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

by Al Sharpton

  When rap music began, I was still in my early twenties. It was the music of my streets, the music of my generation of young, post-civil-rights African-Americans, impatient for our piece of the American pie. Full Force, Public Enemy, Russell Simmons, Run-D.M.C., those guys were around my age; I identified with them. That’s where I got the jogging suits that became a part of my regular outfit. The processed hair came from James Brown, but the clothes were straight from the hip-hop generation. In fact, Public Enemy would come to our rallies at the Slave Theater in Bed-Stuy, joining the “no justice, no Peace” movement, weaving the sentiment into their songs.

  I was there at rap’s beginnings, and I saw it begin to change. It started to go from a music of rebellion to a music form that was co-opted by the recording industry establishment, which made it more acceptable and less threatening in its lyrics and presentation. I saw the transformation up close. It was a powerful lesson for me about what happens when you let outside forces take control of your culture, when you are so entranced by the dollar signs that you hand the soul of your community over to a corporation. We started with guys who were in touch with the streets, expressing their pain. And we wound up with guys assigned by the corporate music world to be politically nonthreatening, to become in many ways minstrels who would entertain people at their base level and play into stereotypes of blacks—they want to have babies they won’t raise, they want shiny jewelry and fancy cars without working for them, they want to call their women “bitches” and “hos.”

  Understand, my primary complaint was not with the artists. They were the victims. I was fighting against the manipulation of a culture. I saw the musical establishment break, dehumanize, and incarcerate James Brown. I visited him in jail when members of his family wouldn’t. I saw them break Michael Jackson, too, and I preached both of their funerals.

  The workings of the music industry can’t be fully understood until you see it up close. It’s why so many artists wind up broke and broken toward the ends of their careers—and, in many cases, at the beginnings of their careers, too. When you step into that den without an intimate knowledge of the game, you will walk out with a chunk of your hide missing.

  Once the artists have “made it,” the first thing they do is move out of the community. Certainly, you can’t fault them for using their new wealth to buy themselves a fabulous new lifestyle. But after they move out, the new norm becomes: Stay away from your people. Don’t get politically involved. Don’t become community-involved. You see it across the entertainment spectrum, from musical artists to actors to athletes. There was a time when our artists would be deeply involved in political movements, whether it was Max Roach with Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier with Martin Luther King, Public Enemy with me. But now they were being told that the more isolated you are, the more successful you’ll be. I felt that I needed to question that publicly. It was antithetical to our culture and our history. The lesson is clear: Stay close to your roots. When you don’t, when you allow others to pull you far away from the culture, the communities, and the sensibilities that boosted you to your success, you will eventually lose your way.

  Artists told me that if they were saying something conscious, something positive, they couldn’t get a record deal. The corporate entities were controlling the language to sell more records. So I started questioning why these hip-hop artists would only be allowed to use certain lyrics. When I got involved, some of my friends, such as Russell Simmons, were alarmed. Nobody is more committed to community uplift than Russell Simmons, and I have a lot of admiration for all the causes Russell has gotten involved in.

  When I said I didn’t appreciate the use of the n-word, the b-word, and the word ho in song after song, Russell told me, “Rev, you can’t tell people what to say. We got free speech.”

  I answered, “Russell, you’re right. They got free speech. And so do I.”

  I have the right to say I don’t agree with it. They have the right to say “nigga.” I have the right to say we shouldn’t be saying that.

  It was important for me to make clear that I wasn’t coming at this as some churchified saint. I’ve used the n-word—too many of us in our community have used it. And it’s wrong. But my problem was with the record companies, more than with the artists. At my organization, the National Action Network, led by Tamika Mallory, who’s now the executive director, we started the Decency Initiative, which aimed to “reduce the dialogue of indecency” in the entertainment industry and called for the removal of nigga, bitch, and ho from the industry’s lexicon. Right away, I heard the criticisms. “Oh, Sharpton is older now; he doesn’t understand.” But I understood, all right, and it had nothing to do with age. I understood that most of the guys who started rap were my age, and I understood that the guys running the record companies these artists were working for were actually older than me.

  When we met with the record companies, we had some pointed questions: If free speech was the reason they put out records that contained the words nigger, ho, and bitch, then why did they take records out of the stores that were considered anti-Jewish? Or anti-police? Let’s get this straight—if something was anti-Semitic, then it was hate? (And I believe that’s correct—it is hate, it shouldn’t be put out, it’s wrong. If it’s anti-Italian, or anti-Irish, or anti-gay, that’s all hate and shouldn’t be put out.) But calling blacks niggas was free speech? Everything was hate speech except when it was directed at us?

  Either have no standard, or have a standard for everybody. That’s still my problem with the record companies. If nigger isn’t the anti-black word, then what is it? Let’s have a meeting and decide what it is. But there’s got to be a word you can’t call us if you say there are words you can’t call everybody else.

