black community’s agenda for the foreseeable future, how these goals will be pursued, and who will lead the charge.

Butts has an opportunity to demonstrate that it is possible for a black leader to amass what he calls “real political power,” the power to get things done, without being branded a sellout. To maintain these channels, he successfully walks in two worlds -- uptown, or the black world, and downtown, the white world. “More than anything else,” says United Way president Ralph Dickerson, “you live and die by who you are. You’ve got to be yourself in both venues. You’ve got to bring all your collective wisdom and be the same person on the sixtieth floor of Chase Plaza or at Time Warner as you are when you’re talking to the church deacons or some young people in central Harlem. If you change in either place, then you know what names they want to paint on brothers when that happens.”

Butts is articulate and forthright, but there is another key to his current success and future prospects. Though no one is likely to say it out loud, Butts is the kind of black man with whom white people feel comfortable. Even before his transformation, when he was more strident, he was the downtown choice among the activists. White editors would often tell reporters working on stories about black issues to find out what Butts thinks. Unlike Sharpton, with his fiery street style and his funky, neo-James Brown processed hair, Butts is far from a threatening figure. With his soft features and his wire-rim glasses, he has a sweet, almost studious look. His only concession to hipness is the small jazz beard that, like his buddy Wynton Marsalis, he wears under his lower lip.

“Calvin is a very easy person to feel comfortable with and to trust,” says Carol Parry, executive vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank, who has financed a number of projects for Butts, including the Pathmark. “He’s outgoing. He’s . . . he’s a minister, know what I mean? He loves you and he brings it with him when he comes into a room.”

The great danger in all of this for Butts, or any other black leader who works on the inside, is that he will lose his street credibility: that he will be damned with the charge that he’s not black enough. A perfect example of how even an unassailable truth can be distorted beyond recognition when viewed in the funhouse mirror of racial politics -- and the damaging impact it can have on a leader like Butts -- is the recent case of the Reverend Henry Lyons. Lyons is head of the National Baptist Convention, the largest black religious group in America, with more than 8 million members. It has for decades been a bedrock institution that blacks have looked to for leadership. Over the summer, Lyons’s wife was arrested for setting fire to a $700,000 waterfront home in Florida.

As the story unfolded, it turned out that Lyons had bought the house, a $135,000 Mercedes, a time-share condo, and a diamond ring for a woman named Bernice Edwards, his mistress. Lyons also had the woman, who had once pleaded guilty to embezzlement, on the religious organization’s payroll as a public-relations consultant and had paid her $440,000. When his wife found out, she set the house ablaze in anger. (She eventually pleaded guilty.)

Shortly after the story broke, the National Baptist Convention held its annual get-together, where Lyons’s leadership was put to the test with a no-confidence vote. Butts led the charge against Lyons, demanding his ouster. How could he lose? Here was a man up for re-election as head of a national religious organization who had lied, committed adultery, misused substantial amounts of the organization’s funds, embarrassed himself, his family, and the other religious leaders, and severely damaged the group’s credibility. It was, for Butts, an absolute slam dunk.

Nevertheless, Butts lost. Lyons easily survived the vote. Though he offered a number of bogus explanations to excuse his behavior, Lyons ultimately relied on one of the classic contemporary strategies of the guilty in this age of no personal accountability: He claimed he was the victim of a white media conspiracy. On the morning of the voice vote at the convention, flyers were placed on every seat in the hall screaming about the white conspiracy.

Butts, in fact, is already viewed by many of the other ministers as a renegade, and his unsuccessful battle to oust Lyons may only isolate him further. The potential damage is that Lyons’s allies in New York will not support Butts if he runs for office. And Butts would need help from his peers in the clergy to solidify and mobilize his natural base. (Lyons’s close friend is the Reverend Samuel Austin, head of the Empire State Missionary Baptist Convention.)

“What I hear from other preachers,” says Sharpton, whose mayoral bid was enthusiastically supported by Lyons, “is that they see this as Calvin grandstanding. They say Calvin will attack a black guy -- whether it’s Mike Tyson or Lyons or the rappers -- ‘cause he knows the white media will give him coverage. But where’s Calvin on racial incidents? Where’s Calvin when white cops shoot us? They felt Calvin knew Lyons was an easy shot.”

Butts, however, is resolute. “There was a time when I felt that in order to maintain my credibility in the black community there were certain things I probably should not say about certain black people or certain things I should not do regarding white people,” Butts says. “But I have to act on what I believe based on my experience. One of the characteristics of a leader is you’ve got to be willing to stand up and say this is the direction in which we need to go when people are not sure. And then you’ve got to have nerve enough to start walking out in that direction to lead and to map the course for those who’ll follow.”

Sitting in his softly lit office at the church one afternoon, with its cherry-wood furniture and wine-colored carpeting, Butts leaned back in his chair and remembered the first time he visited Abyssinian. He was 11 years old, and a cousin took him up to Harlem from his house in Queens. At Abyssinian, they sat in the balcony. “I’d never been in a church that large, with that many people, and that much excitement,” Butts said with obvious emotion. “I don’t really remember much about what Adam Clayton Powell Jr. said, I just remember the overall scene and that he seemed so much larger than life. He was like a god.”

Butts doesn’t talk about it much, but he feels the weight of Abyssinian’s legend. He knows he’s part of a long tradition of independent leadership at the church, which itself was founded as the result of a protest. In 1808, a handful of blacks and Ethiopian merchants were told at a white Baptist church downtown that they’d have to sit in the balcony, away from the white people, if they wanted to worship. Instead of agreeing to the segregation, they formed their own church and named it for the old-world word for Ethiopia: Abyssinia.

One hundred years later, on the next-to-last day of 1908, Abyssinian was taken over by a rising young gospel star from Connecticut named Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Powell preached about pride, self-reliance, discipline, and black unity. He also combined theology with politics, always pushing the power of the ballot to his parishioners. Sensing the change that was happening uptown, Powell led the church in 1920 to buy property on 138th Street next to Marcus Garvey’s black-nationalist headquarters. Powell’s timing was impeccable. It was the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, and in 1923 Powell moved the congregation to a large tent uptown. Fourteen months later, construction of Abyssinian’s present home was completed and the congregation exploded to nearly 14,000.

The Powell era not only continued but was actually enhanced and amped up when Adam Jr. took over from his father in 1937. Known affectionately throughout Harlem simply as Adam, he was a towering figure in the black community: A gifted preacher, an extraordinarily popular congressman, and a bit of a rogue, Powell was the modern archetype of the influential black preacher as politician. He was proud, he was defiant, and he was effective. He fought segregation, he pushed student-loan legislation, and he brought federal dollars into his community.

First elected to Congress in 1944, he served fourteen terms in the House. But in the sixties, near the end of his career, it was clear that Powell had been spending more time in his later years satisfying his appetite for living than taking care of his responsibilities. In 1967, he was denied his seat in Congress because of charges he had misused House money. By the time of his retirement in 1971 and his death a year later, everything had changed: He had fallen from grace, Abyssinian was withering, and Harlem was dying.

When the Reverend Dr. Samuel Proctor took over the church in 1972, it was a mess. A former college president and a professor, Proctor was as reserved and task-oriented as Powell was flamboyant and scattered. Methodically, he got the church’s finances back in order, he began to build up the congregation again, he instituted new programs and services, and he assiduously stayed out of the limelight. He also hired a 22-year-old assistant pastor, who was completing his first year of seminary, named Calvin Butts.