The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (15 page)

He studied me for a moment. “I’ve never heard it put that way. Let’s just agree to disagree,” he said, rising from his chair. He extended his hand, and we shook and said good-bye.

When I was tested after my stabbing, my faith and the daily practice of my religion led me to forgive the man who had harmed me. It was a powerful test for me, one that let me know my faith was more than an abstract idea, more than daily habits that one does without thinking. No, it was a real, living, powerful thing. God asks us to forgive others as He forgives us for our many trespasses. While it is not easy, in many ways counter to our natural human impulses, I have found that forgiveness is deeply cleansing, fortifying, even healing. And it is absolutely necessary for growth and maturity. We all hold on to things that we should let go of. You probably have something inside you now that needs to be freed, some slight or offense against you or even some major act that caused you great harm that you are clutching too close to your heart. Whom do you need to forgive?

R
eaching outside the African-American community to broaden my perspective has been an important element in my transformation and growth in the past two decades as a human rights activist.

In the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up, I was surrounded by immigrants. Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Dominicans, Nigerians, Senegalese—you couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over interesting folks, and interesting foods, from across the globe. Like everybody else in America, these people were striving to work hard, send their children to the best schools possible, and trying to grab their little piece of that elusive American dream.

So when the issue of immigration began to emerge as an explosive political football, my thoughts would drift back to the streets of Brooklyn. These were real people—people who
were a part of me. For me, it could never be
them
against
us
. My upbringing undoubtedly compelled me over the years to be naturally inclined to fight for immigrants’ rights and to try as much as possible to build coalitions between African-Americans and the immigrant community, understanding that our plights in America were intertwined, particularly as the government moved toward increased racial profiling to enforce its repressive immigration policies.

Of course, for too many Americans, fed a steady stream of threatening media images, the word
immigrant
conjures visions of frightened Mexicans scurrying across the dusty Arizona desert, hoping to slip unseen into American society and immediately become a drain on the American pocketbook. That’s become the handy American archetype. You can hardly hear the word
immigrant
without first being accosted by the word
illegal
. In a country founded by immigrants, the ultimate irony is that America has now permanently attached the disturbing descriptor
illegal
to the word that defined our ancestors.

Immigrant.
It didn’t use to be a dirty word, not when the shiploads came into Ellis Island on those steamers from Europe, blessed by the words of poet Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I can’t help but note, as many others have before me, that this country didn’t have an “immigration problem” until the
immigrants became overwhelmingly black and brown. In 1960, the top five countries sending immigrants to the United States were Italy, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Poland. I don’t recall presidential candidates back then being forced to come up with a stance on Italian, German, or Canadian immigrants.

But by 1970, Mexico had entered the top five. By 2000, when immigration had become an explosive third rail of American politics and there was talk of building electrified fences along the southern border, the top five looked very different: Mexico, India, China, the Philippines, and Cuba. It’s not difficult to see the difference between the two lists.

Dr. King was a giant of the civil rights movement, but let us not forget the courageous work of Cesar Chavez, who adopted some of the nonviolent tactics of Dr. King to fight on behalf of migrant farmworkers. With boycotts, strikes, and the creation of the United Farm Workers union, Chavez awoke the world to the exploitation of Latino farmworkers in the Southwest. King and Chavez were also friends and associates who understood the common purposes of their struggle for human rights for black and brown Americans. What happened to the spiritual bond formed by these two great leaders?

I have been disturbed by how quickly forces in the African-American community have succumbed to brainwashing, to wrongheaded propaganda about this issue. When I hear black people repeating this nonsense, saying, “They’re taking our jobs,” my first response is to ask, “What jobs?” Ever since there have been labor statistics recorded in this country, blacks
have been doubly unemployed; our rate has always been double the national rate. The only time black people had full employment in the United States was during slavery—and we didn’t get paid. So who was taking our jobs before we had an influx of Mexicans over the past thirty-five or forty years? This country has never intended for blacks to be fully and gainfully employed, and that has nothing to do with Mexicans. So let’s stop the blame game and try to focus on the big picture here.

I was thinking about the need for me to move outside of my comfort zone when I made the decision to join my Puerto Rican brothers and sisters in their protests against the U.S. Navy’s bombing in Vieques, a small island next to Puerto Rico. I was trying to reach out, to grow, and in the process, I stumbled into one of the most difficult ordeals that I’ve had in my career. I wound up spending three months in jail because of the Vieques protests. Although it was a harrowing ordeal, that time also turned out to be incredibly important to me, giving me an opportunity to do some serious introspection and planning. I would be a totally different person and a different leader today had I not gone through the Vieques experience. It was surely one of the most impactful three months of my life, setting the stage for much that was to come later.

It all started on a Saturday morning in 2001, when I was riding down the FDR Drive in Manhattan on my way to one of the NAN’s regular Saturday-morning rallies. On the radio, they were talking about Robert Kennedy Jr. and Dennis Rivera, a labor leader, going to jail in Vieques. Rivera had gone to jail with me during our “Days of Outrage” protests against police
brutality in New York. I was inspired in that instant to respond in kind in Vieques and to demonstrate the viability of a black-brown coalition. I called Roberto Ramirez, a Bronx political leader who was active in the anti-Vieques movement, and told him that I wanted to support them the way they supported me during our protests.

So I got on a plane and journeyed down to the island paradise of Puerto Rico with three influential Latino leaders: Ramirez; Adolfo Carrión Jr., a city councilman from the Bronx who eventually became Bronx borough president and then an official in the Obama administration; and Assemblyman José Rivera, who was also from the Bronx. The way you staged a protest at Vieques was to crawl through an opening in the fence at the Navy base. It was considered trespassing on federal property, an act of civil disobedience. As planned, we were arrested, attracting a great deal of media attention in Puerto Rico and back in New York.

