The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (11 page)

He was always ambitious, kind of hot-tempered but smart. He was the most natural brand marketer I ever met. He just knew instinctively how to promote, how to set trends. I saw things in him that reminded me of James and Michael. He was a real innovator. As he got older, we would talk more and more. When he got into trouble with gun charges after he and Jennifer Lopez left a party, and Johnnie Cochran was representing him, Johnnie talked to me about supporting him, which I did. He came to church when I invited him. Over the years, he would always invite me to events such as his famous “White Party” in the Hamptons. What I liked about him was that he always had a sense of community. And the older he got, the more he talked to me, asking my advice about people, about deals he was working on, but it was mostly in passing when we saw each other.

He told me he wanted to do something around voting and started the “Vote or Die” campaign in 2004, the year I ran for president, which registered a huge number of young people. But, more important, it created a spirit in the younger generation that made it cool to vote. I think it changed the attitude of young folks in such a way that it helped Obama win in 2008. That wasn’t a venture to add to his riches; it was just his heart, doing what he believed in.

One day in early 2005, much to my dismay, Johnnie Cochran died of a brain tumor. As I was sitting on a platform at Johnnie’s funeral at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, Diddy looked at me and said, “You know, Johnnie was like my pops. Now he’s gone. So you’re gonna have to be my pops now.”

I joked about being just thirteen or fourteen years older than he was but it still being biologically possible for a man my age to be his father.

“I’m serious,” he said.

I looked at him closely. He
was
serious. “All right. Well, when you need me, call me.”

When we were leaving the church, he asked me how I was getting back to New York. I told him I was riding with Earl Graves, the publisher of
Black Enterprise
, on Pepsi’s corporate plane. Johnnie and I were both on Pepsi’s minority advisory board.

“Y’all got another seat?” he asked me.

“But you got your entourage,” I said.

“They can fly commercial,” he responded.

So he flew back with us, and we talked all the way back across the country. He said, “Tell me about how James Brown did what he did. How did he own radio stations when black folks didn’t have anything?” I told him about courage, about standing up and going to the next level. I told him that James Brown went to jail as a kid, but he had to get over his street mentality. I told him about Michael, about the ways he changed the game. And it led to a lot more conversations over the years. Sometimes we won’t talk for a month or two, but then, out of nowhere, I’ll get a text. It’ll say simply, “Pops, call me.” He’ll want to pick my brain about something

These conversations with Diddy paid off a few years ago, when the activist community got commitments from NBC, General Electric, and Comcast to make investments in the black and Latino communities as they were trying to get
government approval for a merger. In addition to adding blacks and Latinos to their boards and agreeing to use black and Latino companies for services such as advertising and legal, they agreed to grant two TV stations to the black community and two to the Latino community. There were at least twenty African-American groups that wanted those stations. So Puffy came to my office and told me he really wanted to do this, to own one of the stations. It was clear he would be a very strong owner, with his business and marketing acumen and all his connections—he was and is hip-hop. But I felt I needed to get real with him for a minute.

“You got to remember, you can’t be getting into fights at hip-hop parties,” I said to him. “You’re not just going to be an artist, you’re going to be an owner. You’re going to have to sit in front of federal regulators. You’re not just going to be
on
TV now, you’re going to own the station. That will require a different mentality, a different thought pattern. You got to
be
this.”

I said to him, “You can do this, you can do that, but you can’t do this
and
that. So you gotta choose. Do you want to be the slickest, hippest, butt-whuppingest dude in the hood, or do you want to be the mogul who has a network that can help transform the hood and make mogul kind of money? You can do both; you got the mentality, the heart, and the courage to do both, but you can’t do both of them at the same time. You have to be one or the other. It’s your choice—the same choice I had to make.”

I told him I wasn’t preaching to him, I was sharing with him.

“I had to decide whether I was going to be the caricature, just standing up at the front of every march, or was I going to continue marching but use it to transform, to really make solid change? It may mean I have to be more careful with what I say. It may mean I have to discipline my lifestyle.”

“Yeah, you’re right, Pops,” he said. “But I’m ready. I’m ready.”

And that’s been our relationship. Now he has the television station, he hired a professional team, and I’m sure he’s putting together something that will be fabulous. We talk all the time, and I’m proud of how he has transformed. I’ve seen situations over the last few years where people tried to provoke him and he wouldn’t respond. Not because he’s turned soft but because he’s really gotten hard. He’s determined now to go to the next level, and he’s not letting foolishness get in his way. Sometimes in counterculture—and that’s what ghetto life is; if the mainstream culture won’t let you in, you create an alternative culture—the reverse of the truth starts becoming your reality. So what you call soft in the streets is really hard. It takes a lot more strength to walk away from conflict than it does to indulge the emotions and trade the insults or beat somebody’s behind.

But I still have the need, the desire, to try to drive this generation toward a greater understanding, to understand the roots of what it is they call their art form. They need to know the historical antecedents and the moral dynamic from which this all sprang. The contradiction, the soullessness of modern hip-hop, was laid bare by the whole Occupy movement. Artists such as Jay-Z and others were caught out there, ostensibly
sitting on the wrong side of the movement, on the wrong side of history.

Here was a movement telling the world that it represented the 99 percent who were being economically oppressed by the richest 1 percent, and the modern incarnation of hip-hop is doing everything it can to be in the 1 percent. Flashing the bling, bragging about your opulence, and conspicuous consumption while your people are suffering. So what the growth of this movement—and the statements made by rappers saying they didn’t understand the movement—revealed was that modern hip-hop is not reflecting the times. There’s a tragic tension that was uncovered. And if they’re not careful, these artists are going to become victimized by that. The people who are buying their music are the ones who are being economically exploited. The artists can’t begin to look like the exploiters. Creating a fantasy world in the music is one thing, but they can’t also look as if they are trying to embody the exploiters in their real lives. And most important of all, they can’t look as if they are oblivious to the exploitation. That is not black music. And it has never been.