  We tried, we pushed, we agitated, but clearly, that battle was lost. So we sit now in the midst of a wave of black music and rap that has only grown stunningly worse, with an inundation of songs that so thoroughly glorify violence and drugs and exploit black women that sometimes I feel embarrassed listening to contemporary black music on the radio for more than a few minutes. We’ve clearly lost two things: a moral compass and boundaries. What is it that we are trying to suggest culturally to those who buy our art? Is there no line we won’t cross? You can call us anything, you can say anything about us? That’s not healthy.

  Just a few decades earlier, African-Americans owned many of the labels that were putting out black music—such as Berry Gordy at Motown, Al Bell at Stax, and Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff at Philadelphia International—and African-Americans such as LeBaron Taylor and Jim Tyrrell also held influential positions inside the major white-owned labels. These men would not have permitted today’s brand of damaging, exploitative music, because they would have seen it as music to be consumed by their kids. But things have changed drastically in the music world over the last few decades. Now there are just a handful of conglomerates controlling the industry and a tiny number of African-Americans with the power to even sign a deal. Ironically, at a time when African-Americans have made incredible strides in almost every segment of American society, when black music stars such as Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Rihanna rule the charts, in this industry whose creation significantly bears our fingerprints, we have less power than we had twenty years ago.

  One day during the middle of NAN’s Decency Initiative, I got a call on my radio show from a young lady who was nineteen. She said, “You know, Reverend Al, I have to confess something to you. When you jumped on the record industry about the use of this language, I said, ‘What’s he getting on that for? People have the right to entertain themselves with whatever language they want.’ But I was in the car this morning driving to work, listening to the radio. A rap song came on, and the rapper called me a ho once, twice, three times. By the time I got to work, he had called me a ho eight times. How many hos I gotta be before I get to work?”

  When you become immune to this beat-down, when you get a constant barrage of “ho” and “bitch” being fed to you on
a daily basis, it eventually becomes a part of your self-concept. You are entertained by it, but you eventually emulate that in your life. How do I know this? Because James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” made me emulate those words in my life. And Aretha Franklin singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” made me emulate that in my life. If you take the songs of the times when we were most progressive in our community, there is a correlation. And conversely, if you take the times when we were most regressive, you also see a correlation. We’re talking about getting high, scattering babies all over town, just hitting it and keeping it moving. Such music, I believe, is helping to suck the hope out of the people, making them numb to their straits, rather than inspiring them to crawl their way out of the gutter.

  When I get into debates about this with the artists, they say they are just a mirror of what’s going on in society, in our community. I spoke at Rosa Parks’s funeral in 2005, right after I had met with some rappers in Detroit. They said, “Man, why you on us? We understand the history, but we’re just a mirror, we reflect what we see.”

  I said, “That’s strange. I use the mirror every morning. I go into the bathroom, look in the mirror, and I see hair all over my head, sleep all in my eyes, slobber all around my mouth. But I don’t walk outside and leave it that way, talking about how I’m going to keep it real. No, I clean my face. You use the mirror to correct what you see, not just reflect what you see.”

  It doesn’t take a musical genius to reflect what’s there. It takes a genius to correct what’s there. That’s why in slavery, you wouldn’t hear us singing about how we glorified working in the cotton fields. We were singing about “Go down Moses . . . let my people go.” That’s why in the civil rights days, we weren’t singing songs about “Nigger in the Back of the Bus.” Or “Ho at the Water Fountain.” We were singing “We Shall Overcome.” Our culture, our artists, drove us toward where we wanted to go; they weren’t just reflecting where we were.

  You show me Dr. King marching in the South, I’ll show you Mahalia Jackson singing “Amazing Grace,” I’ll show you James Brown singing “Black and Proud,” Sidney Poitier in movies such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and They Call Me Mister Tibbs, James Baldwin writing The Fire Next Time. It all corresponded with what was going on with us politically, socially. So the current artists tell me they’re just reflecting what’s going on in society? Well, we have a black president in the White House. We have a black first lady and two young black girls growing up in the White House—and you’re rapping about a ho and a bitch? You’re out of sync with the times you’re in. We don’t have three hos in the White House, so what are you talking about? You ought to be reflecting where we are, but you’re not. That’s no mirror. You’re reflecting where you’ve been assigned to keep us, but we’re not there anymore. So, yes, you have the right to argue with me, but I’m going to fight back. I’m not afraid to fight you, because I am you. You come out of a movement all of us started. Maybe the rest of these leaders are intimidated by you, ’cause you claim you got the streets. But I come out of the streets. I know the streets—and I know you don’t have the streets. We always wanted to change the streets, not glorify the streets. That’s a huge difference.

