The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (2 page)

As you read through the following pages and get a sense of my journey and the lessons I’ve learned, I believe you will come to understand why I’ve not been unsettled or slowed down by the attempts over the years to paint me with a broad brush as some kind of troublemaker or self-interested hustler. While those caricatures might have become media shorthand, I was not about to let the world define me. This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years: Even if everyone around you thinks you’re wrong, you must have the strength to stand strong for what you believe in. You must do this with some honesty and some humility—to be able to look at yourself and admit the areas where you are weak and where you are strong, where you could have done better, where you came up short. And, crucially, you must not be afraid to grow with the times.

The America I faced in the 1980s wearing my jogging suit was not the same place as the America I speak to now, yet I still find myself leading marches to protest outrages such as the shooting death of Trayvon Martin or the widespread attempts to roll back voting rights. I moved with the times, updating my style and my approach so that I never became irrelevant. If you do it right, as I hope I did, you can become part of the reason the times they are a-changin’.

O
ne of the early things I learned about leadership—about transforming yourself into someone whom others will follow—is how intentional it is. Most of the great leaders don’t get there by accident, suddenly waking up one morning to find greatness patiently waiting on their front stoop. No, there’s careful and strategic planning at work from very early in their lives. Deliberating. Reading. Researching. Sometimes there may be a bit of luck and the guiding hand of others helping along the way; it doesn’t usually happen in isolation, without input and mentorship.

I’ve had many opportunities over the years to go off in different directions, whether it was to become the head of some big megachurch or to spend my life living fabulously on the road with James Brown, but that wasn’t what I had in mind for Alfred Sharpton. I knew I wanted to be a civil rights
activist, so I began to take the steps in that direction before I had even reached my tenth birthday.

I tell young people that you can’t arrive someplace until you determine the destination. It sounds simple, almost clichéd, but it’s an inescapable truth. If I’m at the airport, I can’t buy a ticket until I know where I’m going. That’s the first thing they ask you when you step up to the counter. Next, you have to deal with the cost—this is the price of your trip, so are you willing to pay the price to get there? That’s something every potential leader has to decide: Is it worth it to me to wake up at four
A.M.
every day and run around the park like Muhammad Ali training for a fight or to stay in the recording studio all night to get it right like James Brown? The price of leadership may be graduating from Harvard Law School and going into the projects of Chicago to work for peanuts, like a young Barack Obama. Or it may be taking an Oxford and a Yale Law School education and going to Newark, New Jersey, to live in the slums and be a community organizer like the young Cory Booker. In my case, it was turning my back on the life of a megachurch pastor, with all of its material benefits, to spend the next thirty years picketing and going to jail.

What is your intention for your life, and are you willing to pay the price to get there? The destination determines the cost; the cost never determines the destination. You can’t look for the cheap shortcuts to greatness—it doesn’t work that way.

After that airport ticket taker finds out your destination and tells you the cost, what do they ask for next? Your ID. Who are you? Do you have the character to get to your destination?
My early years were a perfect illustration of this: I grew up deep in the hood, surrounded by all the temptations and traps that come in such an environment, yet I walked around in elementary and middle school telling the other kids and the teachers that I was going to be a preacher. Can you imagine how much teasing and abuse I had to endure? I couldn’t go to the same parties as my classmates, I couldn’t hang out with the same girls as my classmates, I couldn’t have the same habits as my classmates. I’m the same age as all of them, part of the same culture, living in the same community, immersed in the same environment, but my ID said something different from theirs, based on my destination. And I could never forget that.

Once I decided I wanted to preach, I became obsessive. I would listen closely to every great preacher who came through my home church, Washington Temple Church of God in Christ. It was one of the biggest churches in New York, so everybody visited at some point, like Mahalia Jackson, with whom I would later tour, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom I met twice when I was just a kid. I would buy albums and listen to all the great preachers, such as Rev. William Holmes Borders and Rev. C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s daddy. I was a sponge, absorbing everything I could, picking up little nuances that I thought I could incorporate into my own preaching. Around this time, I noticed that I was increasingly drawn to social justice. My pastor, Bishop F. D. Washington, would openly tell people, “I raised that boy to be the head of our denomination.” But it became clear to me that’s not who I wanted to be. I wanted to be Dr. Martin Luther King or Rev. Jesse Jackson or
Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., men who were called to serve both God and their people through activism.

