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

by Al Sharpton

  I was fortunate that Vieques forced me to step off the treadmill and look inward. It was a time-out that I wasn’t looking for, one that I never would have chosen on my own. But it was certainly a crucial process for me. I think most of us need to do that type of self-assessment from time to time, but we rarely get the time or opportunity to do it. If I hadn’t been locked away in a Brooklyn prison, I’m sure I wouldn’t have done it, either. So what started out for me as one of the low points of my career, with shackles and strip searches and long, lonely nights in an empty ward, in the end turned out to be one of the most important periods of my life. What I learned during those fifty days was how necessary it is for personal growth and transformation for every single one of us to take occasional time-outs to work on ourselves. It feels almost antithetical to the growth process—how can you grow and improve yourself by doing nothing? But I think many of us use the busy work as a distraction, a way to avoid asking ourselves the hard questions. It’s like what happens in a troubled marriage when a baby comes along and takes the focus off the fraying marital bond; but then the baby starts growing up, needing less attention, and the couple turns back to each other, only to realize there’s very little left to save in their marriage. If we can allow ourselves to step off the hamster wheel from time to time, maybe even go somewhere to get away from the craziness that swirls around us, I think it can be enormously beneficial. I got my little vacation right there in my hometown of Brooklyn, free of charge.

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  DEFINE YOURSELF—BEFORE OTHERS DO IT FOR YOU

  One of the most valuable lessons James Brown taught me was the importance of defining yourself instead of letting others define you. Considering the incredible amount of nasty attacks and characterizations I’ve gotten in the media over the years, this became one of the most vital lessons I’ve ever learned.

  James was born in the woods in South Carolina and raised in Augusta, Georgia. When he was three, his mother left. He never saw her again until he was starring at the Apollo Theater. When James was six, his father left him with his aunt, who ran a whorehouse in Augusta. Before James went to live with his aunt, his father would be gone all day, trying to find trees to tap for turpentine, leaving James alone in the woods for long periods of time. He said his best friends were the doodlebugs and insects. But this time allowed James to develop his own personality, one that was quite independent of what others thought of him.

  One day, James said to me, “Reverend, there’s one thing I always want you to promise me.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Don’t ever be one of the boys,” he said. “Always define yourself. I learned in the woods that I had to depend on myself, make myself what I wanted to be. Don’t mold yourself after somebody else.”

  In the end, I wanted to be able to go to my grave saying I had helped build a movement that made a difference. In order to do that, you have to build alliances, extend yourself, push the envelope. Move outside of your comfort zone. Otherwise, what’s it all for?

  If not for those months of reflection in 2001, I might not have been open to taking a path that would ultimately lead me to my own show on MSNBC. That wasn’t something that was in the script of a civil rights leader. Yeah, Jesse Jackson had a show at one point, but being a TV talk-show host is not really in the activist handbook. If I had been listening over the years to the nasty ways in which I had been defined by others, if I had let the negativity of those New York Post cartoons seep into my soul, I probably would have been too afraid to put myself out there on a national television show, where my continued existence, my survival, would be determined by a national viewership of predominantly white Americans. I would have run away from such an opportunity, because I would have believed my press and accepted what others were saying.

  I work eighteen hours a day now, because I’m purpose-driven. I’m trying to make a difference, on my own terms. I wake up at four or five most mornings, hopping onto a plane to somewhere, to the next crisis, pushed by the thought in the back of my mind: What can I do today to make a difference?

  I think people sense that drive and purpose in me, which is why they don’t begrudge me the first-class flights and the fancy hotels to which I now have access. They know I’ve earned it. People know that I bear the marks of the struggles on my body. I’m fifty-eight years old, as of this writing. I’ve been stabbed. I’ve spent months in jail. I’ve gone through all kinds of controversies over the years. There’s not much left you can do to me, except kill me.

  Even when I was marching in the early days with the pressed hair, the jogging suits, and the medallions—all objects that certainly added to the scornful characterizations of me, items that made me an easy caricature—I wasn’t too worried about how others would perceive me. If I had been afraid of the ways I would be portrayed in the media, I would not have chosen that particular style as my introduction to the world. But I was all about the movement, the message. I didn’t care what they wrote, how they tried to ridicule me, because in my mind, I had a clear idea of what I was trying to accomplish. I knew what Al Sharpton stood for.

  There aren’t many bad days for me, because I can always think of something worse. Having a turbulent flight to Cleveland in first class isn’t a bad day for me, not with everything I’ve endured. When you live your life like that, on the edge, you don’t ever let yourself get too high or too low, too excited or too depressed, ’cause you’ve seen it all.

