by Al Sharpton
“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.
Although my early days were locked into political and racial battles in New York, when I ran for president in 2004 and began to travel around the country to places I never would have gone, I learned something very important about the soul of America: Whether they are white people in Iowa, Latinos in New Mexico, or black people on the South Side of Chicago, they all want the same things. They want their kids to have a better life than them. They want their schools to work. They want to have a fair and even shot at life. They are not that different. And the more they talked to me, the more people understood that what I wanted for my community was no different from what they wanted. But too often, people wind up talking at each other and not to each other.
I also saw that people in positions of power understood a lot more than they let on, but they were so obsessed with maintaining their power that they were not willing to do what they knew was right. Instead, they did what they felt was right for them and their careers. I was moved by James MacGregor Burns’s book Leadership when I was a student at Brooklyn College because of his explanation of the difference between transformational leaders and transactional leaders. This formulation is similar to Dr. King’s idea of leaders who are thermostats and leaders who are thermometers. I’ve built my career around trying to be a thermostat. When we started doing massive, disruptive protests over racially motivated killings and police brutality in New York, I was trying to change the temperature in the city. If we took a poll before we went into Howard Beach to protest, we would have fought nothing. Clearly, I’ve never been in the business of human rights to be popular. That’s not what being an activist is about.
A transactional leader will do and say whatever he or she needs to get elected, while a transformational leader tries to change the course of history and make decisions that are moral, just, and right. While Dr. King was fighting against segregation, there were other black leaders at the time who accommodated segregation because they got something out of it. They got elected, but they didn’t make society better; they didn’t make the black community better. They might even have had long careers, but in the annals of history, their names are long forgotten, no mark made, no legacy left behind.
When I was running, I saw a lot of transactional leaders. Like AM and FM radio, we were on different wavelengths: I’m trying to transform society; they’re trying to move up in society. Unless you can block their transactions or affect their transactions, they have no motive to help you transform anything. You don’t get their attention until you get in their way.
I wanted to create a twenty-first-century version of what the NAACP and others represented in the twentieth century. That was the thinking behind the National Action Network, which I started in 1991 in New York and built into a national organization over the next two decades. I have tried to use NAN as a vehicle to lift up a new generation of leaders, young people in and out of the ministry who are running NAN chapters across America. I am hoping that in this way, NAN can build a slate of future activists who will innovate in their own style and develop their own way of doing things. Given modern technology and the rapid way we have become one global village, the
re is a need for new approaches to social activism.
But let’s be clear: We will always need activists. As long as there is inequality, you’re going to need activists—whether it’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or immigration. So even with a black president, even with a black attorney general, Trayvon Martin happens. And when the acquittal of George Zimmerman happened we were on the air live and were able to mobilize within days in over 100 cities because you must be able to respond quickly and never give up the fight no matter the verdict, especially if the broader pursuit of justice has not been achieved. I have chapters across the country; I have paid staff. We don’t just jump up and respond when there is a crisis; we work at this every day, meeting with community leaders, solving community problems, working with individuals with issues. Our critics say, “They’re just ambulance chasing.” I say, “We’re not ambulance chasing—we’re the ambulance.” People call us because they know we’ll come. In many of our communities, the ambulance they need might not come.
I want these young future leaders to have the activist passion, but they shouldn’t be trying to imitate me. My style is completely different from Reverend Jones’s or Reverend Jackson’s, but their style was different from Martin Luther King’s. I tell them, “Respect me, but don’t imitate me.”
One of the things I have found disheartening throughout my career is the sexism in the upper echelons of leadership, particularly in the black community. The executive director of NAN is a young woman named Tamika Mallory, an extremely talented leader who grew up in the organization from the age of twelve. When I made her executive director, people thought I had lost my mind. People would continue to ask me, “When are you going to choose a successor?” As if it had never crossed their minds that Tamika could be my heir apparent. In addition to Tamika, I have many chapter leaders who are women. But it often feels as if I’m fighting sexism and racism at the same time.
I don’t think we’ve had an honest discussion about misogyny in the black community. I don’t think we’ve talked about the latent feelings of hostility many black men have toward black women, a misguided sentiment that black women somehow have taken part in society’s emasculation of black men. Maybe at some point back in our history, black women were used to emasculate us, but if so, they were being used against their will. They can’t keep paying for that. And black male insecurity cannot continue to be the justification for asking black women to step back and let some insecure boys play out their manhood issues.
It all brings to mind the battles I had when I was eighteen and was made the youth director of Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign in 1972. It was the first year that I would be eligible to vote, and I was so excited about the whole campaign and my role in it. Chisholm had been the first African-American woman elected to Congress in 1968, representing the twelfth congressional district in Brooklyn. Chisholm was fierce, brilliant, and courageous. I was proud to be in charge of organizing young people in support of her presidential campaign. But that sentiment wasn’t shared among the black leadership. Chisholm said that during her legislative career, she faced much more discrimination because she was a woman than because she was black. I can definitely attest to that, because I saw it with my own eyes.
I attended the unprecedented gathering of black leaders and activists that happened that year in Gary, Indiana, and I was shocked that they would not endorse Chisholm. Jesse Jackson and the others were going with George McGovern. I think a lot of their problem with her was because they felt, Shirley’s into that feminism. But my response was, Well, wait a minute, Shirley’s a black candidate with our agenda, in addition to a feminist agenda. Why can’t we support her? Shirley lived in Brooklyn, and I knew her very well. I saw the hurt and pain she went through having to fight black men. Shirley was more gifted and courageous than most of her contemporaries, but because she was a woman, she was denied a loftier status.
