The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (17 page)

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.

T
he 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 his 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.

“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?”