  Too many of us spend our lives as spectators, watching other people, rather than trying to do things ourselves, make our own contributions. Maybe one of the reasons is that it’s not easy to step out there by yourself, especially if you’ve been spending too many of your days letting others define you. But as I tell the young folks all the time in the National Action Network, if it’s easy, it ain’t worth having. I talk about my ninety days in jail, but can you imagine Nelson Mandela sitting there for twenty-seven years? And he never had any idea whether he’d ever get out until the very end. He certainly never dreamed he’d be president of the country; I’m sure in his mind, that was never in the realm of possibility. But at some point, he defined for himself who he was—he’d rather be incarcerated than be free and not fight for liberation.

  When I was protesting in Howard Beach or Bensonhurst or Vieques, I didn’t say, “I want to do this so that one day, I’ll have access to the president of the United States and go to the White House and the inauguration and have my own MSNBC show and have social stature.” I did it all because I believed in what I was doing. Those other things were all rewards, but they weren’t the reason.

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  DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE BIG

  I only saw Martin Luther King a couple of times, because I was just thirteen when he was killed, but I did have the good fortune of getting to know Coretta Scott King very well. I had organized a big march in Washington with her son Martin III, to try to push President Bill Clinton into signing an executive order against racial profiling. The year was 2000. Martin III was president of the SCLC, and I had just expanded NAN to a national organization. Coretta was going to introduce us at the march, and I told her that we thought we might be getting as many as 100,000 people in attendance.

  She said, “Al, always remember, the difference between Martin and a lot of other guys was he was big enough to be big. You can’t be big and small at the same time. If you think small and parochial and get caught up in nonsense and mess and jealousy and envy, you will never grow to be the leader you can be. You gotta be big enough to do big things.”

  Those words have resonated with me precisely because I’ve seen so many great leaders, so many talented people, violate them, getting caught up in small, petty nonsense, drowning in those shallow waters. In activism, in progressive movements, even in the church, people get shrunk down and are trapped in smallness, like a fly wriggling on flypaper. Their talents are bigger than their character allows them to be. When they perceive a threat, they
want to hold on to everything, protect their domain, lash out. But if it’s great, if it’s food for the soul, you’re supposed to want to share it. In the religious community, you get a lot of small-mindedness and insecurity masquerading as theology—holding back others, opposing the rights of others, because you are trying to hold on to what you’ve got.

  I once got into an argument with a black activist group that wanted to bar whites from its rallies. I said, “No, I’m not going to do that.” But they were adamant. I told them, “Anything I say, anybody can hear. Why should I be insecure about white people hearing it?”

  They wanted to have their own private, blacks-only meetings, but it didn’t even make sense—they sold DVDs of their speeches. They were holding on to this secretive, clandestine view of their movement, and they were afraid to be big and bold enough to let everybody hear it.

  Coretta’s words have stayed with me over the years and have driven me. You need some greater purpose when you’re standing there in the morgue alongside a mother who has been brought to identify her dead child—something I’ve had to do probably thirty or forty times. Trying to comfort her through her wails, I want to be able to tell her about the larger purpose of her pain, how I will fight to make sure her child didn’t die in vain.

  With Coretta’s words ringing in my mind, I’ve seen some big things. I stood in the square in Johannesburg the night they brought down that apartheid flag and raised the flag of the ANC, bloodlessly turning the world’s most racist regime into a democracy. I was there as an election observer with Wyatt Tee Walker and Danny Glover and others, witnessing Nelson Mandela become the president of South Africa.

  I was there when Barack Obama put his hand on the Bible and became the forty-fourth president of the United States.

  I’ve seen big things. I know what we can do, as a movement, as a people, as a country. We have to develop the skin to take the little hits and keep the big picture in mind. We can’t be afraid to be big.

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  BE OPEN TO UNLIKELY ALLIES

  The first time I laid my eyes on Barack Obama was in 2003, at Chicago’s annual Bud Billiken Parade, which the African-American community in Chicago has been holding on the South Side on the second Saturday in August since 1929. I was serving as one of the grand marshals that year, and Obama was a state senator at the time. We acknowledged each other in passing, but we didn’t really talk. His name stood out to me because it was so unusual and because he had sponsored legislation against racial profiling in the Illinois state legislature. NAN had been monitoring efforts across the country to combat racial profiling after Johnnie Cochran and I fought the rampant use of racial profiling by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike.

  The first time we really talked was at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. We were both scheduled to speak at the Black Democratic Caucus, one of the many separate meetings that are held that week among various constituencies of the Democratic Party. I had run for president that year, so I had a bit of influence at the convention, where we were going to be nominating Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry as the Democratic candidate, with North Carolina Sen. John Edwards as his running mate. Dr. Charles Ogletree, the distinguished African-American professor at nearby Harvard Law School, brought Obama over to me. Ogletree was close to both of us, because he had mentored both Barack and Michelle Obama at the law school, and he was on my campaign committee and had done a lot of fund-raising for me. Obama had already spoken to the group and was preparing to leave as I was arriving to give my speech.

