by Al Sharpton
As you can imagine, for a singer, an entertainer whose mouth had made him a legend, this particular problem with his teeth really disturbed him. I walked with him to his limousine. He turned around and hugged me.
“Always remember,” he said, “I love you.”
“I love you,” I said back to him.
He got into the car, and it drove off. It was the last time I saw him alive.
Three weeks later, on Christmas Eve, I got one of those haunting phone calls we all dread. I was supposed to be leaving the next day for South Africa. Oprah Winfrey had invited me to go to the opening of her school. My plan was to spend a couple of days in Paris to break up the brutally long seventeen-hour flight. I was going to get up early on Christmas morning and feed the hungry in Harlem, which I do every year, then get on a flight to Paris in the afternoon. Christmas Eve night, the guy who was going to travel with me called and asked if I was packed. I told him, “No, I always pack the morning of the trip so my clothes don’t wrinkle up too bad.”
Before he hung up, he said, “Sorry to hear about your pop.”
“My pop? What are you talking about?”
“James Brown. I just saw on the news that he was in the hospital.”
“In the hospital? But I just talked to him.”
I checked on him every week and had just spoken to him a few days before.
“Nobody told me he was in the hospital,” I said. “It must not be that serious.”
I hung up the phone and called his daughter Deanna. She was in Mexico on vacation with her family and didn’t know anything about him being in the hospital, either. She said to me the same thing I had just said: “It can’t be that serious.”
Next, I called his manager, Charles Bobbit, who had been one of James’s closest friends for forty years and who always traveled with him.
“Oh, no, we took him to the dentist, and we found out he had some emphysema in his chest,” Bobbit said. “We’re at the hospital now. He’s asleep, or I’d let you talk to him. He’s all right.”
“All right, let me know if anything comes up,” I said.
It was about eleven P.M., so I went on to bed, since I had an early morning, as usual. At about one thirty A.M., my cell phone started ringing. It was being charged in the living room, so I decided not to get up. I thought it was one of my daughters, who always had a contest between the two of them to see who would be first to call me on the major holidays and say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Thanksgiving” or “Happy Father’s Day.” But it kept ringing. The person on the other end kept hanging up and calling again. So I went to get my phone and saw that the number was blocked. Again, I thought it was one of my daughters, trying to be funny.
“Hello?” I said, finally answering when it started again.
“Rev? It’s Charles Bobbit.”
“How you doin’, Mr. Bobbit?” I asked him.
“Mr. Brown is gone,” he said.
“What do you mean, Mr. Brown is gone?”
“James Brown is dead,” he said.
“Huh? I thought you said he was all right!”
“I don’t know what happened,” he said, his voice drifting away. “He’s dead.”
I sat down on the couch, not even realizing I had hung up the phone. I convinced myself that I was having a nightmare—nothing I’d just heard or done had been real. But I was on the couch. My phone was in my hand. I had to call Bobbit back.
“Mr. Bobbit, did you just call me?” I asked him.
“Rev, are you sitting down?” he said. “James Brown, your dad, is dead. You’re not having a nightmare. He’s gone.”
I hung up the phone again, the numbing dread starting slowly to creep through my body. I turned on the television and just sat, blankly, dumbly, my mind in a fog. It was about two in the morning. I sat there for three hours without moving. At about five A.M., the words crawled across the bottom of the screen: “James Brown is dead at age 73.” That’s when I really started believing it, when the reality of my world without James came crashing down on me. Less than a decade after my dad had walked out on me, James Brown came into my life, about as epic and manly as a father figure could ever get. For nearly thirty-five years, all of my adult life, he had been there for me, a strong, assuring presence, a wise word, a sun-eclipsing superstar. Now he was gone. I later found out that among James’s final words to Bobbit were, “Look out for Reverend Sharpton.”
I called my traveling companion to let him know my plans had changed. Oprah and South Africa would have to be put aside; I was going to Augusta. I called my secretary and told her to make me a reservation. She asked who was traveling with me. I told her I didn’t have time to think about that, so I wasn’t taking anybody. And besides, it was Christmas. “You’re going alone?” she asked, surprised. I never traveled alone. But I would have to make an exception on Christmas. Besides, I wanted to be by myself while I processed it all. But then I remembered something: my annual Christmas appointment in Harlem.
“Wait, I still want to feed the hungry. He would want me to feed the hungry. So get me a flight to Augusta at about noon, after I go up to Harlem.” And that’s what I did after James Brown died. I fed the hungry in Harlem. Then I got on a plane to Augusta.
The next three days in my memory are a staggering blur of funerals, sadness, and tears. On Thursday, we had him laid out in state at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where tens of thousands paid their respects. Then, on Friday, we had a small family funeral in Augusta, and finally, on Saturday, we were going to have his big hometown farewell at the arena that had just been stamped with his name a few weeks earlier. I rode with the body for the entire journey. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally spent. At three in the morning, while I was asleep in an Augusta hotel room, my phone rang, another wee-hour summoning to jar me from my dreams. This time, it was the mortician, Charlie Reid.
“Reverend Sharpton?” he said, his deep Southern accent slowly oozing through my phone.
“Yeah, Mr. Reid. Please don’t tell me something’s wrong now,” I said.
