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

by Al Sharpton

  But I still have the need, the desire, to try to drive this generation toward a greater understanding, to understand the roots of what it is they call their art form. They need to know the historical antecedents and the moral dynamic from which this all sprang. The contradiction, the soullessness of modern hip-hop, was laid bare by the whole Occupy movement. Artists such as Jay-Z and others were caught out there, ostensibly sitting on the wrong side of the movement, on the wrong side of history.

  Here was a movement telling the world that it represented the 99 percent who were being economically oppressed by the richest 1 percent, and the modern incarnation of hip-hop is doing everything it can to be in the 1 percent. Flashing the bling, bragging about your opulence, and conspicuous consumption while your people are suffering. So what the growth of this movement—and the statements made by rappers saying they didn’t understand the movement—revealed was that modern hip-hop is not reflecting the times. There’s a tragic tension that was uncovered. And if they’re not careful, these artists are going to become victimized by that. The people who are buying their music are the ones who are being economically exploited. The artists can’t begin to look like the exploiters. Creating a fantasy world in the music is one thing, but they can’t also look as if they are trying to embody the exploiters in their real lives. And most important of all, they can’t look as if they are oblivious to the exploitation. That is not black music. And it has never been.

  The key is not to get too sucked in by the fabulousness that’s being offered—in the entertainment business or any other career that might be beckoning to you. Once you let in the bling, get seduced by the opulence or the grand lifestyle, it becomes so easy for you to get lost. The big picture is a distant memory, and pretty soon you don’t even remember why you got into the business in the first place. When that happens, you’re vulnerable to any dude with a hefty checkbook, asking you to sell your soul.

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  HOW TO BE THE GREATEST

  There are lessons, and then there are moments that are so impactful that they sit in your memory forever, frozen in time like an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. Such was the day in Central Park when Muhammad Ali taught me what it means to push yourself to be the greatest of all time.

  I knew some of the guys in the Nation of Islam and through them got to know Muhammad Ali. This was in the mid-’70s, after he had regained his title in Zaire in 1974—a fight I had attended as part of James Brown’s entourage. Whenever Ali came through New York, I would spend time with him.

  In 1977, Ali was in training for his fight against the hard-hitting Earnie Shavers at Madison Square Garden. It would turn out to be his last fight at the Garden, the fight before he lost the title to Leon Spinks five months later. Ali, then thirty-five, would wake up before dawn to run around the Central Park reservoir, the large, scenic lake that sits in the middle of the park. The one-and-a-half-mile track around the reservoir has been a popular jogging site for celebrities and everyday New Yorkers for years, and it has even been featured in movies.

  “I’m going runnin’ in the morning, you going with me?” Ali asked me one day.

  I nodded eagerly, thrilled to get a chance to “train” with the champ. I was in my early twenties, old enough to think I might be able to keep up with him for a minute.

  The next morning, I stumbled out of bed in the wee hours, the night sky still blanketing the city. I put on my sneakers and got on an empty subway train in Brooklyn. I met the champ and his entourage at the Statler Hilton in Midtown, now the Hotel Pennsylvania, across the street from Madison Square Garden. We were whisked up to Central Park, the city streets still relatively quiet.

  I noticed that Ali was wearing heavy brogan boots, which I thought odd since we were going running.

  “Why are you wearing boots?” I asked him.

  “It makes my legs stronger,” he said.

  He was also coated in Albolene cream, which he told me made him sweat.

  “All right, Champ, twenty-two minutes,” his trainer, Angelo Dundee, announced.

  So Ali started running. And I started running, too. Very quickly, I was behind him, huffing, trying to last as long as I could. He was well ahead of me, but I pushed myself to keep going. By the time the champ had gone around the reservoir about two times, he started clocking Dundee’s twenty-two minutes. I was confused.

  “We already did fifteen minutes,” I said. “Why are you starting the clock now?”

  “I train myself to start timing after I’m tired,” he explained as we ran. “After I’m spent. ’Cause that’s how I make it in the late rounds when all of it is gone. When I don’t have any more. I train myself to keep fighting beyond what’s easy for me.”

  Right there, I knew I had heard something important. This was one of the traits that made him a great champion.

  I saw that same trait in the studio with James Brown at four in the morning, cutting some of the most important recordings in music history when the band wanted to go back to the hotel. James was never satisfied, always pushing the band to do it one more time.

  I saw it with Michael Jackson, practically living in the studio for weeks at a time until his music was exactly where he wanted it.

  These were men who had risen to the height of their game, demonstrating to me the discipline and hard work required to get there—and stay there. Of course, they might have had more fun with some fine woman or hanging out all night at a party, but that’s not who they were. They were about the sacrifice. They taught me that essential lesson: If you want to ascend to that next level, you have to learn to walk past the many temptations that will be thrown in your path. I kept that thought close at hand later on, when my own celebrity would bring me all kinds of enticing propositions from people who didn’t necessarily have my best interests at heart. Walking away was easier for me because of the influence of men like Ali in my life. If you’re not willing to make those sacrifices, you’re not going to achieve your goal. You might have some fun, but you won’t get where you’re trying to go.