  “You guys should know each other,” Ogletree said. “You’re not that far apart in age, from the same generation. Barack was one of my students at Harvard.”

  “Yeah, I know who he is,” I said. “I wish you well in your election in Illinois.”

  He was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois against black Republican Alan Keyes.

  “Of course, I know who you are,” he said to me. Then he started to tell me about his keynote address later that night at the Democratic National Convention. “I’m trying to do something to set a tone of unity in the country. I don’t exactly do what you do, but we’re both trying to make a better country.”

  As he continued explaining to me his broader approach, I cut him off. “You do what you have to do tonight—plus, you gotta get elected,” I said, smiling. “I’m going to take care of the brothers and sisters tomorrow night when I speak.”

  He kind of looked at me closely for a second, and then he laughed. So from the very first moment we started conversing, we had established a template of straightforward honesty, acknowledging that we were not the same, we didn’t have the same approach to our politics and activism, but we had broadly the same goals.

  That night, I sat in one of the boxes and listened to Obama do his thing, rousing the crowd by talking about how unlikely it was for him to be standing on that stage. “In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” he said. It was a well-constructed, memorable speech that put him on the political map, establishing him as a rising star. While I thought the speech was excellent, it was a bit mainstream for me. But I said to myself, This guy is exciting.

  The next night, I took to the podium and went for the gusto. I talked about how we weren’t living up to the “promise of America” under President George W. Bush. I even mentioned Barack Obama as I talked about a new generation of young leaders who may come from humble backgrounds but who have integrity and family values. Bush had suggested that the black community was being taken for granted by the Democratic Party, so I explained why we had hitched our fate to the Democrats and told him that our vote could not be bargained away or given away.

  “Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn’t gained because of our age,” I said as the crowd roared. “Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us.”

  A couple of years later, in 2006, I started hearing rumblings about whether Obama, who had destroyed Keyes in the 2004 Senate election by one of the largest margins in Senate history, was going to run for president in 2008. Since I had been a candidate in 2004 and had begun to be seen as a national black leader with some clout, I started hearing from all the candidates who were running—New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. And of course, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. As far as I could tell, everyone assumed I would be supporting Clinton—after all, she was the senator from my state, she had been a frequent presence at NAN’s annual conventions, and she had even spoken at our King Day celebration at the House of Justice in Harlem. So I suppose from the outside it looked like a no-brainer. But then there was the matter of her husband. I had a complicated relationship with the former president. I supported him and called a march for him when he was being impeached, but I also felt that he fell short on a number of issues, such as racial profiling and police brutality. I was bitterly opposed to his welfare reform bill and his omnibus crime bill, both of which I felt would do considerable harm to poor people and people of color. So my feelings about him were somewhat mixed.

  My first meeting with President Clinton was memorable. He was midway through his first term and was speaking at the 1995 Congressional Black Caucus dinner. I was there with Reverend Jackson.

  “Let’s go to the rope when the president finishes speaking,” Jesse said, leaning over to me during his speech. “I haven’t been able to get a meeting with him. We need to talk to him about building all these jails and no jobs.”

  So we went over to the rope at the conclusion of the speech to see if we could get a word with Clinton. He made his way down the rope line, squeezing hands and slapping backs, as he does so well. When he got to us, Jesse said, “I’ve been trying to get a meeting with you. I think—”

  The president cut him off halfway through h
is sentence. “Well, come on over to the residence tonight,” he said. “I’ll have Harold Ickes bring you in. And bring Al with you.” Ickes was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and had worked on Jesse’s presidential campaign a decade earlier.

  With head-spinning alacrity, just a few hours later, I was sitting in the Treaty Room in the residence of the White House, waiting for the president, along with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Jr., who was running for Congress for the first time, and Jesse Jr.’s wife, Sandi. Clinton came into the room, wearing blue jeans and a big smile. Jesse and I began laying out our case to him on why the country needed more jobs programs, not jails, and why we were opposed to some of his triangulation policies. We were engaged in an energetic back-and-forth dialogue, with Ickes sitting in, when Clinton popped up and said, “Y’all want some cherry pie?”

  So as we sat there waiting, the president of the United States went to get us cherry pie. While he was gone, Jesse teased me: “I’m going to tell the fellas in Harlem that you sold out for some cherry pie.”

  We all laughed. Soon after, Clinton came back and asked Jesse Jr. and me, “Y’all ever seen the Lincoln Bedroom?”

  We shook our heads. I had been to the White House a couple of times—the first time with James Brown during the Reagan administration—but I had never been in the residence. So we followed the president to the Lincoln Bedroom, and then he brought us to another room, where we looked in awe at the Emancipation Proclamation.

  When we sat down again, Reverend Jackson told Clinton and Ickes that Jesse Jr. was running for Congress and could really use their help. They agreed to help him, which was a promise on which they did follow through. Then Clinton had a request of us. By now it was close to one A.M.