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

by Al Sharpton

  Oh, they just don’t understand black church culture . . .

  Black preachers are supposed to be overweight—it makes the congregation more comfortable . . .

  What, am I going to be rude and turn down all the meals I get offered as a leader of the black church?

  In other words, I didn’t see my weight as a problem. It was just a part of me, one of the essential elements of Al Sharpton, minister and civil rights leader.

  Anyone who is familiar with the black church knows that the church world is based first on a solid bedrock of God. And not far behind is food. Eating soul food, eating all the wrong foods in terms of a healthy diet, was the norm. I’m talking about fried chicken three times a day—in the morning with grits and eggs for breakfast, a fried chicken sandwich for lunch in the afternoon, and half a chicken at night for dinner.

  When I started getting heavy as a youngster, I didn’t have to worry about standing out. As I said, in the world of the black church, being heavy was not uncommon; in fact, it was almost expected, particularly among ministers. Most of the ministers I saw were large, to the point where if they weren’t, people would think they were unhealthy. The pride of many church folk was to have the minister come eat at their house, where they would keep heaping food on his plate. As I moved through my teens and became more well known, preaching at churches all over the Northeast, I started getting those dinner invitations. People were constantly feeding me, and it certainly was not proper to turn the invitations down. And when you sat down at their table, you couldn’t tell them to stop piling on the food—not as if I would have wanted them to stop, anyway. In my spare time, I began hanging out with other preachers, men who had no discipline at all about eating.

  It only got worse—much worse—when I went out on the road with James Brown when I was eighteen. For those of you who have never done any extensive traveling with a musician, let me draw a picture of life on the road with the Godfather of Soul. You’re literally going from plane to hotel to venue to hotel to plane, and then you do the same thing over again the next day. When you come back to the hotel at about midnight after the performance, you order room service—probably something fried, with lots of starches—and then you go to bed on a full stomach. Remember, this was in the early ’70s. Hotels didn’t even have fitness centers yet, if you were inclined to try to get in a workout. But doing a workout never crossed my mind, anyway.

  One day I woke up, and I was 300 pounds.

  Well, that’s what I’m guessing I weighed—I didn’t take any kind of self-inventory that would involve getting on a scale. In fact, nearly two decades would pass before I actually got on a scale. When I got stabbed in Bensonhurst in 1991, they weighed me in the hospital, and I was more than 300 pounds.

  Starting in my teen years, I was in the bubble of the church world and the entertainment world, spending all my time with friends or church folk, so even the women I was going to date or eventually marry came out of a small circle that was preordained. There was nothing to make me look at myself critically or even to think about the big belly I was carrying around.

  But one day, when my daughter Ashley was about five, she looked up at me with the innocent, curious eyes of a child and asked, “Daddy, why are you so fat?”

  Suddenly, faced with a simple enough question from my child, all those black-church rationalizations sounded silly. In that moment, I began my long journey to become a living embodiment of the things I preached: the need for personal discipline and to hold human life in high regard, which, for me, started with prioritizing my personal health.

  When I became a mainstream figure in New York in the 1980s, my weight was one of the first things that people would use to parody me. I was quite the compelling target, with the sweat suits and medallions and long, flowing, pressed hair. But despite the cartoonish depictions that would appear in tabloids such as the New York Post—even a memorable frontpage picture in the Post showing me in the chair at the beauty salon with rollers in my hair—I still wasn’t bothered by the mocking. I was still a product of that black-church bubble, still spent most of my time with church folk and religious leaders, so it was easy to dismiss it all. Even when a lot of my friends started becoming health-conscious, I would just tell myself that was part of their idiosyncrasies. Some people smoked; they ate healthy food.

  But then came those fateful words from my daughter, asking me why I was so fat. And I started looking inward, asking myself some tough questions. What answer could I give a five-year-old that would make sense? I couldn’t tell her she just didn’t understand church culture, or, even worse, would I be inadvertently resigning her to an obese future, since church culture was her culture, too? How could I tell her that? At that moment, I began to wonder, Wait a minute, what am I projecting to my kids? I spent much of my life looking for a father figure. Now I was the father figure for my girls—what image was I giving them?

