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

by Al Sharpton

  The education tour was a revealing illustration of how Obama seems to view me in a different way from his predecessors. It’s amusing that I’ve gotten attacked for my access to Obama, because I spent considerable time in the White House when Clinton and Bush were president. But I guess, in Bush’s case, when a conservative Republican does it, it’s reaching out; when a Democratic black president does it, it’s called pandering. But the difference with Obama was that he would invite me to meetings about issues that weren’t directly related to race. So I’d be at a White House meeting with white progressive leaders or a meeting on immigration where I’d be sitting next to Mayor Bloomberg and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Obama sees black leadership as part of American leadership, not as a separate entity over in the corner that is preoccupied with race. He’s a worldly man with a huge range of issues that he’s concerned about; he recognizes that other black leaders could be the same. Also, he knows that if he’s going to have a successful initiative, he needs everybody working together. If he has to get Elena Kagan confirmed for the Supreme Court, he’s going to need labor, he’s going to need civil rights, he’s going to need the support of a wide swath of constituencies. So instead of meeting with us separately, Obama will bring all of us to the White House together.

  Whenever I’m around Obama, I always come away with the feeling that this is a serious, cerebral, very deliberate sort of guy. Even during light moments, there’s a heaviness about him. I’ve been around him at social events that are supposed to be fun, such as the White House Super Bowl party, but that feeling never really goes away. He always seems to be looking at the bigger picture, a step or two beyond everybody else. He doesn’t appear to have any hint of pettiness about him. Even with presidents, you can sometimes see an emotional reaction to things, a desire to get back at somebody for a perceived slight. But there’s none of that with Obama. He really wants to be a great president, a transformative president. It’s not nearly enough for him to be the first black president or a two-term president. He is shooting for heights that are much loftier, up there with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Unlike some politicians I’ve known who were happy to be the first black mayor of a city and had no vision beyond that, or the first black CEO of a major corporation but with no real goal greater than that, Obama from the first day was there to make a difference in the lives of all Americans. He was committed to big ideas, such as health-care reform, finance reform, tax reform.

  I heard a scholar criticize him by saying he doesn’t understand the legacy of Dr. King and Ella Baker. When I heard that, I thought, He’s not trying to be Dr. King and Ella Baker. He’s trying to be John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Civil rights leaders like me, we’re trying to be Dr. King and Ella Baker. Once you understand that distinction, you have a much clearer picture of Barack Obama and his relationship to the black community. He wasn’t trying to be Booker T. Washington; he was trying to be George Washington. When I hear people in the black community take umbrage at the notion that he’s not the president of black America but the president of all America, I feel insulted, because it feels to me as if we’re saying that this black man should be loyal just to us, rather than giving him space to run the world. I think we limit his ability to soar when we try to reduce him to something we’re used to, something we are better able to grasp.

  As a civil rights leader in the age of Obama, I had to wrestle with a question that my predecessors never had to face: how to deal with a black head of state. Dr. King didn’t have that challenge. The young Jesse Jackson didn’t have that challenge. So for me, there was no model to study. I have always been one to look back and get some counsel from those who came before, by reading everything they wrote and what others said about them. From my earliest years, this has always been my way, to immerse myself in the books to gain greater understanding. But there was nothing I could read to prepare me for this. What do you do with a black head of state who has the sentiment and the heart of the people you’re serving, yet you still need to hold him accountable? This is all new ground. It may be fifty years before scholars will be able to analyze whether we did it right or wrong, because right now, there’s really nothing to gauge it against. How do you hold him accountable without undermining him at the same time? It’s a daily dilemma—issue by issue, bill by bill. Do you go in and challenge him in the Oval Office, maybe as he sits behind that big desk, surrounded by the breathtaking symbols of American history and power? Do you gather your forces and march on him outside the White House, luring the national media to try to embarrass him into action?

  Interestingly, I think he has the same dilemma. How does he deal with black leadership as a black president? Not showing preference but at the same time showing deference? These are all questions that are being worked out by Obama on a daily basis. If he calls me too often, does he then render me less effective and less useful to him? But if he doesn’t call any of us, will he then be accused of detaching himself from the black community?