I’ve been arrested dozens of times on the mainland, so I was expecting the usual court appearance and slap on the wrist. But the way we were treated right after the arrest should have been my first warning that this one was going to be different from the others.

First, we were handcuffed and hustled to a cavernous old jailhouse on Vieques that looked like a castle. We were stripped naked—in front of one another—and searched, as if the four of us had suddenly turned into despised enemies of the state. They put us in inmate clothing and marched us onto a barge with other prisoners to make the trip to mainland Puerto Rico.

On this barge, we were chained to the floor, alongside a row of tanks and trucks that were making the trip with us. Suddenly, on a day that had started out with a peaceful protest in a gorgeous island paradise, I found myself chained to the bowels of a barge, as if it was 1801 instead of 2001 and I was traveling the Middle Passage.

The fifty-eight-mile trip from mainland Puerto Rico to Vieques had taken less than a half hour by air; by barge, that little jaunt turned into a three-hour ordeal. Near us on the barge were several large military trucks that also were being transported back to the mainland. And during the whole of the three hours, as sea water sprayed up into my face and I was helpless to wipe it away, my mind was stuck like a broken record on just one thought as I stared up at a huge truck bouncing around nearby. Was the chain that was supposed to be holding that truck in place suddenly going to succumb to the bouncing waves and allow the truck to crush me to death? There was very little conversation among the four of us. I think they were thinking about that truck, too. This was not the way I had planned for this trip to go down. I sent up some earnest prayers on that barge. I could see the
New York Post
headline: “Sharpton Suffers Death by Truck.”

By the time we reached San Juan, we had lost quite a bit of our swagger. But we received a lift when we finally got to the federal penitentiary at about midnight. When we walked into that processing room, a big cheer went up for us from all the grateful Puerto Ricans, thankful that we cared enough about them to put our freedom and safety on the line. They
had been fighting the Navy for years, claiming that the military exercises and bombing being conducted on the island were causing cancer and asthma in their kids. Two years earlier, a security guard had been killed by a bomb that went awry. This was a huge political issue in Puerto Rico. They were especially grateful that I had gone down there, since I wasn’t normally attached to Latino causes.

After we were released and traveled back up to New York, I moved on. I assumed that my Vieques ordeal was over. But several months later, in early May, I was attending a meeting in a hotel in Midtown when my cell phone rang. It was one of the guys I had met down in Puerto Rico.

“You know you go on trial tomorrow, right?” he said.

I shook my head. “No, that’s just a court appearance. Just tell the lawyer I waive my appearance.”

“No. The judge says trial.”

“But I can’t,” I said. “It’s three in the afternoon. How am I gonna get down there?”

“If you’re not here, they’re going to put out a federal warrant.”

I was not pleased, but I knew a federal warrant was not something to mess with. I called the three other defendants and informed them of our dilemma. The next four hours were a blur, but we finally walked onto a seven thirty flight to San Juan, relieved and more than a bit annoyed. The next morning, we met briefly with our lawyers before we faced the judge. There were at least 100 other defendants there, all of them Vieques protesters. One by one, they started going before the
federal judge, whose name was José Antonio Fusté. And every single one of them was getting jail time.

I looked at Ramirez; he looked back at me.

“We’re going to jail today,” I said.

He shook his head. “Oh, no, no, no. This is an appearance.”

Again, I repeated, “We’re going to jail.”

When they called our case, the four of us stood up and went before Judge Fusté. One of our defense lawyers explained to the judge that three of us were elected officials and had to return to work.
Time
magazine had just told the world that I was thinking of running for president. We were busy guys. The hope was that the judge would give us a trial date for some point in the distant future.

“Fine. I understand all that,” the judge responded. “Are you ready for trial?”

Before we knew what had hit us, the prosecutor was laying out his case against us. Of course, we were guilty—that’s the whole point of civil disobedience. You want to get arrested, maybe even go to jail, to bring attention to your cause, to use the weight of public opinion to move the other side. After the prosecutor was finished, it was our turn to make our case. We had hired local counsel from Puerto Rico because we thought we were just making a court appearance. We weren’t expecting an instant trial. Our lawyer stood up and stumbled through an ineffectual defense.

When he was done, Judge Fusté said, “OK, have a seat.”

He turned to the four of us. “Be ready for sentencing. You’re guilty.”

Before our sentencing, we each had a chance to speak to the court.

“I don’t come from Puerto Rico,” I told the judge. “But I am one for standing up for something that is right. If Martin Luther King were alive, he would have come to Vieques to raise these issues. We believe that is his legacy. We owe a moral debt in the King tradition to stand up for children who can’t stand up for themselves.

“This building will be closed next January in honor of Martin Luther King, who stood for civil rights,” I continued. “Before you sentence me, I would like to wish you a happy King Day.”

When it was time for sentencing, the judge called Ramirez’s name. Ramirez stood. “Forty days,” the judge said.

Next was Carrión. “Forty days.”

Rivera. “Forty days.”

Sharpton? “Oh, I see you’ve been arrested many times for civil rights,” Judge Fusté said, looking down at my file. “You’re a repeat offender. Ninety days.”

Just like that. Three months in jail.

When I had left home the previous afternoon, I told my wife and two daughters, “I’m going to Puerto Rico for a hearing. I’ll be right back.”

Next thing I knew, I was in jail for the rest of the summer.

When we emerged from the courthouse, they had shackled not just our hands but also our feet. That was the federal way. My partners were clearly in a state of shock. But it was an important lesson for any activist preparing to participate in
civil disobedience. You always have to be ready to go to jail. I don’t care how important or indispensable you think you are. If there’s a probability of arrest, then there’s a possibility of jail. It’s simply part of the activist job description.