  Those questions stunned me. I had never stopped to think about these things before, had never considered the entirety of the image I was projecting to the world. Am I that reckless, both in terms of language and appearance? I started to reevaluate what I wanted to look like, what I wanted to project and say to the world. So I went back to the books.

  Dr. King and Nelson Mandela were devoted to discipline. They saw leadership not as something that was segmented, compartmentalized in a specific slot of their lives—which is what I had been doing, in a sense—but as something that needed to run through every aspect of their lives. Mandela was a boxer, an athlete who maintained his health so well during his twenty-seven years in prison that he was able to walk out of there erect and in great shape, and he remained vibrant well into his nineties. Dr. King wrestled with his weight—no doubt from being ensconced in the church world—but he would never let himself get out of control with it.

  And just as important, both of them thought a lot about the temperament of leadership, controlling your mind and your mouth, in addition to your body. I had put in many sacrifices, had my life endangered by being stabbed, had been getting attacked for many years, but I still hadn’t given enough attention to the temperament of leadership, the rhetorical discipline. It dawned on me, reading about these great men, that if I wanted to go to the next level, I needed to take control of my mouth—both what I put into it and what I allowed to come out of it. What I ate and what I said. And I could only do that by controlling my mind, controlling my appetites. To me, that became the path to greatness; it was the only way I could go from being a famous leader to being a great leader.

  While I thought compartmentalizing was working for me, this time of study and introspection revealed to me that it wasn’t working. We’re all one person. We may have many facets to our personalities, but I saw that they are all connected. The image you project publicly and the way you treat yourself—it’s all tied together.

  This message started to find its way into my sermons and the words I was delivering to the black community. I began to preach about the need to be consistent and disciplined in all aspects of our lives. You can’t preach about the abundant life and then tell people to go downstairs into the church cafeteria and kill themselves. In effect, to dig their graves with their teeth. This transformation made me think more deeply about the way food dominated the black church community and even to think more analytically about the food itself. For example, what we call soul food came out of a slave culture. We had to eat heavy meals because we worked in the fields all day and night. So when you’re working in the fields from sunup to can’t-see, doing grueling manual labor, you not only need to eat certain foods to give you strength, but you will sweat away thousands of calories every day. Now most of us spend our days behind a laptop in an office. Clearly, that can’t be compared to working in the cotton fields in Alabama. So the diet our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers needed to survive in the fields, probably burning upward of 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day, is totally inappropriate today, completely antithetical to our dietary needs when we work
behind a desk, burning next to nothing.

  We’re no longer slaves. I preach a sermon based on Galatians 4, where Paul is trying to advise the Galatians to stop acting as if they are still in slavery. Black people are corporate CEOs now, governors, even president of the United States—so why do you still have a slave diet? African-Americans would be quick to attack someone who spoke to us as slaves—but then, when it’s time to eat, please hand me the slave lunch menu. Either we are the twenty-first-century children of those who rose to the unbelievable levels we have achieved, with everything from the menus to the habits and social life that goes with our status, or we are not. You can’t go backward and forward at the same time. These are the thoughts I had to come to terms with as I did an inventory on my life, my thinking, and my diet.

  This is one of the great challenges for the black community and the black church—and also for the Latino community and poor Southern whites, too—if we are going to rise up and fight against people looking at us as if we are nothing and treating us as if our lives are without worth. If we are going to battle to insist that our lives have merit, have value, then how are we going to proceed to kill ourselves with our own diet?

  The basic fact underlying all my work is that every human life has value. But how can I preach the value of human life and at the same time preach that it doesn’t matter what you do to your human life with your diet? I knew I couldn’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s all right to kill yourself with diabetes and hypertension and high blood pressure and obesity but still parade around telling everyone to value all human life. If you value life, you have to value it in all ways. At least, that’s what I came to believe about my own life. So that made me act to take control of my diet.

  Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten an endless number of requests from magazines and periodicals asking me for the specifics of my diet, but what worked for me may not work for everybody. I came up with a plan by doing a lot of research, talking to doctors, and learning how my body works. I’ll give the basic outlines here, but by all means, don’t consider this a diet guide.

  I don’t eat any meats. I eat fish maybe twice a week. Mostly, I eat salads and uncooked fruit and some whole-wheat toast which provides some grains and starch to give me sustenance for the exercise I try to do every morning. At first, I didn’t do the toast, but my doctor told me that if I was going to do the treadmill, I needed to have something substantial in my stomach. So I’ll eat some whole-wheat toast in the morning and maybe at night. Other than that, we’re talking fruits and salads and fish—but the fish is most likely on the weekends.

  It took me about a year to lose the first hundred pounds. A rate of two pounds a week is about as fast as you want to go with weight loss. The people around me at first were startled. I used to be the kind of guy who ate all the time, big meals, heaping servings. That was something you could count on with Rev. Al Sharpton. When people realized this was something I was serious about, they began to get a little uncomfortable eating around me. I would tell them it didn’t bother me, but people were still self-conscious about sitting there with a heaping plate full of things I used to covet, while I ate my salad. Eventually, they got over it. In the church and civil rights communities, people thought I was sick, which was understandable. There would be whisper campaigns: “What’s really wrong with him? Why’s he losing all that weight? Come on, tell me if something is wrong with him—I don’t want to read about it in the newspaper.” A couple of people actually worked up the nerve to ask me, “You all right, Rev?”

  One morning, during one of our weekly Saturday rallies in Harlem, I said on the radio: “What’s been interesting to me as I’ve lost the weight is that when I was 300 pounds and obese, nobody asked me, ‘Are you all right?’ When I got healthy, everybody asked, ‘Are you all right?’ You should have been asking me that a year ago, when I was killing myself!” But it’s a consequence of the culture of obesity we’re dealing with in the country as a whole and particularly in the African-American community. A child is much more likely to hear, “Boy, sit down and eat—you don’t look healthy.” Really? You’re not looking healthy because you’re not overweight, not obese?

  I’ve heard people actually say that I lost weight because I got a television show on MSNBC. But I had already taken control of my diet before I got the TV show. I acknowledge that many celebrities lose weight because they’re concerned about their public image, but my motivation was to personify what I believed and what I was teaching. It had nothing to do with the public. In fact, I never really thought about how the public was going to react. There have been other changes I have had to make as a result of my weight loss that I also hadn’t calculated, such as the impact it would have on my wardrobe. People see me wearing these fancy suits on television and say, “Ooh, look at Sharpton, wearing the fancy Italian suits now that he’s on television!” But in reality, I had to buy a whole new wardrobe because I couldn’t wear the suits I used to wear. So when you restock your wardrobe and you have a few dollars in your pocket, you’re going to buy what’s in style. It has nothing to do with a television show; it’s just a practicality. If I wore one of my old suits on television, my shoulders would be down at my elbows.

  I was already separated when I started losing weight, so that meant I was out on the dating market as the pounds were dropping off. I think at some point, I got caught up in the stereotypical middle-aged male mind-set—an old man dating young girls to try to affirm himself, prove he is still young and vital. But then I told myself, You need to stop this, What are you trying to prove? I knew I needed to settle down again. Carrying around those middle-age insecurities, needing a young woman to tell me I was still a man, all of that was antithetical to having a serious contribution to make in my life. From your diet to your friends to your social life, you have to say either you’re going to be serious about leadership in all aspects or you’re not going to be serious.

  I’ve lived long enough to see with so many leaders that if you start living a life of contradictions, your enemies can use it against you. Even if you never get caught, the contradictions weigh down on your ability to be effective because you know you’re living a double life. It’s not even necessary for you to be a CIA director like Gen. David Petraeus; you can just be a regular guy with a wife and a family. I knew it was going to help me as a man and as a leader to be whatever it is I’m preaching. And you have to be able to withstand the self-inventory if you’re going to seek greatness. I don’t think in any way that I’ve achieved greatness, but I have to be honest and admit that greatness is what I seek.