  I should add that you can’t talk about the grace and seriousness of Obama without talking about the tremendous talents that his wife, Michelle, brings to the table. I think her symbol and her substance—in terms of issues such as her focus on America’s health and the well-being of military families—have been very effective, but her personal charisma is overwhelming. When you are with her, you feel a genuine concern and love for people. One of the highlights of my life was going to the White House in 2011 for the Super Bowl party. I brought my older daughter, Dominique, with me; Ashley was away at college. It was in the East Room of the White House, where we walked in and saw about thirty tables, each with four chairs, and two very large TV screens. After we had arrived, the president came in with the first lady, the girls, and Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson. Everyone was dressed down, in sweaters and slacks. As I sat there talking to my daughter—we were the only ones at our table—I suddenly felt these arms slide around my neck. I looked up, and it was the first lady. She hugged me and then sat down at our table. She began talking to my daughter, going in like a big sister or an auntie. “What are your plans? What are your goals in life? Don’t ever think you can’t do whatever you want to do. People are not smarter than you.” It was basic but challenging, hard stuff. This was not the superficial conversation you might expect in the situation. I could see that she was really getting to my daughter; Dominique was soaking it up. It was stuff I would say to her, but she would expect me to say it. But here was the first lady of the United States, sitting in the White House, lecturing her that she needed to be serious about her life, that she couldn’t just rest on her last name, that she had to go out there and make her own mark. While I was sitting there listening, I looked over Dominique’s head and saw a portrait of George Washington gazing out over the room. I chuckled to myself. Did George ever imagine there would be a black first lady in the White House telling the daughter of a black civil rights leader to focus on her life? It just showed me how far we had come, sitting there in that big house that slaves had built.

  While I was soaking in the moment, the president walked over and started laughing. “For the last twenty minutes, I saw something I never thought I’d see,” he said. “All I saw was Al Sharpton’s head going up and down, not saying a word, not getting a word in edgewise. Now you know how I feel when I go to the residence at night.” We all laughed. It’s a day I’ll never forget. I’m sure Dominique won’t, either.

  Michelle Obama is very direct, very blunt, but loving at the same time. I’ve been very impressed with her. Together, the two of them have it all—he’s more studious and deliberate, she’s more outgoing. And their affection for each other is real. What you see of them publicly is also how they are privately. I don’t think there’s any pretense to their bond and their love. The pressures on their relationship have to be enormous, but they seem to handle them well. They are exemplary role models for the entire country on how to sustain a strong marriage in the midst of crazy stress. I don’t know if Michell
e Obama will ever run for office, but if she did, she’d be a hell of an officeholder. She’s extremely smart, and she has an instinctive feel for people. She’d certainly get my support.

  After Obama’s reelection, I got together with other black leaders such as Ben Jealous of the NAACP and Marc Morial of the National Urban League to craft a black agenda to bring to the president. I think it’s something that we should have done earlier, during his first term. Obama got attacked by a lot of black activists and the black academic community, who felt he wasn’t doing enough for the black community. While I had my disagreements with the administration—I felt we should have withdrawn immediately from Afghanistan; I’m opposed to our use of drones; I want them to close Guantanamo Bay—I didn’t buy the strategy of the black opposition. If you have a list of things you think he should be doing, why not write them down and present your list to him? At least, that way, there will be something by which you can judge his actions on your behalf. Because otherwise, as happened during his first term, he will take a series of actions, such as health-care reform or auto-industry rescue, and he will claim they were to the benefit of your community. But then you respond that they weren’t the right actions, or they weren’t the actions you wanted him to take. With a specific agenda, at least everyone’s on the same page.

  What I kept hearing was: He did stuff for Latinos, such as protections for the children of some undocumented immigrants; he did stuff for gays, such as stopping “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and supporting same-sex marriage; he did stuff for women, such as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helps women seek equal pay. But my response was, yeah, and the women’s groups brought him Lilly Ledbetter, gay groups fought for same-sex marriage, Latino groups brought him the DREAM Act and immigration reform, and I even led a march with them in Arizona. He didn’t sit down on his own and just pull this stuff from his imagination. They all brought these issues to him. So what the black activists are saying is, because he’s black, they want him to write the black agenda and bring it to himself? And then, if I meet with him and talk about a black agenda, I’m too close, and I’m a sellout? It sounds like a catch-22 to me.

  I think a lot of the criticism was coming from a place of insecurity, almost like the nervous high school kid who likes the pretty girl but isn’t sure if he’s good enough for her, so instead of asking her out, he’s going to wait for her to call him to prove she really likes him. And then he’s devastated when she never calls; never mind the fact that she may never have been aware that he wanted her to call. At times, it also felt as if many in the black community didn’t understand that Obama was really the president. The honest-to-goodness leader of the free world. Some of us had a hard time wrapping our heads around that. When he came to speak at the NAN convention, some of my staff were shocked that basically the entire block had to be shut down, cordoned off. I was thinking, Yes, that’s what they do to protect the president! Every president. Sometimes the tone of the Obama criticisms felt as if critics were saying, “He didn’t come by my fish fry, so I’m going to attack him.” And then they started attacking me: Sharpton can’t be that close to the president and still be a civil rights leader. Really? Andrew Young, a civil rights leader, became United Nations ambassador for Jimmy Carter. But that was all right. Jesse Jackson was envoy to Africa for Bill Clinton. But that was all right. I don’t have a job or an appointment with Barack Obama; I just have access to him. So when did everyone have a meeting and change the rules? I didn’t get the memo. And besides, leaders far greater than me, such as Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins, were attacked for the same thing. There was no more vociferous critic of King than Malcolm X for King’s relationship with the Kennedys and Johnson.

