"LEXINGTON - Add this to the list of things you thought you'd never see: Pulpit-banging civil-rights activist-cum-2004 presidential candidate Al Sharpton visiting the tomb of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

"This is where he's buried?" Sharpton asked as he stood beside a sculpture of Lee lying in state inside Lee Chapel on the Washington and Lee University campus Thursday evening. In fact, Lee's body is entombed one floor below.

Sharpton gave a speech at the college as part of a three-day kickoff event for the school's mock presidential convention, which takes place in January.

But the power of the jaw-dropping juxtaposition of a man who believes blacks should be compensated in cash for the injustice of slavery with a patron saint of the old South was not lost on Sharpton. He stood by the crypt twice to make sure photographers got a picture.

"I think there's some symbolism in me coming to a conservative college in the South where Robert E. Lee is buried. I did the best I could to give his memory a different flavor by visiting him," Sharpton said with a grin. "Imagine how it's going to play in Harlem."

But, Sharpton noted, "it's always an odd couple when I come to Virginia." He usually comes here to meet with the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg.

This time he was the only one of nine Democratic presidential candidates to accept an invitation to speak at the mock convention kickoff. The convention, which is entirely student run, has taken place in advance of every presidential election since 1908. It is always held for the party that does not occupy the White House at that time.

Student organizers fully recognized the potential for Sharpton to be entertaining, if not inflammatory, given the setting for the speech, said Michael Denbow, one of the leaders of the convention committee.

As entertainment, Sharpton didn't disappoint.

He arrived in a stretch limousine wearing a black suit and a red tie, though it was one of the hottest days of the year so far. His hair, gray at the temples, was combed straight back in his familiar style.

Political consultant Dick Morris, who fashioned President Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996, took the podium first. He playfully called Sharpton out, telling the crowd the question Sharpton would duck that day was whether he would run as an independent if he failed to get the Democratic nomination for president.

"I'm not duckin'; I'm just not tellin'," Sharpton said, firing off the first of a string of one-liners that punctuated a good-humored 40-minute speech. "That's a good line, Dick, you ought to write that down," he said.

Sharpton, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native, started preaching at age 4 and became an ordained Pentecostal minister at 10. He headed the Rev. Jesse Jackson's youth civil-rights campaign at 16.

In 1991, he founded a civil-rights group called the National Action Network, which has chapters in Richmond and Lynchburg.

But he's become known to most Americans as a fiery advocate in civil-rights cases, including the one involving Tawana Brawley, a black teenager who in 1988 said she was abducted and raped by a gang of white men. A grand jury found no evidence to support her claims.

"I'm probably the only politician in history who has to defend himself for standing up for a young lady, rather than for laying down with one," he said. "That's another good line."

Sharpton slammed Democrats for trying to hold him down and for "trying to be Bush Lite."

"I don't know why the Democrats aren't asking the president, 'Where is [Osama] bin Laden?'" he said. "One thing I can promise if I'm elected president is that George Bush will not be in charge of the missing persons bureau. He hasn't found anything he's gone looking for yet."

He said Bush's tax-cut plan will benefit only the rich and will explode the federal budget deficit. "It's like Jim Jones' Kool Aid. It tastes good, but it'll kill you once you swallow it," he said.

The audience seemed at least amused, if not swayed, by Sharpton.

Gabrielle Harris, a freshman from Maryland, was one of a handful of black students in the crowd on the overwhelmingly white campus. "I wouldn't have come if it wasn't Al Sharpton," she said.

"I give Al Sharpton a lot of credit for coming" to a place like W&L," said Harris' friend Kristen Evans, also a freshman from Maryland. "He did it with grace and style and a lot of class."

Sharpton said he expects to campaign more in Virginia and in any state where there is a primary.

"I want people to see that if I will go to Robert E. Lee's grave, I will go anywhere." " (Matt Chittum, The Roanoke Times, May 9, 2003)