  It’s an admission we shouldn’t shy away from—that we want to achieve greatness. People might say, “Oh, but that’s vain.” But Martin Luther King said we all have a drum-major instinct. He didn’t say we have a want-to-be-in-the-band instinct. He said drum major, the man or woman who’s out there in front, leading the show. That’s where we want to be. You can certainly see that in the reality-show craze sweeping the globe. It’s a response to the human drum-major instinct. So, King said, if you’re already trying to be out front, pushing to be the drum major, then why don’t you be a drum major for justice? If you’re going to be out front, then you have to accept the responsibilities that go along with that. For my life, the full interpretation was, even though you’re a celebrity, you can’t date just anybody anymore. And you can’t eat just anything you want and look any old way anymore. And you have to consider what comes out of your mouth. And when that guy takes shots at you, you’re going to have to refrain from shooting back, because you represent a higher cause than yourself. You can’t aspire to be the drum major of a band but live by the rules of the regular band members. If you want to live by the rules of a band member, then you should just step back and be a regular member of the band.

  If you’re going to be a drum major, if you’re going to be a front man, if you’re going to be a leader of your family, of your community, of your people, then there are different rules that you have
to live by. I have accepted my role as a drum major, and I try every day to be as consistent as possible about the image and the message I project to the world. If I’m going to preach and protest whenever I see human life being disrespected and denigrated, then I must show the ultimate respect for my own life by demonstrating concern for my health.

  And even though I’m not getting any younger, I have a confession to make: I feel great.

  20

  * * *

  EVERY LIFE HAS VALUE

  The notion underlying most of the fights I have engaged in as a civil rights leader over the years is that every life has value. It is an idea fundamental to Christianity and to human rights. But I was never more stunned at how easily lives can be devalued and rendered cheap than when I went to Rwanda in 1994.

  I felt African-American leadership should be doing more at the time to challenge the Clinton administration to intervene in the massacre that ultimately resulted in as many as a million Tutsis—nearly 20 percent of the Rwandan population—being slaughtered by Hutus. On our trip to Rwanda, we first stayed in Goma, Zaire—now the Democratic Republic of Congo—and drove two hours across the border to Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Every two or three miles, we would be stopped by these unbelievably young kids, fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds, brandishing automatic weapons and demanding to search our car to see if we were hiding any Hutus. The guys in my delegation were shaken by the danger of the situation, but I kept thinking, How are these kids who barely have clothes to wear getting automatic weapons? Who is arming this tribal war?

  Rwanda is so breathtakingly beautiful, as if you have stepped onto the most fertile, gorgeous land that God ever created; it looked as if you could spit on the ground and a tree would grow. But once you thought about the sights we were coming across, it was obvious that the forces of big business and transcontinental corporations that were exploiting the mineral resources of Rwanda—and many other African countries—were financing these tribal wars, arming the countryside, because as long as there’s chaos, they can manipulate the land and the minerals. So, heartbreakingly, you get people in these countries fed by greed and a hunger for power, driven by a total disregard for the worth of human life, who fall right into the trap, walking into villages and not thinking twice about killing an entire family, just because they are in a different tribe. I saw this with my own eyes—families and villages wiped out. Annihilated. There was no recognition that each one of those people had value—they were seen as representations of tribes, Hutus or Tutsis, not individual men, women, and children who could make a valuable contribution to mankind. One of those children who were slaughtered could have been the scientist who develops the ultimate cure for cancer or the next great African musician or athlete or political leader. All of that human potential, just wiped off the face of the earth. And it wasn’t potential that might have benefited only Africans or people of color—each of those lives could have had value for all of mankind, no matter what complexion or country of origin. A great musician, doctor, scientist, or politician can have an impact far beyond his own people or her own country.