  I think Obama is able to absorb the criticisms without taking them personally. His reaction always seems to be, I understand the criticism. I think he believes some of it is ill informed, for instance, from blacks who aren’t aware of how some of his policies provide a direct benefit to the black community. But I think he also sees some of it as legitimate, coming from groups frustrated with the pace of change and with their inability to lift themselves out of difficult circumstances. There’s also another interesting element to the criticism: A lot of people forget he was a community organizer. He knows the difference between real, legitimate criticism and guys out there just posturing to get on the news. He came out of their world, unlike most high-ranking public officials. This is a man who could have gone into the corporate world and made a huge amount of money but who decided instead to work in Altgeld Gardens in Chicago with poor people. And he has enough African-Americans around him to keep him close to what’s happening on the ground, to give him intel on things he doesn’t already instinctively know himself. I think that may be part of the problem that many of his critics have; he may be more in touch than they are. He comes out of a different generation from many of them, from a Northern urban setting, the rap, hip-hop generation, not the Southern civil rights, Mahalia Jackson, “Amazing Grace” generation. So on an issue like gay rights, he probably has more of an understanding of shifts in the country and in the black community than many of these guys criticizing him. Many of the black preachers who stood out there and attacked him for his support of same-sex marriage had never criticized a president before. I was flabbergasted. Wait, we forgave senators and presidents for personal immoral acts, prayed for them, went to the White House and slobbered all over them and anointed them with oil. Now Obama takes a personal position, and you’re telling people not to vote, while you never did that against people who committed acts that personally we felt were wrong? Come on, are you kidding me? Just tell the truth—say you don’t agree with him or you don’t like him or some Republicans gave you some money to attack him. But don’t act as if you’re going to dictate the actions of the rest of us.

  In November 2012, we got clear and irrefutable evidence that Obama understood the community more than his critics did. Despite the attacks and the predicted fall-off in his black support, he got a huge turnout of black voters—in many states, more than in ’08. Not only did blacks come out to vote, but they stood in line for five or six hours to do it in some places. So at the end of the day, whom were the critics speaking for? What happened to all their threats? In the end, it appears that perhaps he understood more than they understood.

  There’s no constituency group I’m aware of that doesn’t think the president could do more for them. Latinos ask why they didn’t get the DREAM Act passed. The gay community asks why it took so long for him to support same-sex marriage, which he was not in favor of at the beginning of his administration. Everybody wants more. That’s the burden of the world’s biggest job.

  As we look upon Obama’s second term, the black, Latino, union, gay, and progressive white communities need to understand that we are under siege. Even as the election showed that the country is changing and that we have more electoral power than ever before, that’s not reflected in the country’s policy-making right now. At last count, twenty-four states were considering right-to-work laws that could push unions into extinction. The Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court when they removed Section 4 and it became a rallying cry for our 50th Anniversary National Action to Realize the Dream March on Washington. Several so-called swing states are considering changing their electoral college process from winner-take-all to proportional representation based on congressional districts—meaning a Republican presidential candidate could overwhelmingly lose the state’s popular vote but walk away with a majority of the electoral votes. Roe v. Wade is one case away from being squashed by the Supreme Court.

  If the progressive community does not use the next four years under Obama to legislatively, and with executive action if necessary, cement what we have achieved, we will find ourselves in a very bad state. We must push Obama to help us salvage what we have already achieved in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement. Otherwise, the next president will be looking at a landscape that
resembles 1950s America. We must activate every resource we have—from mass marches to boycotts to petition drives—to come together. We must use technology, too, as in recent movements around the world. The president can be a major ally as we undertake this—but only if we don’t waste a lot of time indulging our egos and making him the enemy. If we get caught up in the pettiness, I fear we will look back in twenty years and wonder why we didn’t take advantage of so many opportunities to get more done when he was in office. And while we look back with regret, our grandchildren by law will not even have the rights and legal protections we have. What a sad day that would be.

  As for me, I’m not going to be bogged down in the mire of people condemning me for having access to the White House. After all, as I said before, other black leaders before me didn’t let such critiques keep them from pushing forward, so I must do the same. There’s never been a day in our history when every black leader agreed on everything—proving total unanimity isn’t necessary to get things done. Complete unity and harmony would be wonderful, but it wouldn’t be wise for me to waste time and energy yearning for something that we’ve never had before.

  And none of us should forget the importance of asking for what we want, whether from the president of the United States or from a spouse sitting across the table. Not the president, not our boss, not even our loved ones can read our minds.

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  A TRUE LEADER HAS TO BE DISCIPLINED—AND CONSISTENT

  It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I connected my obesity to the traumas I experienced when I was a child. Before that moment of introspection, I had a list of rationalizations that I would wield like a nimble flyswatter, batting away any questions or ridicule connected to my weight.