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

by Al Sharpton

  Our children see the condition of their schools and understand what the society is telling them: You are not important. If you’re black, Latino, or poor white, and your school is falling apart—and the fancy public school across town is dripping with amenities—and you’re already inundated with videos and music that says you’re nothing but a nigga, a bitch, a spic, a ho, what are you supposed to think but that you’re nobody? You don’t have a sports team, you don’t have a pool, you don’t even have computers in your classroom.

  It all matches the message you’re hearing on the radio: You ain’t shit.

  But if each of us looks upon these children as our own, if we consider that we all have a responsibility to not only the young people in our families but also the ones in our neighborhoods, our communities, and across the nation, we will all feel it intimately when children in a particular community are forgotten or disrespected. That should be a requirement for citizenship in this country we profess to love: If you truly love America, you will also love Americans.

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  DON’T GET HYPNOTIZED BY THE SHINY OBJECTS

  I first met James Brown when I was a boy growing up in Hollis, Queens, not far from the big house where Brown lived. The kids on the block would stand by the gate outside his house, which loomed before our young eyes like an urban castle, and wait for him to come out and talk to us. He would tell us the sorts of things that older black people liked to tell kids: “Stay in school” or “Don’t do drugs.” He’d also say things you were not likely to hear from a lot of other black people at the time, such as “Be proud of being black.” He was already a towering figure in the music industry by then, the creator of both funk and soul music, with iconic hits such as “Cold Sweat,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” (a song that many credit for making the African-American community begin to favor the descriptive moniker black instead of Negro).

  The relationship I had with James Brown turned out to be one of the most meaningful associations I’ve had in my life, one that shaped a lot of what I eventually became.

  In 1973, when I was eighteen, James heard about my National Youth Movement and decided he wanted to help me raise money by doing a benefit concert. James seemed to really like me and took me under his wing. He started inviting me to his shows to help out, eventually bringing me all around the world with him and even appointing me as his manager because he knew he could trust me. Our relationship became like father and son. In fact, James’s father, Joe Brown, once said I brought out the best in James because he wanted to live up to my admiration of him.

  Those years with James were a heady, glorious time for me. I learned a great deal about human nature, about business, about the black community, about the music industry, and I met huge stars in just about every field imaginable.

  In fact, James was the one who told me to shorten my name to Al. Up to that point, I was known as Alfred Sharpton.

  “Reverend,” he said to me one day (he always called me Reverend). “Cut it to Al. You don’t need four bars [as in ‘Al-fred Sharp-ton’]. Just Al Sharpton. Alfred’s too much.”

  If James Brown tells you to shorten your name for the aural benefits, you do it. From that day forward, I was Al Sharpton.

  In a profile somebody wrote on me years back, the writer recounted how I was kind of adopted by James Brown when I was eighteen, after his son Teddy died in a car crash. He said this period with Brown defined me, because that’s where I got my style and where I learned to deal with the grass roots—the people with backgrounds similar to James’s, the marginalized and the dispossessed. But I don’t think that’s completely accurate. What really defined me during that time was my decision to leave James Brown.

  During the year and a half that I stayed with James, I was thrown smack into the middle of a teenager’s dream: nights in Vegas, parties in Hollywood, shows in London. I was there when he left to perform before the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight, the famous “Rumble in the Jungle.” I was nineteen, and I was a player at some of the most intoxicating cultural events of our time. Can you imagine? He was one of the biggest figures in the entertainment industry, and I was his right hand. What more could a kid ask for?

  But I wasn’t happy. I knew this was not what God intended for me, to be a road manager and assistant for James Brown. There were bigger things in store for me, a path that I needed to begin to walk. That’s why I say don’t get hypnotized by the shiny objects, the so-called bling. It would have been easy for me to stick around and live large, but it didn’t feed my spirit. So I left James and went back to my mother’s place in Brownsville, Brooklyn. James couldn’t believe it.

  “Oh, he’ll be back,” James told the people around him. “He can’t make a living.”

  I wasn’t exactly certain what my purpose was in life, but I knew following James around wasn’t it. I dedicated myself to building my National Youth Movement. There were no guarantees, but it’s what I had to do.

  When I counsel up-and-coming young leaders, I try to get them to practice consequential thinking: If I do this, what is the consequence? It’s something my best friend, Dwight McKee, has been saying in my ear for decades. I tell them the two things you have to be most careful of are money and sex. Those are the twin evils, the flagrant, tantalizing mistakes that will bring the media firestorm every time. When you fall in those two areas, everyone’s coming after you. I’ve made mistakes with money—not really doing anything wrong or egregious but not being obsessively careful. I got lax with my recordkeeping and accounting, and the government came along and accused me of unpaid taxes in amounts that exceeded a million dollars. Even if you didn’t do anything wrong, you can’t say, “To hell with them!” and walk away. The Bible tells us to avoid even the appearance of wrong, so even if you didn’t do the things you are being accused of, it becomes a huge distraction.

  Huge distractions also come in the form of sex scandals. This is obviously the most lethal trap in public life, the area where a monklike discipline is sometimes required. Yeah, that young lady looks great, but is she worth it? Is it worth you not being able to have the moral authority to stand up and raise issues? What’s more important to you, a weekend in Bimini with a young woman or standing up and changing the course of history?