As her youth director, I felt the tensions. For a lot of these leaders, it was the first time I openly went against them. It was eye-opening, and it was painful, because I had to make a personal choice. I looked up to them, and I couldn’t believe their view was that limited and that biased. There’s no other way to put it. I knew there was considerable sexism in the church community, after watching the battles Bishop Washington had gone through for his progressive views, such as ordaining women as preachers in the church. But I thought the leaders with whom I was mingling at the convention were more learned than that, more advanced than that. I learned a great deal during those days in Gary, lessons that helped me understand my community over the decades.
Forty years later, we are still going through these gender trials. We have quite a few prominent elected officials who are women, but I would expect the proportion to be greater than it is. So I frequently make conscious decisions in my sphere of influence to ensure that I include as many women as possible in the mix when it is time to establish the leaders of my organization. Of course, it is talent that is my top priority. That was surely the case with Tamika. But I also want to make sure women aren’t being discriminated against.
After my two daughters were born, I was even more disturbed by the prevalence of sexism I still saw around me. I’ve spent most of my life breaking down racial barriers, but it would be the ultimate irony if my daughters were denied opportunity not because of their race but because of their gender. My daughters went to very good schools; I was able to work hard and enable them to have a good education. But if they can’t pull up to the table with the men of their generation, having a better education and better training than I had, then I have not done all I was supposed to do by dealing with race and not fighting hard enough against gender bias. My own bloodlines will be carried by two women who will have to deal with sexism and racism for the rest of their lives. It is my fervent prayer that the world they grow up in will see the shortsightedness of sexism, will see how much more powerful and dynamic we become when we grant the seeds of opportunity to every one of us. I hope my daughters in their lifetimes see the day when they can pull up a chair to the table and the man sitting next to them won’t find it necessary to make a mental note of their gender. And I say to all the young men out there who might find themselves one day sitting at the table next to my daughters and all the sisters of their generation and the generations after them: Their presence strengthens you, makes you stronger and smarter and more capable. It doesn’t diminish you.
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PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH
My social activism is my religion in practice. It is the daily embodiment of my lifelong service to God. As a Christian, as a man of the cloth, I am required to fight on behalf of those who have been wronged, on behalf of the downtrodden, on behalf of those facing injustice. That is my ministry. I don’t have a problem with ministers who build cathedrals—maybe that’s their calling. But my calling was to fight for those the Bible calls rejected stones. As the Bible says, Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders who became the cornerstone. I feel this intensely because I was a rejected stone myself in many ways when I was growing up.
My activism and its inherent dangers brought me one of the greatest tests that my faith has ever had to endure. It began amid the ugliness of our protest marches in Bensonhurst, a working-class Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, not far from Coney Island. Sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins had been shot twice in the heart in cold-blooded murder by a racist mob, upset that Yusuf and his friends were in their neighborhood. The mob thought Yusuf and his friends were linked to a neighborhood girl who had been bragging about dating a black man who was going to bring his black friends to the neighborhood to confront the young Italians. After the murder of Yusuf, we marched to assert the right of African-Americans to travel anywhere we wanted in our city, particularly after the same thing had happened in Howard Beach, another Italian neighborhood where another young black man, Michael Griffith, age twenty-four, had been killed by a racist mob in 1986. We also marched to ensure that the Bro
oklyn courts convicted each of the young white kids who were part of the mob that killed Yusuf, which was starting to look less likely. Right after the shooting happened, we marched to persuade the community to give up the identities of the shooters. During the weekly marches, we faced a revolting horde of racial hatred, with the residents of this neighborhood—mothers, brothers, grandfathers, sisters—crowding the sidewalks as we walked through, hurling the word nigger and its every variation while holding aloft bananas and watermelons and throwing garbage at us. While the civil rights struggles of the South and the hatred and brutality encountered on the Freedom Rides in Alabama and Mississippi—when activists like the young John Lewis, now the distinguished longtime congressman from Georgia, got beaten and bloodied—have certainly been well documented, I’m not sure that people realize the extent of the vicious racism we encountered up North in places like Bensonhurst and Howard Beach.
One of our lawyers got a call one day from Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, who had won election to that post largely because of the fame he garnered as the special prosecutor in the Howard Beach racial killing. Hynes let us know about something the government had picked up on a wire installed inside a social club in Bensonhurst with suspected mob ties.
On the bug, the government heard these mobsters talking about killing me, so Hynes wanted to put me under police protection. Apparently, one of the guys who shot Yusuf had mob ties, and I was bringing the national press to their neighborhood on a weekly basis, which was affecting their ability to conduct their illicit activities such as drugs and numbers running. I had seen enough mob movies to know Rule Number 1: Don’t mess with the cash flow.
I’m not going to lie and tell you I was Superman jumping out of my suit into a cape, ready to go take on the scary mobsters. No, I had to seriously wrestle with it. I was just thirty-six, I had two very young kids at the time, and I had really no income. I made money where I could, preaching, and occasionally, folks like James Brown would help us out, but there was no steady income and no big trust fund to support my family if I was gone. I had been preaching about faith since I was a little boy, standing up on that podium and telling my people they needed to trust God to protect them if they were doing right by Him. Now I had to decide whether I was ready to step back out there on those Bensonhurst streets, knowing it could end at any moment. Now we’re going to see, Sharpton, if you really believe in God, if you really have faith. I said we had to go, keep marching. I believed too strongly in the rightness of our cause to stop because of a threat. After they couldn’t persuade me to stop the march, the authorities begged me to wear a bulletproof vest. But I didn’t want to succumb to the fear.