The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (12 page)

But it took time, maturity, and growth for me to transform into the kind of leader who had the discipline to control myself and my emotions. I learned by trial and error, making some painful mistakes along the way.

I’ll never forget a poignant moment I had one day with Stokely Carmichael, the former Black Panther who changed his name to Kwame Ture. He had originally been a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), participating in the Freedom Rides and working closely with King, but he became more radicalized and moved to the Black Panthers. He was the man credited with popularizing the term
Black Power
. He came by the headquarters for my organization, the National Action Network, in the ’90s, a couple of years before his death in 1998, and sat with me to talk.

He said, “You know something, you’re following the tradition of Dr. King. I helped start the Black Power movement, but it was a different strand.”

“You used to attack Dr. King,” I said.

“Yep, called him a bunch of names. You know something? When Dr. King got killed, I went to his funeral, and I cried more than his kids.”

“Really? Why did you do that?” I asked.

He said, “Because all them years when we would say it’s not about turning the other cheek, it’s about Black Power, and you’re a Tom, you’re an old man, he would just smile and never respond. He never once called us a name. Not once. He said he really loved his people, and sometimes you gotta take it for a bigger cause. I never forgot that.”

Here was Stokely Carmichael, who got famous as the antithesis to King, in the end respecting King more than anyone. I actually went back and studied that further. He was right; King never responded to Malcolm, never responded to
all the attacks from the more militant blacks. That was a real lesson for me. When I was younger, I was always ready to go at somebody, tit for tat. I considered it an essential part of who I was, part of being a New Yorker. You call me a name? Oh, OK, let’s go at it. I used to go on talk shows and argue, fight, cuss, whatever. But at some point, you realize that always engaging in the fight doesn’t help your cause. If you’re going to be focused on becoming a real leader, you learn that some stuff shouldn’t even be dignified with a response. Somebody attacks you with craziness? OK, I’ll be all those things you said I am, but you’re still going to give justice to Trayvon Martin. OK, I’ll be all that, but you’re still going to give us this Affordable Care Act. Again, you have to be focused and intentional and committed to a cause greater than yourself. If I’m attacked from the right, with people calling me a radical, my reaction is going to be, “OK, whatever.” It’s not going to bother me. If I’m attacked from the left—people saying, “You’re too close to Obama, you’re becoming a part of the system”—my response will be, “OK, got it. But I need to go get this Trayvon Martin case in court.” Or, “OK, I heard you, but I need to help the president with health care. Our community is disproportionately impacted by coverage denial because we have so many people with preexisting conditions.”

I’m focused because, at the end of the day, when they stretch me out and lay me down, those names I’m being called aren’t going to mean anything. They’re going to say you either accomplished this or that, or you didn’t. And that’s where you have to keep your focus. That’s running the laps before the
twenty-two minutes is even being counted, like Ali. That’s staying in the studio all night until it’s perfect, like James Brown. I know the difference between great men and famous men, because I’ve been around great men.

Strangely enough, I think it was a work of fiction that stamped me in the eyes of white people inside and outside of New York, creating a portrait that made them think they understood who I was. That portrait came from the mind of novelist Tom Wolfe and his book
The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Released in 1987, Wolfe’s novel featured a character named Rev. Reginald Bacon, who was supposed to be based on me. Bacon was a community organizer who was also exploiting the community and taking money on the side by shaking down elected officials. I think the media and the public “Baconized” me as a way to avoid dealing with the issues of racism and police brutality that I was raising. That was a convenient excuse not to deal with the discomfiting questions, dismissing me as a fraud because of a fictional character in a novel. Talk about laziness.

And if they are going to turn me into Bacon, at least follow it all the way through. If I’m picketing the city officials, like the character in the book, and I’m shaking down city officials, like the character in the book, then ask the question: What is Sharpton getting from city officials? What is Sharpton getting from Mayor Ed Koch, who was my most frequent target at the time? Where is the shakedown? Years later, when the late Mayor Koch came to my fiftieth birthday party after he and I had worked together on an
education-related nonprofit program, the mayor was asked how he could work with Al Sharpton, of all people, after the nastiness of all those years, when he used to call me “Al Charlatan” and I called him “Bull Koch.”