  This is a lesson many men and women can relate to: the need for personal discipline when it comes to pleasures of the flesh. It can happen so quickly—a kind smile and a batting of the eyelashes, and the next thing you know, you can wind up in something you can’t get out of without causing heartache and pain. It can happen anywhere, everywhere—the church, the entertainment world, professional life, doctors’ offices, law firms. In this age of technology, you don’t even have to be in the same place to fall into something unseemly. I tell the people around me all the time, whatever you do in life, assume it’s public. So the consequential thinking is, weigh what you’re doing compared with your destination. If it’s going to get in the way of where you’re trying to go or how you want to be perceived, then don’t do it. And just as important, don’t lie to yourself and claim you don’t have temptation. That church song says, “Yield not to temptation.” So the presumption is that there is going to be temptation. I get tempted every day, but I realize you can’t have your cake—success and respectability—and eat it, too. I don’t think I need to explain the rest of that saying; you get the picture.

  Public life can be lonely. I learned that early on during my days with James. It was probably one of the reasons he liked having me around, companionship that didn’t make a lot of demands on him. It’s a lesson that has been hammered home for me as I became nationally known. You can’t just walk out of your house and go to the movies like everybody else, because people are going to bother you. Walking to the corner becomes a public display. So you tend to withdraw a bit, and there are very few people you can talk to who really understand what it’s like, who operate at the
same level as you do. That means your circle gets smaller and smaller, the bigger you get. As a result, entertainers, political figures, and athletes may wind up using drugs and having reckless sexual liaisons, among other things, to fill in that loneliness. I saw what happened to James Brown, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson. I took them as cautionary tales, warnings about what happens when you get reckless. I loved James Brown like a father, but I saw him getting himself deeper into legal trouble, having bouts with demons like drugs, totally undermining his career and maybe the length of his life.

  A big issue becomes, whom are you going to trust? I tell young entertainers all the time, you can go out with some random woman you meet somewhere, some woman you don’t really know, and if she’s outside your circle of trust, if she doesn’t understand the game inside the circle, then after you have your fun, you end up on some website with buck-naked pictures of you sleeping or doing something worse. That’s the world we live in now. I’ve committed myself to talking about this stuff with young people, because a lot of my role models and mentors wouldn’t talk to me much about such things. They didn’t want to admit that they had flaws. James Brown was one of the few who invested a lot of time in making sure I knew all about his mistakes. He would tell me, “I did this, Rev, and you should never make that mistake.” But most of them wanted to look infallible. I think you wind up looking stronger when you can discuss your flaws and then overcome them. If you can’t even admit to them, you’ll never overcome them.

  While I was with James, sometimes I got powerful reminders that I was in the company of one of the most important musical legends of our time. There was one night in Augusta in the early 1970s that stands out for me. I was just a teenager, but even then, I could understand that I had just been granted a peek at something magical. James and I were driving in his van, just the two of us, with him at the wheel—as a New Yorker, I’ve never learned to drive—down a dark street in the heart of Augusta’s black community. Suddenly, James pulled the van over to the side of the road. He was staring across the street at a big church. I could see that it was the United House of Prayer for All People, the Augusta chapter of Daddy Grace’s church. Daddy Grace was a charismatic black evangelist and one of the first black religious leaders to put a band in his church.

  “You hear that band?” James said to me, pointing up at the church, which was lit up like a Christmas tree and pulsing with the sound of a jamming band.

  I nodded.

  Smiling, James told me that he learned the beat he later made famous, the half-beat, from listening to the drummer in Daddy Grace’s band.

  When James said, “I’m on the one!” that’s what he was talking about. James took that half-beat out of the church and changed the course of music history.

  People would later ask me how I could reconcile growing up in the church with going out on the road with a huge secular music star like James, but it really didn’t feel like such a big leap. There was not much difference between James Brown on the road and Mahalia Jackson on the road, other than the genre of the music they were singing. A lot of the rhythms, the bands, and the lifestyles were the same. James would take me out with him on the weekends; Mahalia would take me out on the weekends. It was still hotel, gig, airport, hotel, gig, airport. Same thing. And the people were the same: talented musicians, little formal education, living by their wits. The members of the JBs were the same people as the members of Rev. C. L. Franklin’s choir.

  Being in the studio with James was like suspending time. I was there when he recorded “It’s Too Funky in Here.” I was with him in New York when he did “Papa Don’t Take No Mess.” When James recorded, he would actually dance as if he was onstage. He’d be dripping wet. He was famous for his Live at the Apollo recordings, but every recording with him was like a live recording, because he would actually do the spins and all the moves there in the studio. He said he wanted to feel the song while he recorded it. And he’d do it over and over and over again. He had become famous for his demanding, taskmaster ways, and I saw them up close. The more exhausted the band got, the more James said, “We’re gonna do it again.” You were almost ready to jump out the window of the studio. Over the years, I got to where I just knew that if I got a call at night from James, “Rev, you’re going with us to the studio,” I was not going to see daylight until about ten the next morning. It was nothing to him to do nine or ten hours in a row. It seemed as if he just enjoyed having me there with him.