“Nah, nothing’s wrong, Reverend Sharpton,” he said. “I just wanted you to give me authorization. I just got a call from Michael Jackson.”
I could hear the wonder in his voice.
“He’s in town, and he wants to come by the funeral home and see the body,” he said.
“Michael Jackson? But Michael is in Bahrain.”
“Nah, he’s here. He wants to come by and see Mr. Brown,” Mr. Reid said. “I didn’t want to wake the girls up.”
I was shaking my head, shocked again by one of Michael’s moves. “Yeah, he’s authorized. But tell Michael to call me.”
“All right, I will, Reverend Sharpton.”
I sat there waiting, not able to get back to sleep. An hour passed with no call. An hour and a half. So I called Mr. Reid back.
“Mr. Reid, did Michael come?”
“Yeah, he came,” Mr. Reid said. “He sat here a whole hour. He told me I combed James’s hair wrong. He took a comb, and he recombed it.”
“Wait a minute—he recombed the hair?”
“Yeah, he redid it,” Mr. Reed said. “Said I did it wrong. He sat here with the body for an hour.”
“Did you tell him to call me?”
“Yeah, he said he was going to call you.”
So I called Michael myself and told him he shouldn’t leave. I knew Michael well—he’d come and sit with the body and then get out of town.
“One day, you’re going to have to reappear in public,” I told him.
He had not been in the States and had not been seen in public since his trial, which had ended a year and a half earlier.
“What better time to do it? You came to show your respect to your idol,” I continued.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, and hung up.
Word got out that Michael had been in town, but everyone assumed he was gone. However, the next day, halfway through the funeral at the James Brown Arena, Michael walked in.
He came over and sat next to me and the family. The band broke into a memorial tribute to James, playing some of his biggest songs. The band members started motioning for Michael to come join them on the stage.
“Sit there—don’t go,” I said into Michael’s ear.
“What do you mean?” he asked me.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t want the picture everybody sees the first time you come back and are in public to be of you on the stage boogying and dancing and moonwalking. You came to mourn James. Don’t get up there with the band.”
“OK,” he said, nodding his head. “But I want to see the body one more time.”
So we stood up and walked over to the casket. The family all gathered around. Michael leaned over and gave James a tender kiss, saying his final good-bye. When I got up to do the eulogy, I talked in the beginning about Michael, how much he looked up to James and the standard of music they had created. Then I asked Michael to say a few words. This was the statement that went around the world, Michael’s reintroduction to the public.
“James Brown is my greatest inspiration,” Michael said. “Ever since I was a small child, no more than six years old, my mother would wake me no matter what time it was, if I was sleeping, no matter what I was doing, to watch the television to see the master at work. And when I saw him move, I was mesmerized. I never saw a performer perform like James Brown. And right then and there, I knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, because of James Brown. James Brown, I shall miss you, and I love you so much and thank you for everything.”
No matter how high he had ascended, Michael never stopped looking up to his inspiration, the man who provided him with the guideposts for his greatness. That’s the way it is with our idols—a part of us always sees them perched up high on that pedestal where we place them. Michael became bigger commercially than James ever was, became the King of Pop, but James was always his hero, his guidepost.
Nobody else sitting in the audience at that funeral understood better than Michael the pain that James Brown endured, the pressures that led James to make some of the bad moves in his life. Only people who have walked the same path truly understand each other. As I watched Michael lean down and kiss James in that casket, I knew he understood James’s battles with drugs and his battles in his personal life, because Michael understood the pain of going into any city and having tens of thousands of people pay to see you but not to have anybody in your life who you feel really loves you. It is a hauntingly lonely and complex life, one that only a handful of people truly understand. But you have to walk the path to know. I understand the pain of great civil rights leaders trying to do things that are noble but knowing tomorrow’s paper is going to call them opportunists and hustlers, knowing they are really giving much more than they’ll ever get.
But I also know that this role is the one I signed up for, just as James and Michael knew there would be collateral pain as they strove for greatness. As you watch those who came before you, you gain valuable lessons and insights about what awaits you. It is a necessary exercise for all of us, to understand the price we must pay for the path we choose.
James and Michael were arguably the two individuals who most defined black music, one historically and the other commercially, bringing it to a level of success never before seen. But both of them ended up in the same place, disgraced, one sent to prison and the other fighting prison, both battling the establishment. But both of them always upheld the standard. And that standard, that excellence that emanated from the black church and black culture, that striving to be perfect, is what we need in the current generation of musical artists. It is missing, and its lack is felt like a hole in all of our hearts. That’s all I’m saying to these artists: You are better, you have more excellence and genius than these corporate entities making money off you think you have. All they care about is your moneymaking ability. They do not care about your history, your roots, what you leave behind. You are more than a money machine.
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, another music mogul I’ve grown close to, is a prime example of the capacity of black artists and music industry professionals to grow and change. I first met Diddy when he was in his early twenties, and he was under fire for his connection to a basketball game at City College in Harlem where nine people had died in a stampede. He had promoted the celebrity game, which was supposed to feature several rap stars playing ball. They tried to scapegoat Diddy, when it was really the irresponsibility of the college and the police that caused the tragedy. So I got other community activists to join me in standing up for him.
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 Puff
y 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.