I dived into learning about civil rights leaders just as I had dived into learning about the preachers. There was nothing Jesse wrote that I didn’t have a copy of, nothing James Farmer, who was in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), did that I hadn’t heard about. I knew their styles, knew their rhythms. Methodically, obsessively, I tried to take in everything I could. Some kids wanted to be athletes and knew every tiny detail of Willie Mays’s life. I knew everything about Jesse Jackson and James Farmer and MLK. While my classmates were outside playing ball, I was inside reading King’s
Where Do We Go from Here?
This need to preach and serve wasn’t something imposed on me; it just bubbled up from within, something I attached to on my own. I had no guarantees I would find a life there, never mind a livelihood. But I knew that was where I wanted to be.

My mother recognized my yearning at an early age and did whatever she could to encourage it. When my family moved to a big house in Queens, she built me a little chapel in the basement, complete with three or four benches for pews and a little stage that was the pulpit. While the other kids in Hollis were outside playing punchball and stickball in the streets, I would go down to the basement and preach, lining up my sister’s dolls on the pews to act as my congregation. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to me at the time, though it might have looked a bit strange to outsiders. And no amount of ridicule or other kids calling me weird mattered to me, because I knew what I wanted to do, where I felt the most at
home. In fact, the more I was teased or encouraged to do other things, the more it made me want to preach.

As I got older, I continued to encounter pressures to do other things, and I continued stubbornly to say no. When I ran for mayor of New York in 1997 and just missed forcing Ruth Messinger into a runoff, I got an interesting visit at my home in Brooklyn by three New York luminaries. Former mayor David Dinkins, Congressman Charlie Rangel and former Manhattan borough president and business mogul Percy Sutton sat me down and tried to get me to run for Congress. They wanted me to take on Rep. Ed Towns, a Brooklyn congressman who had broken with the Democratic establishment and endorsed Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani for reelection. Because I had won the borough of Brooklyn in the mayoral primary, they thought I’d have an easy time beating Towns. I told them I would think about it; for weeks, they continued to lobby me to run. But ultimately, I decided I couldn’t do it. Some of my detractors said I didn’t want to hold office and be held accountable; my friends were telling me I could be New York’s star congressman. But the reason I said no was simple: I didn’t want to be a congressman.

When you are being pushed into something by others, you have to look inward and ask yourself: Do I really want to do this? Will I be at peace with myself if I say yes? I wanted to be what I had become, a national civil rights leader and an advocate using the media to push important causes. If I had gone to Congress, I don’t know if we would have been able to pass racial-profiling laws; I wouldn’t have been able
to move around the country trying to protect voting rights; I wouldn’t have been able to march on behalf of all those who had been unjustly slain, such as Trayvon Martin. And I would have been miserable, because I would have been outside of my mission, away from my passion.

Whatever your politics, you must find your comfort zone. And stick with it. Don’t let other people talk you into what seems to be a more appealing or lucrative career if it doesn’t match your purpose in life. If you succumb to the allure of money or prestige, the rewards will never be enough if it isn’t your passion.

M
y father abandoning my family when I was nine was one of the most devastating and consequential events of my childhood. It also instilled in me a desire to break the generational curse of father abandonment that haunts so many families, particularly in the African-American community. Once my own daughters were born, I vowed to do everything in my power to remain a strong and influential presence in their lives, no matter what.

This is a lesson that all of us from “broken” homes need to carry out of our childhoods: Don’t allow the shackles of a challenging childhood hold you down.

