The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership

by Al Sharpton

  I’ve seen this over and over. When you go too far in not giving a damn, then you become the caricature rather than the conduit. So if I’m oppressed and I need you to be the one to bring my message, I don’t need for you to be distracted by whom you’re going to bed with, being intoxicated in public, not giving a damn. Because all of that quickly gets in the way of the work at hand.

  After going through the Adam period, with the memory of that David Frost interview stamped in my mind, I eventually saw a transformation in my thinking. I started to realize that you need to give a damn, not because of your adversaries but because of whom you claim you want to serve. This was an extremely important revelation for me. If you’re going to call yourself a leader, do you love the people you want to lead enough to discipline yourself? If you don’t, then are you worthy of leading them? It goes back to the Bible, Luke 12: “To whom much is given much is required.”

  Let’s bring this idea down to a more personal level, to those of us who are trying to be leaders of our families. If you’re a father, do you love your wife and children and family life enough to summon the discipline to turn away from the pretty girl in accounting with the come-hither smile? Is half an hour with her in a stairwell or a hotel somewhere spectacular enough for you to throw away all that happiness and possibly wreck your children in the process? If you’re a mom, are you going to succumb to the nice guy in marketing who listens patiently to all your complaints about being bored or unsatisfied in your marriage, one day finding yourself in his arms and in his bed, or are you going to be strong enough for the sake of your family to walk up to your husband and ask him to help you fix what’s broken? If you’re a business owner tempted to cut corners or do something illicit to bring in more cash for your family, think about what might happen to that family if you were hauled away to jail. Being a leader is hard, whether you’re leading a nation, a community, a company, or a family. You’re going to need vast reserves of discipline, patience—and love.

  In all of the work I’ve done over the years, I’ve always been motivated much more by the people I aim to serve than by any accolades or pats on the back from the media or the politically powerful. It’s an inclination that I believe can be traced back to my earliest influences, being drawn to men like Powell not because of the power he had accrued but because of the changes he was able to make in the lives of those he led.

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  YOU NEED TO KNOW WHEN TO QUIT IT

  Two great men from very different spheres of influence taught me a crucial lesson about the importance of timing: knowing when to move on.

  Even before the end is nigh, as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. showed me, you have to start thinking about it, working on an exit plan. If you don’t, if you blithely pass the days thinking you’re going to stick around forever, you end up leading yourself into ruination.

  Powell was dying of cancer and had just narrowly lost in the Democratic primary to Charlie Rangel. The year was 1971, and for the previous two decades, Adam had been the king of Harlem. Everybody wanted him to come back fighting, to take Harlem back from this young upstart Rangel, who had been in the state assembly for four years. I traveled up to Harlem from Brooklyn that Sunday after the election to see him at Abyssinian. He had announced that he was resigning from the church and wasn’t going to fight Rangel. He was gone, retired, and heading to Bimini, the island in the Bahamas where he had a home and spent a lot of his time.

  When I found out that he planned to leave, I asked Odell Clark, his assistant, “Are you kidding me? Why is he gonna do that?”

  Clark said, “You go talk to him, kid.” Powell and his people all used to call me “kid.”

  There was a long hall at Abyssinian that you had to walk down to get to the steps on the side of the church that led to the street. I ran around to the side and saw him in the hall, already coming out of his office. He was holding hands with Darlene Expose, his girlfriend at the time, as he walked down the stairs.

  “Reverend Powell!” I said.

  He turned around and saw me. “Hey, kid,” he said, and he patted me on the head.

  “You can’t leave us,” I said. “You’ve got to run. We’ve gotta get the seat back from Charlie Rangel! What are we going to do?”

  He looked at me closely. He said, “Kid, one day, you’re gonna grow up and be a great man. Always remember this: Know when to hit it, and know when to quit it.” He paused. “For me, it’s quitting time.”

  But I didn’t want to hear that. “Well, what are we gonna do?”

  “I’m going fishing,” he said. “I don’t know what y’all are gonna do.”

  He patted me on the head again. Then they were gone. It was the last time I ever saw him alive.

  Despite it all, he went out a legend, because he didn’t disgrace himself by trying to hold on too long. I’ll always remember what he said: Know when to quit it. When quitting time comes for me, I’m gone.

  I think a lot of my colleagues in public office get into trouble because they lose sight of the point, the reason that drove them into the career in the first place. You’ve got to consciously decide early on, when you get your shot, what are you going to do with it? You’ve got to come ready for execution. You have to aspire to leadership for a reason, not just because it’s your season, not because you think it’s your time to lead. You must have specific things you want to achieve, benchmarks that drive you. Otherwise, if it’s just about the position and the power, you won’t ever want to let it go. But if you had goals, once you have crossed them all off your list, then you can walk away from the job with a smile and a great deal of satisfaction. I can name many leaders who got seduced by the position and lost sight of the goals.

