The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership

by Al Sharpton

  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.

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  BREAKING THE SHACKLES OF CHILDHOOD

  My 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.

  Just because I was the boy preacher didn’t mean that I wanted to be isolated from my peers, but that’s what happened. If I went outside to play punchball, guys would play with me, but I could tell they really didn’t want to. And as for the girls? They found it all extremely weird. How are you going to do naughty things with a preacher? I was a rigid fundamentalist Christian, but I was still a growing boy moving into adolescence and puberty, with an escalating interest in girls. And no outlet for that interest. And the adults around me either exalted me or admonished me because they were holding me to an entirely different standard than my peers. In the middle of all that, I was still seeking a father f
igure. So it was a big, messy stew of difficult emotions I was grappling with at the time.

  When I got older and had children of my own, I realized that I had no road map to follow, no role model to help me figure out how to do this thing called fatherhood. But I quickly realized that maybe the most important element of fatherhood was to be a bedrock for my children, to be there always as a support system for them—all the things my father never was for me. When my wife and I weren’t able to sustain our marriage and we separated, I became even more convinced that my job was to make sure I remained available to my two daughters. Developing a strong, unbreakable bond with them became one of the most important things in the world to me.

  But it wasn’t easy, primarily because I had nothing to emulate. Many men move into the role of father quite easily, smoothly, because their own fathers had always been there as examples. They could either duplicate their fathers’ strength or eliminate their weaknesses. But I had none of that. All I had was absence, emptiness. I didn’t know the elements that made fathers successful or the things to avoid. So I would find myself watching fathers, trying to figure out what worked or didn’t work and how to incorporate it into my own fathering style.

  My goal was to break the generational cycle of dysfunction that hung over my family. I already had a failed marriage; I didn’t want a failed fatherhood, too. But I had to be honest with myself and acknowledge that I needed help, that I had many shortcomings in this area. I knew my goal would be impossible to reach if I didn’t figure out how to fix them.

  The world is not a perfect place; none of our families are perfect, either. All of us who come out of “broken” or dysfunctional homes first must comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we’re not responsible for our family situations. I had to bear some of the shame, the embarrassment, and the lack of security from what my father did, but none of it was my fault. So while embarrassment might be an understandable response, I could not burden myself with guilt. Just as some people inherit wealth, I inherited dysfunction. And just as those who inherit wealth should not act as if the wealth accrues some sort of merit on them, granting them a superiority over those whose beginnings were more humble, you shouldn’t be humiliated if you’re on the other side of the ledger, grappling with family dysfunction, because you had nothing to do with it.

  Those of us who come from dysfunction must take an important step toward healing. We have to admit that we are scarred and understand where our scars are located. I realized perhaps the most damaging consequence of my father’s abandonment was a feeling I retained, deep in my psyche, that I was unworthy, that I had been rejected. When you grow up believing that you have been rejected by the man whose genes helped to form you, whose name is stamped on you, whose face is clearly visible in yours, you can’t help but embark on a dire search for validation. That’s what I got from James Brown and Jesse Jackson and Rev. Bill Jones, a widely respected religious leader in Brooklyn—more than seeing them as father figures to emulate, I saw them as important men who could validate me. By spending time with me when my father wouldn’t, by advising me when my father had not a word of advice to offer, they gave me a sense of self-worth that I didn’t even realize I had lost until I got it from them. My thinking was, if these talented and influential men were taking time with me, then I must not be some worthless kid from the hood who had no value and nothing to offer.

  When you come from a childhood as shattering as mine was, you have to be honest about your insecurities and your burning questions. Whatever process you come up with to deal with these issues, whether it’s prayer or meditation or a therapist’s couch, you must step into that den of painful self-inquiry and find some answers for yourself. If you don’t, the insecurities and the questions will remain buried deep in your psyche and become a threat to everything you do—lurking, biding their time, ready to spring forth at the most inopportune moments and sink you with self-doubt and self-sabotage. If you come from dysfunction and you don’t grapple with it, bearing the inevitable pain, it can become a permanent fixture in your personality.

  I was in my twenties when James Brown took me with him to the White House, and on that day, he told me that he wanted me to style my hair like his. For me, it wasn’t about the hairstyle; it was the satisfaction of having this man asking me to emulate him, something that had never happened with my own father. That’s why I didn’t even give it a second thought—he could have been telling me that from then on, we were going to wear short pants. I still would have done it. Of course, on the surface, it looked as if I was just copying my idol, but the deeper point was that he was giving me the validation I so desperately needed. Had I known beforehand that I was going through these psychological trials, that I badly wanted validation, I might have responded differently to the hairstyle.

  Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I see how the traumas of my early years continued to reach far into my adult years and affect my experiences as a parent. Although I grew up swirling around in a stew of need and dysfunction, I think I was able to break the cycle and give my daughters a stable foundation to launch them into adulthood. Whenever I could, I would bring them with me, whether it was to the White House or just to a chicken dinner at some local event. Even now, although they are grown, I have a long-standing dinner date with them every week.

  Certainly, their childhoods were out of the ordinary, because their father’s job was the farthest thing from a nine-to-five imaginable, always on the road, always fighting a new cause. But they could always be sure of one thing: Their father was nearby, anxious to shower them with all the love I could manage.

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  LEARNING FROM FLAWED LEADERS

  Our leaders aren’t always going to be perfect, but we can still learn a great deal from them about how to live our lives. This message was delivered to me with force and clarity by the great Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

  As I moved into adolescence, I became fascinated with Powell, whose father had been pastor of Harlem’s iconic Abyssinian Baptist Church from 1908 to 1936. Adam Jr. was a huge figure in Harlem during his civil rights activist days, using rent strikes and public campaigns to force businesses to treat blacks fairly. He utilized the picket line to force the World’s Fair to hire more blacks in 1939. Two years later, he led a bus boycott to force the Transit Authority to hire more black workers. After succeeding his father as pastor of Abyssinian, Adam was elected to the New York City Council in 1941, the first black council member in New York history. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1944, the first black congressman in New York State history. Once he got to Congress, Powell immediately became its racial conscience, as he was eager to take on the racists and segregationists who had been roaming the congressional floor for decades. Adam wasn’t afraid of anybody. His courage, brilliance, and outspokenness made him a figure of immense pride in the black community.

  I would go up to see him at Abyssinian on Sundays, entranced by his electrifying sermons. I would hang out after church and find a way to attach myself to his entourage. This was the kind of preacher I wanted to be. Powell knew my pastor, Bishop Washington, so he let me hang around him. He had a man on his staff named Odell Clark and a driver named Jack Packard, and even though I was just twelve, they would call me and tell me when he was coming to town. They got used to me being around, and Adam was intrigued by me, this kid preacher following him around like a puppy. I think my fascination with him probably flattered him. He had begun his political decline and was accused of misusing public funds, eventually being stripped of his chairmanship of the House’s powerful Labor and Education Committee, a position that he had wielded like a talisman in helping President Lyndon Johnson enact pivotal legislation in his War on Poverty.

  Congress had voted to prevent Adam from taking his seat until the House Judiciary Committee completed an investigation, even though he had been reelected by his constituents. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that Congress had acted unconstitutionally in keep
ing Powell from taking a seat to which he had been elected.

  In the midst of his troubles, Adam appeared on the David Frost Show, a popular evening talk show at the time. Frost asked Powell how he would describe himself, since he had been a member of Congress for more than twenty years, had been the pastor of the largest Baptist denominational church, had been married three times, and had an untold number of mistresses.

  Adam leaned back, puffed on his cigar, and said, “Adam Powell doesn’t give a damn.”

  At first, Frost didn’t appear to understand. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  So Adam repeated it. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody thinks. As long as it’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening, I’m going to live my life.”

  I was amazed, exhilarated. Can you imagine the impact of that kind of bravado on an impressionable fourteen-year-old boy? I yearned to get to the point where I could be so bold and uncaring about what people thought. And when I was early in my career, during the Bernard Goetz, Howard Beach, and Tawana Brawley years, that’s exactly how I was. My mind-set was, I’m going to do me, I’m gonna be me, I don’t care what anybody thinks.

  But one day, as I started to mature, I realized that Adam’s mind-set was flawed. That was not leadership reflected in that way of thinking; it was selfishness. When you have accepted the mantle of leadership, when you want to ascend to the level where people can comfortably call you a leader, you must accept the reality that people have the right to expect you to be different, better, more evolved than everybody else. If they are going to invest their faith and their hopes and their ambitions in you, then they have the right to expect that you are going to be the kind of leader who does care what people think. With all due respect to one of my early idols, they have the right to expect you to give a damn.