Al Sharpton says he quietly supports Barack Obama

In an interview with the New York Daily News, Sharpton acknowledged that he told his supporters at a weekly rally last Saturday that he's going to do "whatever I gotta do" to help Obama, adding "Hillary Clinton has never done nothing for us," a reference he said applied to his group and not to the black community.

"'I won't either endorse you or not endorse you,'" Sharpton said he told Obama before a dinner last November at Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem. "'But I will tell you I can be freer not endorsing you to help you and everybody else,'" the Daily News quoted Sharpton as saying.

The former Democratic presidential candidate issued a statement this week praising Obama's speech on race on Tuesday, calling it "an important statement on the continuing realities of race and division in America and the quest to move beyond it towards a more fair and open society."

The next step, he said, was for Sen. McCain, Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama "to raise the discussion to solutions" instead of focusing on the "denunciation of surrogates' statements." Sharpton said that "if the contest remains at that level the American people are to lose." 

Sharpton told the New York Daily News that his decision to remain publicly neutral was based on strategy, but he decided recently to discuss his "private feelings" because of the "disappointment I've had in the public conduct of the Clinton campaign."

Both the Clinton campaign and the Obama campaign declined to comment on the Daily News story.