by Al Sharpton
“This Million Man March that’s happening next month—what do you think I should do?” he asked. “Some people are saying we should attack Minister Farrakhan.”
I decided to answer that one. “Let me tell you something. Minister Farrakhan may do or say things that a lot of people don’t agree with. I don’t even agree with everything he’s said and done. And I know he doesn’t agree with everything I’ve said and done. But like Dr. King, he’s galvanized something that’s important. I don’t think you should attack him.”
Jesse suggested that Clinton let the march proceed and perhaps find something else to do that day. It turned out that on the day of the march, Clinton did travel out of town, to the University of Texas, and delivered one of his most sweeping speeches on race, asking Americans to “clean our house of racism.” However, in the speech, he did take a swipe at Louis Farrakhan and the march, saying, “One million men do not make right one man’s message of malice and division.”
So while Clinton and I had been allies, it wasn’t all milk and honey.
In early 2007, I decided I needed to know what each of the candidates for president stood for and what they were thinking about how to solve the nation’s problems. So I toured Washington and met with each of them, which was easy, since almost all of them were in the Senate. Obama was the last meeting, the end of my gauntlet of senators. When I walked into his office, I was struck by the poignancy of the huge picture of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall that he had on his wall. I thought it fit, because that was the tradition that had birthed him, the former law school professor—the world of jurisprudence, where Marshall clearly had been a pioneer.
As we talked, I liked Obama’s thinking, his approach to problem solving, but I wasn’t sure if he was strong enough on black issues, which was a common criticism he was hearing at the time in the black community. At the same time, I was getting the red-carpet treatment from the Clintons—Bill was speaking at the NAN convention, Hillary at the NAN women’s luncheon. Actually, we had every one of the Democratic candidates speak at the NAN convention that year. I was quite the popular guy, with the suitors lined up to punch my dance card. But I was not about to let it go to my head; I knew it was just part of the political game, the methodical courting of each constituent group that you must do when you run for president, like an accountant tallying numbers in a ledger.
At that point, I still hadn’t made up my mind which candidate I would support. I was leaning toward Hillary, but I kind of liked Obama. I got a call one day from Charlie King, who was the acting executive director of NAN at the time and who was a longtime Democratic Party operative in New York State. King told me that President Clinton was flying home to Chappaqua and wanted to meet with me at the house there. I traveled up to Chappaqua and met with the former president for about an hour. He persuasively laid out all the reasons I should go with his wife. It was a convincing presentation, and I was almost there, right on the verge of giving Hillary the nod. But on the drive back to Manhattan, one of my associates who was in the car with me managed to say something that changed my perspective a bit. First, he asked me, “Have you decided what you’re going to do—Clinton or Obama?”
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “I’m kind of going back and forth on it.”
Obama had also been laying on the charm. He had come up to New York and asked if he could take me out to dinner. He came by the House of Justice in Harlem, already accompanied by the Secret Service, and scooped me up. We went to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem, with the national media in tow and making a big deal about him having soul food in Harlem.
“I remember when all the black leaders went against you in ’04,” my associate reminded me. “I guess it didn’t hurt them.”
That comment stayed with me for a minute. I went up into the Grand Havana Room, a private club where I like to unwind and smoke cigars several evenings a week, and I thought some more about it, how the New York leadership didn’t feel the need to rally around me when I ran; this idea of regional loyalties didn’t seem to apply for me. My decision had been made. I went into a private area of the club, and I called Obama.
“I met today with President Clinton,” I told him.
“Yeah, yeah, I know you have to work on policy with her,” he said. “All I ask is, if you can’t support me, try not to hurt me.”
“Nah, I think I’m going to support you.”
“Huh?” he said, clearly shocked. “I never asked you to do that.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “In my own way, I’m going to go out there and support you. I don’t even know if you can win. Probably, tonight, I don’t think you can win. But it won’t be because I was in the way. I won’t do to you what a lot of folks did to me.”
Clearly, he was very thankful—and surprised.
A few weeks passed, and I got a call from Obama. They were having a black forum focusing on urban affairs in Iowa, the location of the first Democratic primary/caucus. They had asked me to be the keynote speaker. Obama said he had to go because all the other candidates were going. He wanted to know how we could pull it off without bumping heads, because our approaches to the black agenda would be different and might even at times be in conflict. He didn’t want to sound as if he was in opposition to anything I might say, but at the same time, he didn’t want to hurt his campaign.
“How do we do this?” he asked me.
“Let me think about it and get back to you,” I said.
I later found out there had been debate among his staff about how to handle Iowa and Sharpton. He had decided to call me directly, rather than having a surrogate call me, which I appreciated. After a couple of days of deliberation, I called him back on his cell phone.
“I thought about how we can do this,” I said.
“OK, what do you think we should do?” he asked.