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  STAY FOCUSED, AND DON’T BE RULED BY YOUR EMOTIONS

  Whether it was my search for a father figure or for a clearer idea of how to turn myself into a great civil rights activist, one big lesson I took away from all of the men I followed early in my life was the notion that in order to rise, I had to be focused and intentional and committed to a cause greater than myself. The word focus here is key. It’s something I believe I was lacking early in my career, when I too often allowed my emotions to control me. That was a mistake I made with one of the cases with which my name became indelibly linked: Tawana Brawley.

  If I had it to do over again, there are things I would do differently, knowing what I now know about human nature, about the criminal justice system, about the media. The entirety of the case hinged on whether this young black girl in Upstate New York had been violated, as she said she was, by a white police officer, among others. Sensational stuff, sure, but there’s no way I would ever turn my back on a young teenage girl in need, even if her claims were going to turn into an explosive media story. That’s just not in my nature. But my first miscalculation was in making the case so personal—us against Robert Abrams, the special prosecutor. The lawyers I was working with and I did a whole lot of name-calling. In these instances, the right approach is to fight the case, not demonize the actors. Because when you allow it to become personal, you take away from the objective. Here’s a young lady who says she was violated. Let’s deal with the facts, what we know. You can conduct an investigation and try to determine what happened to her, but you can’t just ignore it because she said the perpetrators were law enforcement. That’s what we feared was happening, that the authorities were automatically dismissing her as a liar.

  Years later, when I got involved in the Trayvon Martin case after he was gunned down by George Zimmerman, who still hadn’t been arrested, I never once even used the name of the sheriff in
Sanford, Florida. That was after years of learning the danger of making it personal. Are you about the issues and getting justice, or are you about the sound bite and the name-calling? Hell, we used to call David Dinkins, who was New York’s first black mayor, names. What did that get us? Rudy Giuliani.

  But it took time, maturity, and growth for me to transform into the kind of leader who had the discipline to control myself and my emotions. I learned by trial and error, making some painful mistakes along the way.

  I’ll never forget a poignant moment I had one day with Stokely Carmichael, the former Black Panther who changed his name to Kwame Ture. He had originally been a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), participating in the Freedom Rides and working closely with King, but he became more radicalized and moved to the Black Panthers. He was the man credited with popularizing the term Black Power. He came by the headquarters for my organization, the National Action Network, in the ’90s, a couple of years before his death in 1998, and sat with me to talk.

  He said, “You know something, you’re following the tradition of Dr. King. I helped start the Black Power movement, but it was a different strand.”

  “You used to attack Dr. King,” I said.

  “Yep, called him a bunch of names. You know something? When Dr. King got killed, I went to his funeral, and I cried more than his kids.”

  “Really? Why did you do that?” I asked.

  He said, “Because all them years when we would say it’s not about turning the other cheek, it’s about Black Power, and you’re a Tom, you’re an old man, he would just smile and never respond. He never once called us a name. Not once. He said he really loved his people, and sometimes you gotta take it for a bigger cause. I never forgot that.”

  Here was Stokely Carmichael, who got famous as the antithesis to King, in the end respecting King more than anyone. I actually went back and studied that further. He was right; King never responded to Malcolm, never responded to all the attacks from the more militant blacks. That was a real lesson for me. When I was younger, I was always ready to go at somebody, tit for tat. I considered it an essential part of who I was, part of being a New Yorker. You call me a name? Oh, OK, let’s go at it. I used to go on talk shows and argue, fight, cuss, whatever. But at some point, you realize that always engaging in the fight doesn’t help your cause. If you’re going to be focused on becoming a real leader, you learn that some stuff shouldn’t even be dignified with a response. Somebody attacks you with craziness? OK, I’ll be all those things you said I am, but you’re still going to give justice to Trayvon Martin. OK, I’ll be all that, but you’re still going to give us this Affordable Care Act. Again, you have to be focused and intentional and committed to a cause greater than yourself. If I’m attacked from the right, with people calling me a radical, my reaction is going to be, “OK, whatever.” It’s not going to bother me. If I’m attacked from the left—people saying, “You’re too close to Obama, you’re becoming a part of the system”—my response will be, “OK, got it. But I need to go get this Trayvon Martin case in court.” Or, “OK, I heard you, but I need to help the president with health care. Our community is disproportionately impacted by coverage denial because we have so many people with preexisting conditions.”

  I’m focused because, at the end of the day, when they stretch me out and lay me down, those names I’m being called aren’t going to mean anything. They’re going to say you either accomplished this or that, or you didn’t. And that’s where you have to keep your focus. That’s running the laps before the twenty-two minutes is even being counted, like Ali. That’s staying in the studio all night until it’s perfect, like James Brown. I know the difference between great men and famous men, because I’ve been around great men.