Until the age of nine, I lived in a stable, middle-class, two-parent household in Hollis, Queens. My father had plumbing and construction companies, and he owned several pieces of property. He bought himself and my mother new late-model
Cadillacs every year, which they parked in the garage connected to our house. It was the epitome of 1950s idyllic suburban life. I was happy. But it all ended when I was nine and my dad ran off with my mother’s oldest daughter from her previous marriage—in other words, his teenage stepdaughter. One day he was there, the next day he was gone. I didn’t understand the gravity of the incest, but I knew that his act instantly transformed my life and traumatized our entire family. My world flipped overnight. The whole ordeal almost gave my mother a nervous breakdown, and it cast me out on a lifelong journey to fill the hole he left in my heart and to search for men who could act as stand-ins for the father I no longer had.

For several months, my mother, my sister, and I lived in a house with no electricity or gas because my mother had no money. When she lost the house, we ended up moving to Brooklyn and living the typically grueling existence of the hardcore ghetto: welfare, food stamps, housing projects, single motherhood. This was 1963, so sociologists such as William Julius Wilson hadn’t yet applied their analytical microscopes to black poverty, but this part of Brownsville, Brooklyn, was the classic portrait of what sociologists would later call a “disadvantaged” neighborhood. They were difficult days. What made it worse for me was knowing that part of my mother’s struggle was to figure out how to get me a couple of suits for my growing body so that I had something nice to wear to my preaching jobs.

The shock of my life changing so severely and drastically surely did some long-lasting damage to my psyche, but when I
look back on it now, I think the most damaging aspect of it all was the raw, aching sense of abandonment I felt. My father just walked out of my life. It would be nearly four decades before we would reconnect. The abandonment was made worse by the fact that he had my older sister, Cheryl, the first child he had with my mother, come and live with him and his new wife for a while, leaving me behind in Brooklyn. I was named after him; I looked like him. But I distinctly remember feeling as if my father didn’t want me. It was incredibly debilitating. I was a nine-year-old boy without an anchor, unmoored in this new world. So I reached desperately for any father figure I could find, a replacement that could help fill the emptiness that ate away at my insides. I found a lot of what I was looking for in the church.

My preaching career started at the age of four, when Bishop Washington allowed me to stand on a box at the pulpit and sermonize to a congregation of 900 people on the anniversary of the Junior Usher Board. When I started to become known in the community as the boy preacher, it was not looked on kindly by my classmates. Their reaction ranged from outrage to amusement, with a bit of everything in between. I never got beaten up, but they clearly thought I was a strange kid. They were either laughing at me or trying to avoid me. It wasn’t helped by my insistence in writing “Rev. Alfred Sharpton” at the top of my papers in school, which upset my teachers so much for some reason that my mother had to come to school to intervene. It was my first real confrontation with authority, but it was also affirming for me, my insistence that I was
something
,
someone of worth, despite the rejection by my father, despite the craziness that my life had become. My growing identity as a boy preacher undoubtedly helped my self-esteem at the time, but it also increased the sense of isolation I was feeling. It put me further out of step with my contemporaries, made me an oddity. After all, I was their mothers’ preacher on Sunday. How were they supposed to act toward me on Monday?

Bishop Washington took me under his wing, with the intent of nurturing and guiding me so that one day I could succeed him as pastor of the church and maybe even become a bishop in the Church of God in Christ. I began to do the circuit, preaching at different churches in the area. That’s when I went on the road at the age of nine with Mahalia Jackson, traveling with the most famous gospel singer in the world as her opening act, as the astounding boy preacher from Brooklyn. I knew Mahalia was huge, but I had been preaching for so many years already that this became second nature to me. One of my distinct memories from that period was opening for Mahalia at the 1964 World’s Fair, at the circular pavilion and replica of the globe—the Unisphere—in Queens, that you can still see when you fly into LaGuardia, next to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center where the U.S. Open is held. This made a serious impression on my classmates. So what was at first odd and amusing soon became a reason to hold me in a certain amount of esteem, or at least respect. They’d point to me, saying, “There’s the boy preacher.” But no more “Ha ha ha” to go along with it. Opening for Mahalia Jackson at age nine will do that for you.