  When he finished a song, he’d always want to know, “What do you think? How did you like it? You think it’s gonna be a hit?”

  To James, every song he did was the best song he’d ever recorded. No matter how many hits he already had, he’d say, “This one is gonna be bigger than anything I ever did. This is the hit. This is the one.”

  It fascinated me how he would always cut more songs than they were scheduled to do; he’d cut three or four songs that just disappeared into the ether. Maybe four years later, he’d pull one out and say, “Time to put this on the album now.” He’d have a sense when he made the recording that it wasn’t the right time for the public, but he heard the music, and he heard the words, and he wanted to record it.

  One day in 1979, several years after I left him the first time, I got a memorable phone call from James.

  “Rev, I think I want to do a gospel-rap record,” he said.

  “Gospel-rap?” I said, not understanding how those two things could possibly go together.

  “Yep. I want you to preach. I’m going to sing. I’ve never done a gospel song.”

  But I was still confused. “Me preach and you sing? How’s that going to go?”

  “Rev, I got this,” he said.

  So after I flew down to Augusta, we got into his van, and he drove us to a studio in Greenville, South Carolina, driving about ninety miles an hour the whole way. The JBs were already there when we arrived. James liked the James Cleveland song “God Has Smiled on Me,” so that’s the one we were going to do but reimagined with an up-tempo beat. He taught the band the tempo he wanted. After about two hours, when they finally got it, he started singing, “God has smiled on me . . . He has set me free . . .” And then he pointed at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Preach!” he said.

  “What am I going to say?”

  “Just say it from your heart!”

  And so he started it again, then he pointed at me—and I started preaching. He’d break in and start singing again, then he’d point at me to preach again. We did that for hours, recording two or three songs that night, with James, me, and the JBs. James believed in improvising. He didn’t read music; he didn’t even really read lyrics. He mostly believed in going with what came from the heart. And that’s what he wanted me to do. The man was truly a gifted musical talent.

  James tried to get those songs out on the market for mass distribution, but he never found a willing partner in the music industry. I still have the recordings, though.

  After we made that record, James asked me to stay with him again. His manager at the time had just had a heart attack, and he needed some help keeping the proverbial trains running. He got me a house, and I moved back to Augusta. This was when I began a serious relationship with Kathy, one of his background singers, whom I had met years earlier during my first stint with him. We got married during this time and lived in my house in Augusta. But I woke up one morning and realized I needed to leave James again. I didn’t want to be in entertainment. Yes, I was making money. Yes, I was married now and had responsibilities larger than myself. But I wasn’t happy. I knew what I was doing just wasn’t me.

  I brought Kathy back with me to Brooklyn, and we lived in my mother’s house for six months. Again, James kept predicting that I would come back because of the money—and he was right; I was broke. But I had fixed it in my mind that I would establish myself in the ministry and by doing activist work. I was constantly being pushed in that direction by invisible forces. I was broke, but I was happy.r />
  A year or two later, on December 22, 1984, a white man named Bernhard Goetz, fearing that he was about to be robbed, opened fire on a group of four black male teenagers on the Number 2 subway train in Manhattan, igniting a blaze of controversy and media scrutiny. To me, the racial connotations were clear. While many were lauding this man as the heroic “Subway Vigilante,” I knew I had to call attention to the risks of allowing anyone who perceived danger to open fire on black males. As I began to stage protests in the Goetz case, I started to find my rhythm. My civil rights career was reborn, and I never looked back.

  I thought I had permanently left entertainment behind, but the music business wasn’t done with me yet. Don King, the biggest boxing promoter in the world, decided that I should become a major concert promoter, working alongside him to become to the music industry what he was to the boxing world. I had worked with King on the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984, which King had promoted, and I had helped promote a few other concerts. Even Michael Jackson and James Brown were urging me to do it. But that’s not what I wanted to be.

  When you know what you want to do, you get to the point where you don’t even need guarantees that it’s going to work. If you have that conviction, you will turn down guaranteed income, big stacks of dollars that could be very helpful in raising a family, and you will wander down the uncertain path. But I did have one guarantee: I knew I would be happier on that uncertain path.

  Over the next decade, I watched as James Brown’s half-beat became influential in another music form that was growing like fertile vines in my native New York City: rap music. Rap was a powerful rebellion against a cultural mainstream that was ignoring the pain and deprivation in the inner city. From its first notes, rap became an angry canvas on which these urban geniuses painted their pulsating, lyrical masterpieces. The volatile ethos of rap was captured perfectly by Public Enemy in their seminal song, “Fight the Power.” Rap artists at the time were the antithesis of what was accepted in the music world. It was the same way James Brown was seen in his time. Rappers were drawn to the rage and the hope that came through James’s music. He became like the patron saint of rap and appears to have been sampled by the rap culture more than any other artist. Songs such as “The Payback” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” all found their way into the belly of rap, woven into beats and melodies like an intricate web of black consciousness and black anger, raging against the cultural and musical establishment. Rap and James came from the same places, the raw soul of black America.