“I’m not going,” I said.
“What do you mean, you’re not going? I didn’t ask you not to go.”
“There’s no way I can go and not say things that they would try to use against you, because I’m going to be Al Sharpton. But if I don’t go, there won’t be any potential conflict—and they might not even have it. So I’m not going.”
“Wow,” he said. “You know, it’s rare to meet people who can see things are bigger than them.”
“Hey, all of us in public life got ego,” I said. “But all of us should remember there are things bigger than us. So I’m out.”
After we called the folks in Iowa to tell them I would be bowing out of the keynote, they did eventually cancel it. I think that whole exchange revealed to each of us important things about the other. Obama saw that I had a self-awareness and humility that allowed me to take myself out of the picture for the greater good, which was his election. And I was surprised and impressed that he valued my counsel and help enough to call me on the phone himself. After that, we started communicating on a fairly regular basis. I also talked directly to Valerie Jarrett, a very good friend of the Obamas from Chicago who was a close adviser of his. Let me just say that in the more than four decades I’ve been in public life, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who had more integrity in their dealings with me than Valerie Jarrett. She never told me she was going to do something that she didn’t do. And if she didn’t agree with me about something or it was something they weren’t going to do, she would tell me that, too. Her degree of sincerity and truthfulness is truly rare in public life. When I’ve heard people in the African-American community question the president’s closeness to the black community, whether he got a sense of what was happening with us or the difficulties we were having, I never doubted for a second that he got this kind of crucial intelligence, because I knew Valerie was at his side. I have found that not only does she have a great deal of influence, but she also has enormous integrity. When I relay issues or concerns to her, she doesn’t jump because we said jump. With her, you have a strong woman who makes her own decisions, because she knows our community as well as
we do.
As the campaign was just starting to heat up, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story broke, with the media condemning Obama for being a member for twenty years of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and playing in a seemingly endless loop the footage of a tiny portion of a Wright sermon during which he proclaims, “God damn America!” I talked about Wright with Obama and with Valerie, and I knew he was trying his best to have that story go away as quickly as possible. I went on different talk shows to defend his position. It was a dilemma for him because he wanted to be respectful of his pastor, but he had to come forward and denounce some of what the reverend said while pointing out that Wright’s words were being distorted. So he had about three different positions he was trying to take at the same time, which is a nearly impossible predicament for a politician to maneuver out of—and which will leave a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
What was especially upsetting for me was the idea that Wright was being attacked as some type of racial arsonist when the tenor of his words was not racial at all. He was questioning America; what was racial about it? To say “God damn America” might be interpreted as disrespectful, but where is it racial? The whole ordeal created problems for me internally, because not only did I know Reverend Wright, but his daughter Jeri was head of the NAN chapter in Chicago. So here I was supporting Obama by saying that he did all he could to respect his pastor but that some of Wright’s comments were extreme, and I was going against my own chapter leader. As you could expect, the conflict temporarily tore up our Chicago chapter. And I had a lot of ministers taking Wright’s side and asking me how I could support Obama and say he was doing the right thing when he was being critical of Wright. That was the first round of friction that I took for my support of Obama.
I was trying to get my colleagues to see the bigger picture. The man was running for president, with a very legitimate chance to win. Wright was coming out of a prophetic tradition of black pastors—as I do—who are charged to speak truth to power and lead our people out of oppression. These are two very different agendas that are not always going to be heading in the same direction.
I think the Wright saga demonstrated to the then-senator that we both had different but crucial roles to play and, perhaps more important, that we could trust each other.
After Wright, we stepped into another controversy that managed to hit me even closer to home than the Wright stuff. During a television interview on Fox News, Reverend Jackson, not realizing that his mic was on, said under his breath that Obama was “talking down to black people” with his Father’s Day comments, when Obama had said black men must stand up and do a better job of taking responsibility for their kids.
“I wanna cut his nuts off,” Jackson added.
I went on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN that night and defended Obama again. I said I loved Reverend Jackson, that he had mentored me and I had learned a great deal from him, but I didn’t agree with him. I said for a man to stand up on Father’s Day and talk about how black men must be responsible for their kids is not talking down to us. For us to act as if being irresponsible is just a black thing is talking down to us. I also said that Jesse had made one mistake with an off-the-cuff remark, but let’s not forget his forty years of service. As I left CNN after doing Cooper’s show and got back into the car to go to Fox to do Sean Hannity’s show, I talked to Reverend Jackson. Let’s just say he was less than happy with my position. After we hung up, I got a call from a friend at Fox who was a producer. I thought he was getting worried about my arrival. I told him I was on my way.
“Before you get out there too far in defending Jesse, you should know we have not released the whole tape,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Jesse also used the n-word,” he said. “You know that word that y’all said we should bury?”