  And I’m not just going to blame the rappers. That moral compass is broken in many sectors of our community, our society. Our megachurches are operating with a broken compass, preaching luxury, materialism, prosperity, get rich. We don’t need pastors to preach to us about having gold-plated chains; we need them to help us go break out of the chains. We don’t need diamond-studded shackles. Standing up there and failing to talk about economic justice, about fairness, just telling people to shoot for prosperity? That’s not preaching; it’s not helping to give people the Word. If the pastor is afraid to deal with the body politic? That’s not preaching. Standing up there and ignoring the wars in the Middle East? Not preaching. And worse, telling you that you can get that new Mercedes as long as you bring your son over to the Army induction center to go fight an unjustified war? I tell you, that’s jive.

  Our artists, our politicians, our preachers must find the courage to stand up and be real leaders. Yes, you’re going to get hit from both sides—from the established order and from the dissidents. In fact, that’s the only way you know you’re effective, if you get hit from the right and from the left. That means you are trying to say something that’s not being said. That’s what happened to Miles Davis, to James Brown. They got hit by the purists, the guys who never wanted them to get commercial, but they also had to fight the commercial establishment at the same time. That’s when you know you’re being an innovator. Look at Dr. King, constantly under attack by the black radicals, who said he was a sellout because he would meet with Kennedy and work with Kennedy and Johnson on legislation. Malcolm and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power crowd always criticized him because he would never embrace the Black Power movement and he wouldn’t stop meeting with the establishment. But then again, he was the one leading the marches against the establishment. So he was getting hit by the right, calling him a troublemaker, and hit by the left, calling him a sellout. But you see, forty years later, we hardly know anybody’s name but his, because he stood for something.

  In 1994, when I went to South Africa for the elections, nobody talked about Nelson Mandela worse than the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). They called him a sellout for negotiating with President F. W. de Klerk. How could he be dealing with the leader of the apartheid regime? They wanted to kill all the whites, not talk about some kind of reconciliation. But twenty years later, I couldn’t name one of those PAC leaders, while Mandela is a living legend. The point is, you have to have the courage to be great. You are going to take hits, but you have to know that you are doing it for a greater cause.

  This turn in the music was a constant source of anger and frustration for James at the end of his career. He brought it up nearly every time I called him. I guess he felt a sense of responsibility for the fate of black music, since it was his creativity that had forged so much of what it would become. And he was not pleased by what he had wrought.

  At the 2006 national convention for NAN, I decided that I wanted to honor James Brown and Jesse Jackson, two people who had been dominant, pivotal figures in my growth. When I picked up the phone to call James, I was a bit nervous, because I knew James never went to these kinds of events. He had always been a loner, not one to enjoy the chicken-dinner circuit. But when I called him and told him I wanted to honor him, he said, “All right, Rev, for you, I’ll come.” And he came. He told me that his knees were hurting and asked if I could put him up early so he could cut out. I moved the program around a bit and gave him his award first. He graciously accepted it, and then he left.

  About three months later, I got a call from James.

  “Rev, remember when you came down when we unveiled the James Brown statue?”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking back to that special day in downtown Augusta, after he had gotten out of jail, when we watched them pull the sheet off a statue of him on Broad Street, where he shined shoes growing up. He asked me to speak at the statue dedication, where there was a big crowd of about 3,000 or 4,000. James had whispered in my ear to look across the street. I saw a large statue of some Confederate general. “I bet those Confederate generals never thought they’d be looking across Broad Street at the statue of a black man,” he said to me.

  “Well, this time, they’re going to change the name of the civic center here to James Brown Arena,” he continued, shaking me out of the pleasing memory. “Would you come down and do a speech for it?”

  I said of course I would. I thought it was only appropriate that Augusta was finally now recognizing his greatness. Right after I got to Augusta, his daughter Deanna called me.

  “Dad said you and me have to do all the speaking,” she said. “He had dental work, and all his top teeth are out. He said he’s not coming.”

  I was taken aback. “Wait, they’re gonna change the arena to his
name, and he’s not coming? He’s got to come.”

  Two hours later, she called back.

  “He said he’s coming, but we have to do all the speaking. He doesn’t want anybody to see his mouth.”

  When we got to the arena, the place was packed—live TV, the mayor, all the local dignitaries. Finally, James pulled up and got out, looking sharp as a tack. He had his mouth covered with a red handkerchief, and he walked over to sit in the front row. They introduced me to speak, so I got up and explained to the crowd that James wouldn’t be speaking because of his dental work. But he interrupted me by raising his hand.

  “Nah, I want to say something,” he said from under the handkerchief.

  Well, James, who didn’t want to speak, got up and spoke for forty-five minutes. He talked about me running for president, how proud he was of me, what I was like at sixteen, what his own legacy was. And then he talked about how disgusted he was by the lyrics in music now. He told the crowd that we’ve got to clean up the music and get back to family and loving one another. Then he sat down.

  When it was time to unveil the new marquee, we walked over together to pull down the cord. There was a reception scheduled afterward, but he said to me, “I’m not going to the reception. I want to take care of my mouth. You go take care of all that, Rev.”