Koch answered, “Oh, we fought, we disagreed—and still do. But I never felt he was a hypocrite. He never came and asked for anything. He didn’t have an ulterior motive, whereas many other leaders would say to me, ‘I need this program, I need this day-care center, I need this for my church.’ ”

I never asked for public funding for anything, so there would be no confusion about my motives. I always raised my own money. So where was the “Bacon”? But over the years, as I got older and gained a better understanding of the inner workings of the media machine—hell, as much as it pains me to admit it, I’m actually a member of the media myself these days!—I understand it now: If you’re a young reporter and you want to impress your editor, then you want to go back to the newsroom with “gotchas.” You don’t want to run back into the newsroom and say, “Hey, do you want to know the real story of Al Sharpton?”

Tawana Brawley came along later in 1987, after the Wolfe book had become a big hit, soon to be made into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis, and that was that. It all became self-fulfilling: Sharpton is a huckster.

One of the most telling revelations of the civil rights work I did in the 1980s and 1990s was how uncomfortable New Yorkers were with the social unrest. For the first time, we brought a Southern kind of civil disobedience movement to New York
over a long period of time. This was Malcolm X’s town; King and Jesse never brought any campaigns to New York. When we marched in Howard Beach, in Bensonhurst, did the “Days of Outrage” to protest police brutality, this was something the city hadn’t ever seen: a sustained movement, jumping on issue after issue, rallying every week, leading nonviolent marches, disrupting the city, shutting down bridges, willingly going to jail. It was new, so the reaction of the media and the public was expected:
This makes us uncomfortable, so we must demonize it.
Even black people were made uncomfortable by all the fuss, because they had never seen it before.

But one of the reasons I was able to keep doing it, despite all the attacks, was that I believed in it, saw it as essential to making the city—my city—more just and fair. I didn’t come to New York; I
was
New York. I grew up in Queens and Brooklyn. I knew how to talk to the guys in the street, ’cause I had been talking to them and preaching to them since I was a little boy. Everything I had been doing for the previous twenty years had prepared me to be a civil rights leader in my city. Even though my mother and my siblings and potential mates thought I was crazy, I was doing exactly what I had pictured myself doing. They would say, “Al, how in the hell you gonna build a career doing that?” But I never thought about it that way. Growing up as a boy preacher, I never knew normal. So I never pictured a nine-to-five gig in my future.

In the early ’90s, I would have regular meetings at Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem with two close friends of mine, David Paterson and Greg Meeks. All of us were in our thirties at
the time, born within a year of one another, and we were all thinking about where we wanted our careers to take us next. On one particular day, we conducted a little poll on where we saw ourselves headed. It was a pivotal moment for us, because it showed how we were activating the long-term vision that would propel us. We went around the table. David went first. His father, Basil Paterson, is still one of the deans of New York politics, particularly in Harlem, and has served the city in many capacities—state senator, deputy mayor, New York secretary of state, and currently a prominent labor lawyer at the age of eighty-seven. In 1985, David was elected to the state senate, taking the seat once held by his father.

“I think I’m going to be the next David Dinkins, the next black mayor,” David said.

Meeks went next. A Harlem kid raised in a housing project, Meeks had already succeeded spectacularly, first as an assistant district attorney and then as a politician; he had just been elected to the state assembly.

“I want to be the next congressman from Queens,” he said.

They got around to me. I had already been through the wrenching ordeals of Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and quite a few other high-profile instances of racial injustice in the city. I had just started my National Action Network to bring some structure to my activism and had recently run for the U.S. Senate in New York. But up to that point, my work had mostly been contained in the city.