The key is not to get too sucked in by the fabulousness that’s being offered—in the entertainment business or any other career that might be beckoning to you. Once you let in the bling, get seduced by the opulence or the grand lifestyle, it becomes so easy for you to get lost. The big picture is a distant memory, and pretty soon you don’t even remember why you got into the business in the first place. When that happens, you’re vulnerable to any dude with a hefty checkbook, asking you to sell your soul.

T
here are lessons, and then there are moments that are so impactful that they sit in your memory forever, frozen in time like an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. Such was the day in Central Park when Muhammad Ali taught me what it means to push yourself to be the greatest of all time.

I knew some of the guys in the Nation of Islam and through them got to know Muhammad Ali. This was in the mid-’70s, after he had regained his title in Zaire in 1974—a fight I had attended as part of James Brown’s entourage. Whenever Ali came through New York, I would spend time with him.

In 1977, Ali was in training for his fight against the hard-hitting Earnie Shavers at Madison Square Garden. It would turn out to be his last fight at the Garden, the fight before he lost the title to Leon Spinks five months later. Ali, then thirty-five, would wake up before dawn to run around the Central Park reservoir, the large, scenic lake that sits in the
middle of the park. The one-and-a-half-mile track around the reservoir has been a popular jogging site for celebrities and everyday New Yorkers for years, and it has even been featured in movies.

“I’m going runnin’ in the morning, you going with me?” Ali asked me one day.

I nodded eagerly, thrilled to get a chance to “train” with the champ. I was in my early twenties, old enough to think I might be able to keep up with him for a minute.

The next morning, I stumbled out of bed in the wee hours, the night sky still blanketing the city. I put on my sneakers and got on an empty subway train in Brooklyn. I met the champ and his entourage at the Statler Hilton in Midtown, now the Hotel Pennsylvania, across the street from Madison Square Garden. We were whisked up to Central Park, the city streets still relatively quiet.

I noticed that Ali was wearing heavy brogan boots, which I thought odd since we were going running.

“Why are you wearing boots?” I asked him.

“It makes my legs stronger,” he said.

He was also coated in Albolene cream, which he told me made him sweat.

“All right, Champ, twenty-two minutes,” his trainer, Angelo Dundee, announced.

So Ali started running. And I started running, too. Very quickly, I was behind him, huffing, trying to last as long as I could. He was well ahead of me, but I pushed myself to keep going. By the time the champ had gone around the reservoir
about two times, he started clocking Dundee’s twenty-two minutes. I was confused.

“We already did fifteen minutes,” I said. “Why are you starting the clock now?”

“I train myself to start timing after I’m tired,” he explained as we ran. “After I’m spent. ’Cause that’s how I make it in the late rounds when all of it is gone. When I don’t have any more. I train myself to keep fighting beyond what’s easy for me.”

Right there, I knew I had heard something important. This was one of the traits that made him a great champion.

I saw that same trait in the studio with James Brown at four in the morning, cutting some of the most important recordings in music history when the band wanted to go back to the hotel. James was never satisfied, always pushing the band to do it one more time.

I saw it with Michael Jackson, practically living in the studio for weeks at a time until his music was exactly where he wanted it.

These were men who had risen to the height of their game, demonstrating to me the discipline and hard work required to get there—and stay there. Of course, they might have had more fun with some fine woman or hanging out all night at a party, but that’s not who they were. They were about the sacrifice. They taught me that essential lesson: If you want to ascend to that next level, you have to learn to walk past the many temptations that will be thrown in your path. I kept that thought close at hand later on, when my own celebrity would bring me all kinds of enticing propositions
from people who didn’t necessarily have my best interests at heart. Walking away was easier for me because of the influence of men like Ali in my life. If you’re not willing to make those sacrifices, you’re not going to achieve your goal. You might have some fun, but you won’t get where you’re trying to go.

W
hether it was my search for a father figure or for a clearer idea of how to turn myself into a great civil rights activist, one big lesson I took away from all of the men I followed early in my life was the notion that in order to rise, I had to be focused and intentional and committed to a cause greater than myself. The word
focus
here is key. It’s something I believe I was lacking early in my career, when I too often allowed my emotions to control me. That was a mistake I made with one of the cases with which my name became indelibly linked: Tawana Brawley.

If I had it to do over again, there are things I would do differently, knowing what I now know about human nature, about the criminal justice system, about the media. The entirety of the case hinged on whether this young black girl in Upstate New York had been violated, as she said she was, by
a white police officer, among others. Sensational stuff, sure, but there’s no way I would ever turn my back on a young teenage girl in need, even if her claims were going to turn into an explosive media story. That’s just not in my nature. But my first miscalculation was in making the case so personal—us against Robert Abrams, the special prosecutor. The lawyers I was working with and I did a whole lot of name-calling. In these instances, the right approach is to fight the case, not demonize the actors. Because when you allow it to become personal, you take away from the objective. Here’s a young lady who says she was violated. Let’s deal with the facts, what we know. You can conduct an investigation and try to determine what happened to her, but you can’t just ignore it because she said the perpetrators were law enforcement. That’s what we feared was happening, that the authorities were automatically dismissing her as a liar.

Years later, when I got involved in the Trayvon Martin case after he was gunned down by George Zimmerman, who still hadn’t been arrested, I never once even used the name of the sheriff in Sanford, Florida. That was after years of learning the danger of making it personal. Are you about the issues and getting justice, or are you about the sound bite and the name-calling? Hell, we used to call David Dinkins, who was New York’s first black mayor, names. What did that get us? Rudy Giuliani.