  Strangely enough, I think it was a work of fiction that stamped me in the eyes of white people inside and outside of New York, creating a portrait that made them think they understood who I was. That portrait came from the mind of novelist Tom Wolfe and his book The Bonfire of the Vanities. Released in 1987, Wolfe’s novel featured a character named Rev. Reginald Bacon, who was supposed to be based on me. Bacon was a community organizer who was also exploiting the community and taking money on the side by shaking down elected officials. I think the media and the public “Baconized” me as a way to avoid dealing with the issues of racism and police brutality that I was raising. That was a convenient excuse not to deal with the discomfiting questions, dismissing me as a fraud because of a fictional character in a novel. Talk about laziness.

  And if they are going to turn me into Bacon, at least follow it all the way through. If I’m picketing the city officials, like the character in the book, and I’m shaking down city officials, like the character in the book, then ask the question: What is Sharpton getting from city officials? What is Sharpton getting from Mayor Ed Koch, who was my most frequent target at the time? Where is the shakedown? Years later, when the late Mayor Koch came to my fiftieth birthday party after he and I had worked together on an education-related nonprofit program, the mayor was asked how he could work with Al Sharpton, of all people, after the nastiness of all those years, when he used to call me “Al Charlatan” and I called him “Bull Koch.”

  Koch answered, “Oh, we fought, we disagreed—and still do. But I never felt he was a hypocrite. He never came and asked for anything. He didn’t have an ulterior motive, whereas many other leaders would say to me, ‘I need this program, I need this day-care center, I need this for my church.’ ”

  I never asked for public funding for anything, so there would be no confusion about my motives. I always raised my own money. So where was the “Bacon”? But over the years, as I got older and gained a better understanding of the inner workings of the media machine—hell, as much as it pains me to admit it, I’m actually a member of the media myself these days!—I understand it now: If you’re a young reporter and you want to impress your editor, then you want to go back to the newsroom with “gotchas.” You don’t want to run back into the newsroom and say, “Hey, do you want to know the real story of Al Sharpton?”

  Tawana Brawley came along later in 1987, after the Wolfe book had become a big hit, soon to be made into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis, and that was that. It all became self-fulfilling: Sharpton is a huckster.

  One of the most telling revelations of the civil rights work I did in the 1980s and 1990s was how uncomfortable New Yorkers were with the social unrest. For the first time, we brought a Southern kind of civil disobedience movement to New York over a long period of time. This was Malcolm X’s town; King and Jesse never brought any campaigns to New York. When we marched in Howard Beach, in Bensonhurst, did the “Days of Outrage” to protest police brutality, this was something the city hadn’t ever seen: a sustained movement, jumping on issue after issue, rallying every week, leading nonviolent marches, disrupting the city, shutting down bridges, willingly going to jail. It was new, so the reaction of the media and the public was expected: This makes us uncomfortable, so we must demonize it. Even black people were made uncomfortable by all the fuss, because they had never seen it before.

  But one of the reasons I was able to keep doing it, despite all the attacks, was that I believed in it, saw it as essential to making the city—my city—more just and fair. I didn’t come to New York; I was New York. I grew up in Queens and Brooklyn. I knew how to talk to the guys in the street, ’cause I had been talking to them and preaching to them since I was a little boy. Everything I had been doing for the previous twenty years had prepared me to be a civil rights leader in my city. Even though my mother and my siblings and potential mates thought I was crazy, I was doing exactly what I had pictured myself doing. They would say, “Al, how in the hell you gonna build a career doing that?” But I never thought about it that way. Growing up as a boy preacher, I never knew normal. So I never pictured a nine-to-five gig in my future.

  In the early ’90s, I would have regular meetings at Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem with t
wo close friends of mine, David Paterson and Greg Meeks. All of us were in our thirties at the time, born within a year of one another, and we were all thinking about where we wanted our careers to take us next. On one particular day, we conducted a little poll on where we saw ourselves headed. It was a pivotal moment for us, because it showed how we were activating the long-term vision that would propel us. We went around the table. David went first. His father, Basil Paterson, is still one of the deans of New York politics, particularly in Harlem, and has served the city in many capacities—state senator, deputy mayor, New York secretary of state, and currently a prominent labor lawyer at the age of eighty-seven. In 1985, David was elected to the state senate, taking the seat once held by his father.

  “I think I’m going to be the next David Dinkins, the next black mayor,” David said.

  Meeks went next. A Harlem kid raised in a housing project, Meeks had already succeeded spectacularly, first as an assistant district attorney and then as a politician; he had just been elected to the state assembly.

  “I want to be the next congressman from Queens,” he said.

  They got around to me. I had already been through the wrenching ordeals of Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and quite a few other high-profile instances of racial injustice in the city. I had just started my National Action Network to bring some structure to my activism and had recently run for the U.S. Senate in New York. But up to that point, my work had mostly been contained in the city.