“I want to do what Jesse does. I want to be the national civil rights guy,” I said.

They seem surprised. “You don’t want to hold elective office?” they asked me.

I shook my head. “No, I want to use running for office to drive voters to the polls, to drive policies, get in the debates, help push you guys through. I want to do what Jesse and Adam did.”

Fast-forward about seventeen years. We were sitting in another restaurant, this time in downtown New York. David looked over at me.

“Remember our meetings at Sylvia’s?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding my head. “I remember.”

“I think we did it,” David said, his smile broader now. “I’m the governor of New York. Meeks is a congressman. And you’re the national civil rights guy.”

It was a sweet moment. But what was interesting about it was that we all understood our roles, our different talents, and how we could make our contributions. Ultimately, if you’re going to be an effective leader, you have to pick a space that’s comfortable for you. Because eventually, if you’re not comfortable in that space, it’s going to show. Either the public is going to sense it, or you’re going to do something you shouldn’t be doing.

Vision is so essential to any career in any field that it can’t be overemphasized. It may seem obvious, but you can’t stay on a course to your goal until you’ve decided on a course. I decided I wanted to be the Jesse Jackson of my generation. Jesse decided before me that he wanted to be the Martin Luther King of his generation. Of course, you wind up bringing all your baggage
with you—all your psychological issues, the difficulties of your childhood—but you can develop the strength to carry all of it on your journey, or you can make enough money to have somebody else carry the baggage for you. I have actualized my vision by going through the same routine every morning: doing my prayers, reading the Bible, then practicing visualization where I get an image of where I want to see myself. I have been doing this for years. I visualized myself leading an organization with offices all over the country, even when my office was the payphone booth on the corner of 50th and Broadway. I guess I was even doing it when I was a little kid, preaching to my sister’s dolls and pretending they were my congregation.

I never aspired to be a politician. I saw running for office as a way of bringing issues that had been marginalized into the mainstream. It’s part of the job of an activist, to place front and center in the public mind issues that the state, the media, and those in power want to keep stashed away in the dark corners. So if you run for high-profile office, you’re in the debate, with a guaranteed seat at the table. It becomes much harder for them to keep ignoring your issues. It was a model I got from studying Adam Powell, studying Jesse Jackson. So I ran for U.S. Senate, I ran for mayor, I ran for president. I never ran to win. If I actually wanted to hold office, I could have run for other seats that were more attainable. When I ran for president, I put affirmative action, police misconduct, and racial profiling on the national agenda. These issues never would have been discussed during the campaign, wouldn’t have had the chance to become more mainstream, if I hadn’t been at the table.

I’ve heard critics say that I was running as a way to make money—to get matching funds, or to have access to fund-raising—but most of the money I raised for my campaigns I put in myself. In fact, I got in trouble for it; they said I put in too much of my own money, and the campaign had to return it to me. No, the point was exactly what we got out of it: to put issues in the public domain, culminating in 2004 with my speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The other accusation that was leveled at me was that I was just doing it for publicity. I’ve always been amused by that one, which I’ve been hearing since the beginning of my career. So I go through all the public conflicts and attacks, get stabbed and almost killed, go through all kinds of legal battles and tax troubles, and then they begrudge me for becoming well known? If after all that trouble, all I’m getting out of it is fame—not an opulent lifestyle, not a life of comfort, just a little bit of name recognition—then I think the public got the best of that deal.

What is a civil rights activist if not someone who is engaged to make a public issue out of something that otherwise would be ignored? So when people accuse me of trying to get publicity, that’s exactly right. To accuse an activist of seeking publicity is to mean he is competent. Nobody comes to me for their issue to be buried; they come to me to get the attention of the public. When I go out into the community, when I speak at churches and community events, people are steadily handing me letters and envelopes and asking me to look into their issue. They didn’t come to me for me to keep a secret. I think the public doesn’t understand the point
of an activist’s job—these people are hoping I can get their particular injustice into the news cycle.