“He did what?” I said, making him repeat it. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. Jesse had used the n-word in reference to Obama? That was an entirely different matter.
I hung up and immediately called Jesse back. “You used the n-word?” I asked him when he picked up.
“Nah, I didn’t use the n-word,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”
Two weeks later, Fox released the full video, which confirmed that Reverend Jackson did, in fact, use the n-word. The incident certainly didn’t help Reverend Jackson’s relationship with the Obama camp.
Senator Obama saw that not only did I understand what he strategically had to do for his candidacy, but I was also fighting with people I had decades of history with, on his behalf. By the time they got to the last primaries, I had upset much of the civil rights community, many of the black preachers, and pretty much all of the politicians in New York State for going against Hillary. To my surprise, Obama won. So in hindsight, I looked brilliant, but I had no idea when I decided to support him that he would win the nomination.
That 2008 election campaign showed me how crucial it is to keep the big picture in your sights, even when there’s a hellish storm swirling all around you. It is a lesson whose importance the Obama team demonstrated on an almost daily basis during the campaign, a lesson I would think a man on the verge of becoming the first black president would need to repeat to himself over and over as race and politics slammed together and led people to say some crazy stuff about him and his wife.
One day in the midst of the summer, as the Democrats were gearing up for the convention in Denver, I got a call on my cell phone as I was riding through the Holland Tunnel for a speaking engagement in New Jersey. I looked down and saw that it was Senator Obama, who was supposed to be on a family vacation in Hawaii.
“How are you doing back there?” he said.
“I’m doing fine,” I answered. “I thought you weren’t calling people during your vacation?”
“Al, to tell you the truth, I talked to the president of Russia today, and I talked to you. Those are my business calls.”
“Wow, I’m honored,” I said.
He laughed. “The day I’m accepting the nomination is the anniversary of Dr. King’s March on Washington and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” he said. “I’m going to have the Democratic Party host an official breakfast that morning. I want to have Martin III, Bernice, and you as the speakers. And I just want you to know I appreciate you.” I thanked him and hung up the phone. He followed through on that breakfast, with all the civil rights guys there, with Martin III and me doing the keynote. I brought my daughters with me, too.
Later that night, before we headed to the stadium to watch a black man receive the Democratic Party nomination for president, I got into a car with my daughters to go to the convention center to do my radio show. My cell phone rang. It was Obama.
“Thank you for the words you said this morning,” he said. “Valerie called and told me what you said.”
“It’s a great day,” I said to him. “I hope you win the election, but just winning the nomination is a great thing. I brought my daughters here with me to see it.”
“Your daughters are with you?” he said. “Let me speak to them.”
So I handed them the phone, and he talked to Dominique and then Ashley. It was the thrill of their lives, to talk to Barack Obama on the day he was nominated.
After the rigors of that campaign and the frequent questions I got from the civil rights community and the black church community, I was even more convinced of the need to stick to your principles when you’re being threatened and attacked. As we all watched Senator Obama run a brilliant campaign against John McCain and become President Obama, I could breathe a little easier. It had all been worth it. My relationship with Barack Obama has taught me an important lesson about being open to unlikely alliances and unexpected friendships. With his Ivy League background and mainstream approach, he would seem an unnatural fit for the fiery preacher and civil rights leader from the Brooklyn streets. But when we remained open to the possibilities of an alliance, we discovered that, in fact, we retained an easy u
nderstanding and respect for each other. With our very different approaches, we usually wound up in the same place, fighting the same battles.
18
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DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT
A few months after Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, I asked Valerie Jarrett if we could have a meeting at the White House to discuss inequality in education and the huge achievement gap between black students and white students. I had convinced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, about as visible and conservative a Republican as you could find, to come to the meeting with me, because I wanted to show that it was a societal problem with bipartisan support
The meeting took place with Gingrich; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican who had endorsed Obama; and me. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was supposed to come, but at the last minute, he had to stay in L.A. because of union negotiations. When the president addressed the NAACP at the 100th anniversary celebration, he told the story about sitting in the Oval Office, looking at me and then at Gingrich, and not believing that we were sitting there in his office together.
Gingrich and I had developed a respectful relationship over the years, based on our common ground of major education reform to address inequalities, which we both felt was a civil rights issue. He even addressed the NAN convention one year. Of course, there’s a lot in his educational platform that I don’t agree with, such as vouchers and diverting money and space away from the public schools for a bunch of experimental charter schools that reach just a tiny percentage of the population.
At the White House meeting, Arne Duncan, the president’s education secretary, came up with the idea of Gingrich and me going out together on a national tour to bring attention to the need for education reform. Gingrich and I, along with Duncan, went to five cities, culminating in an appearance on Meet the Press, where we talked about education as a civil rights issue—because, ultimately, if you do not give equal educational preparation to Americans, you’re never going to have an equal society.