  When I meet young people who tell me they aspire to leadership, my first question is, “To what end?” If they can’t answer that question, then I have to conclude that they don’t really deserve leadership; they’re just trying to be celebrities. We have got enough celebrities. We need some leaders.

  The lack of mentorship is a serious problem in the political realm, across parties and ideologies and racial backgrounds. We all need to be more intentional about bringing along the next generation. All of us, when we have achieved at a certain level, should be asked, “Who are your mentees? Who are you bringing along?” Young people aren’t doing enough to seek out mentors, and older leaders aren’t doing enough to reach back. It is a particularly acute problem in the black community, where you often have a talented young newcomer taking on the old, established lion, who is so eager to hold on to his seat that he will stoop to embarrassing levels to discredit the newcomer. We see this all the time. I think that when you have been denied power and influence for so long, those who break through and gain some power are going to be desperate to keep it. That’s just human nature. But there’s a difference between natural competitiveness and trying unduly to maintain something you should no longer be trying to maintain. I don’t care who you are, at some point, your skills wane, your luster wears off. You should want to go out as a respected figure, rather than playing dirty and undoing all of the goodwill you accumulated. Granted, this is a lot easier said than done. But I think you know when you’ve lost it, whether you are an orator, an athlete, or a leader. When you don’t recognize the signs, the consequences can be dire.

  Muhammad Ali told me that at the end of his career, in the ring, he could see the opening against his opponent, but he couldn’t move his fist fast enough to get there. That’s the sign it’s time to bow out, although too many fighters are not willing to act on it. But if you don’t act, you might wind up on your back, your legacy forever tarnished. It’s so enticing to try to hold on, to give it one more shot. But what you’ve got to think about is how hard it was for you to get there. Do you really want to undermine all that work, all those years of blood and sweat you poured into making your name mean something? I saw guys wind up on their backs, and I don’t want to be that guy. But if you see me slipping, losing my ability to get to
that opening, like Ali, then do me a favor—slide me a note to let me know that it might be time to quit it. But please, be kind.

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  NEVER REST ON YOUR LAURELS

  No matter how high you soar, how many accolades you collect, maybe the most important lesson to hold close can be summarized with few words: Don’t rest on your laurels.

  I came to see the importance of this lesson by closely watching Dr. William Jones. When I was twelve years old, my pastor, Bishop Washington, knowing of my interest in social justice, introduced me to Dr. Jones, who was a lion in the black New York religious community. Dr. Jones was a deep thinker with a fire in his belly for social justice and a hunger to help the poor and oppressed. He was head of the 5,000-member Bethany Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the son and the grandson of Baptist preachers, an academic theologian with degrees from the University of Kentucky and Crozer Theological Seminary, the same institution that helped mold Dr. King. As the New York chairman of Operation Breadbasket, the economic development arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. Jones was the kind of preacher I aspired to be. In Reverend Jones I found a psychic fit, a leader who wanted to get out there and confront authority on behalf of his people.

  Reverend Jones died the same year as James Brown, in 2006, removing two great influences from my life in rapid succession. But Reverend Jones told me something a year before he passed that will always stay with me.

  He said, “Alfred, I only fear three things.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I fear God, I fear living past my mourners, and I fear drowning in shallow waters,” he said, his booming voice filling his office.

  He saw the quizzical look on my face and kept going.

  “I don’t want to be so old that when I die, there’s nobody around who knew my glory. I still want to be relevant when I die. And I don’t want to have scaled the oceans, beaten the whales, outrun the sharks, and then come into the shallow water around the kids playing in the sandbar and drown in the shallow waters.”

  He turned to me with a look that was almost haunting. “You’re on your way now; you will make your mark in history,” he said. “But watch out for the shallow water. Don’t go out on some shallow foolishness.”

  Examples abound in popular culture of leaders brought down by indiscretions, usually connected to sex or money—from Rev. Jimmy Swaggart to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, from Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to Rep. Anthony Weiner. Leaders who soiled years of accomplishment with carelessness, recklessness, and extremely poor judgment.

  It’s a powerful lesson, because once you ascend to a certain level, the temptation is always there to relax, to get sloppy. You’re thinking, Oh, boy, I can have fun now. And then you find yourself gasping for air in that shallow water. Next thing you know, you’ve undone decades of hard work.

  If you ever find yourself flailing about in shallow water, you must remember the first step to saving yourself and getting back on track: Stand up.

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  BE AUTHENTIC

  I am powerfully reminded of the need to be authentic, to be real, every time I go out into the community to preach or meet my people at some event. When I am invited to give a sermon or to speak at a church anniversary or an awards dinner, I make sure I come down from the pulpit and spend as much time as possible mixing and socializing with people, taking pictures, shaking hands, accepting hugs and kisses. I might have a million people watching me every night on television and a half-million people listening to me every day on the radio, but it’s the regular folks at the church events and in the community who sustain me and make me what I am, not the TV show on MSNBC. It’s those grandmas on fixed incomes who scrape their quarters together to make it down to the church to hear me. When there is no more MSNBC show, those women will still be there for me. I’m more concerned with them saying, “I’m with you, Reverend Al, I’m praying for you, don’t let us down,” than I am concerned about some editorial in the newspaper or on a website slamming me.

  Now, I understand that there are others in leadership, even in the black community, who have to deal with the editorial writer in the cubicle, because they have to run for office. I get that; that’s their lane. But my lane is over here, fighting for the grandma in Ohio, the black kid in the hood who can’t find a job, the family whose child has just been victimized by the police or by a fake neighborhood watchman because of how he looked. Those are the people Reverend Jones always put at the top of his list. I have always tried to do the same, following the lead of my pastor. As long as I keep my focus on them, then I know I’ll be all right. Once you lose your touch with the people you’re supposed to be serving, sooner or later, you become irrelevant.

  I recently spoke at a church in the Midwest, and just before I left, someone asked me if I could go back up on the stage and take pictures with a bunch of kids who were there. I didn’t hesitate. It was so easy for me to remember when I was one of those kids. It was me standing there taking a picture with Adam Powell. It was me standing there taking a picture with Jesse Jackson. And I know there may come a day when one of those kids will think, I don’t have to be an athlete, I can be a leader, like Al Sharpton.

  Even during my sermon that night, I glanced up to the balcony and saw a group of kids from the church. There were about fifteen or twenty of them, mostly fidgeting in their seats and trying to make it through my sermon. But if you looked closely, you could notice that two of them weren’t fidgeting at all. They were engrossed, taking in every word. That was me fifty years ago, sitting in Washington Temple, studying every utterance and nuance of every preacher who came through there.

  You never know whom you may touch, so you have to make yourself available to that, open yourself up to the possibility that staying a little longer after the speech, wading into the crowd to shake hands and take pictures, answering every question that is asked of you, might be the crucial moment when something clicks in a young mind, when a seed is planted, and that kid blossoms into a great leader. These great leaders always made themselves available to me, so it’s only right for me to do the same. I was this chubby little kid from the hood. Why would I turn out to be anything? Why would a great leader think it was important to have a word with me? But they did. Those young people, that grandma on a fixed income, it is their plight that I’m trying to bear. They are the ones I serve.

  I think some of the most disappointing moments of my career have come when I met leaders who were leading people they didn’t even like. Forget love—they see their flock as just props, extras to help them reach their life goals, backdrops in their photo ops. I think when you have those feelings about your constituents, they can feel it. You can only fake the affection for so long. People know. James Brown used to tell me that people can feel you before they can hear you. Especially people who have been oppressed. They have been exploited so much that their antennas are always up, checking for authenticity, kicking the tires, making sure you are real. They know who’s authentic and who’s not. They can’t even tell you how they know, can’t even describe what is missing. They just know.

  So that’s why it’s so important for leaders to be themselves. Even if sometimes that means not being the perfect candidate, or the perfect pastor, or the perfect principal. People will accept you and your mistakes much more readily if they feel you’re being real. What they won’t accept is a phony. I’ve made a ton of mistakes in my career, but the people I was trying to lead didn’t hold them against me, because they could see the content of my heart. They could feel it. It’s like the saying I hear all the time in politics: It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. You make the mistake, people understand. But when you try to disguise it and play them for the fool, that’s when you’re going to pay dearly.

  The Bible is filled with examples of the importance of authenticity and the many rewards that will flow to you when you don’t try to be something that you’re not. When
Moses found out that he was actually an Israelite and not an Egyptian, he went and found his people and became a great leader to them, rather than trying to live more comfortably as one of the ruling Egyptians.

  When God called Gideon to lead the Israelites from oppression, Gideon didn’t try to hide his fear and pretend he was some heroic figure. No, he asked God to prove Himself before Gideon would commit to taking on a massive army. So that’s when God drenched the fleece in dew, to demonstrate His power.

  I think it’s only natural to wrestle with yourself when you are faced with the opportunity to be something you’re not. Who among us doesn’t want to be perceived as smarter or braver or grander than we really are? But it is when you win that wrestling match with yourself that you begin to approach greatness.

  Those who listen to me on the pulpit or in front of the mic might notice that I mix a lot of humor into my orations. It was always a part of my personality to be funny, but at an early age, I decided to develop and use humor in my sermonizing. I think it’s extremely important when converting people to make them comfortable; it adds a great deal to your authenticity. You have to let people know that you are not dropped out of heaven onto earth like some flawless gift of God. That’s not going to get you as far as letting them see that you came through the same insecurities, the same anxieties, the same fears, the same temptations that they did. I came from the ground up; I didn’t come from the sky down. When people realize that about you, they can relate to you better and therefore are more open to your message.