The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (16 page)

I knew this would be a huge media story. The reason we had gone to Vieques in the first place was to bring attention to the harm the U.S. Navy was causing to the people of Puerto Rico and Vieques. So if the federal government was going to try to hit our burgeoning movement by imposing a harsh sentence on us, a sentence that might make the country take notice, then our job was to cooperate with the media in telling the story.

“Walk slow,” I called out to the other guys, who were trying to hop quickly to the bus. “I want the whole world to see what they would do to us for saving some kids in Puerto Rico,” I said.

And that was the picture that went out around the world—the four of us hopping in those stupid shackles. The images worked; the public was outraged by the entire spectacle.

When we were deposited in the federal facility, the New York senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, called to check on us. After two days, Schumer and Clinton arranged for us to be transferred to the federal jail in Brooklyn. They couldn’t do anything to reduce our time, but they could have us moved to a more convenient location. If I was going to do three months in jail, I might as well do it in my hometown, smelling that sweet Brooklyn air!

When it was time for us to leave the facility in Puerto Rico, all the activists on that floor signed a bedsheet to thank me
for doing so much for their cause. I still have that sheet, more than a decade later.

We had to keep those shackles on all the way to Kennedy Airport. When we landed, I looked out the window and saw twelve government cars on the tarmac. Twelve cars! Like they were bringing in John Gotti or something. They carted us to the Brooklyn House of Detention, where we would be doing our hard time.

In the meantime, a slew of lawyers, such as Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, were running around to the appellate courts, trying to get our sentences reduced or thrown out. But I was resolved that we should do the time.

“Let me tell you something,” I told my co-inmates. “They can go all the way to the Supreme Court. We are not getting out of here. We will do every day.”

The federal authorities put us on a tier all by ourselves. They didn’t want us in the general population. It quickly became clear that they couldn’t let anything happen to us. That would be a public-relations disaster. So there we were, four men in a ward that was large enough for ninety. We could sleep in whatever cell we wanted, could watch a bunch of different TVs.

One of the most dramatic things I came up with to break the tedium was a fast. Nothing steals away the boredom like the growl of an empty stomach. A fast would continue to apply pressure on the authorities while keeping the public’s eye on our cause. It was a classic political-prisoner tactic, used by everybody from Gandhi to Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. After we started the fast, we would get a visit from
the doctor twice a day, taking our blood, checking and double-checking that we weren’t getting sick. They could not have us getting sick in their custody.

Whenever the doctor would come, I’d say, “Here comes Dracula to take my blood.” That was our little joke.

I was getting lots of visits from my family. My wife came nearly every day. They let my daughters come in to see me twice. After my mother visited me, she went outside and talked to the media, one of the only times she ever talked to the press. They asked her if she had talked me into eating.

“No, he said he’s not going to eat,” she said. “All I can do is pray for him. He said he doesn’t want to eat. I believe God is able.”

After the forty days came and went, my partners in crime left me in that big chilly ward all by myself. Before they went home, they made me promise that I would eat at least one meal a day. They didn’t want to leave; they were so wracked with guilt. They kept saying to me, “We’re Latino, but you gotta do fifty days alone.”

Once they were gone, there I was, just one man in this huge ward, alone for fifty days. Sometimes I’d have a visitor, but visiting hours ended at eight
P.M.
After that, it was just me and one lone corrections officer.

However, an amazing thing happened during those fifty days in that federal jail. In a sense, I had a fifty-day-long meeting with Al Sharpton. I had been on a treadmill all my life, always rushing from one tragedy or outrage to the next, always with a great sense of urgency, life-or-death stuff.
But rarely had I taken the time to sit down and ask myself,
Where are you going? What is your ultimate purpose here?

It dawned on me that I could take advantage of this rare opportunity for self-reflection. It was time for me to take a personal inventory and make some important decisions about my future.

As I look back on it, many of the amazing things that happened to me during the next decade of my life—syndicated radio show, national talk show, total reversal in how I was perceived by the public, sitting onstage at the Obama inauguration—were a direct result of those fifty days alone in jail. I guess I should take a minute to thank the venerable Judge Fusté down in Puerto Rico.

One of the things I decided was that I was going to devote myself to the National Action Network, make it bigger, more progressive, more national in scope.

I decided that I was going to focus on my health and my diet in a way I never had before. I began exercising every day and vowed to eat healthy foods. They were the first steps toward a change in lifestyle that resulted in my ultimately losing nearly 150 pounds—basically, I shed an entire person. (I wasn’t able to keep off the weight I lost in Vieques, though. The real weight loss wouldn’t come until a decade later.)

I did a lot of reading, devouring books by serious thinkers such as Paul Tillich, Arnold Toynbee, Reinhold Niebuhr, Nelson Mandela. It became clear to me that serious movements inevitably always must broaden. From the African National Congress in South Africa to Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement
in Poland to the civil rights movement in the American South, in order to grow, each of these movements had to expand beyond its sectarian beginnings. You either grow and expand, or you die a quick death. Many of the civil rights organizations, such as CORE and even the SCLC to some degree, died out or were drastically streamlined because they didn’t expand and build the next generation.

In every group, there are extremists who don’t want to hear anything about expansion or growth. They will challenge you, accuse you of betraying the group by reaching out to others. It’s such a common step in group dynamics that it’s almost a cliché. This makes the development of a movement tougher, because you’re going to take some shots from the people inside your own crowd. Malcolm X had to go through this, as did MLK and Mandela. You might be tempted to play to the cheap seats in your crowd, going after the easy targets, repeating the same campaigns, the same slogans, over and over. But you won’t grow. The real loyalists, the ones who are truly committed to achieving a goal—rather than making themselves feel good or seeking vengeance—will understand the need for growth.

After reading about other movements, I became even more committed to establishing a strong and lasting bond with the Latino community. I saw it as the only way forward for black people in America.

I was fortunate that Vieques forced me to step off the treadmill and look inward. It was a time-out that I wasn’t looking for, one that I never would have chosen on my own. But it was certainly a crucial process for me. I think most of us
need to do that type of self-assessment from time to time, but we rarely get the time or opportunity to do it. If I hadn’t been locked away in a Brooklyn prison, I’m sure I wouldn’t have done it, either. So what started out for me as one of the low points of my career, with shackles and strip searches and long, lonely nights in an empty ward, in the end turned out to be one of the most important periods of my life. What I learned during those fifty days was how necessary it is for personal growth and transformation for every single one of us to take occasional time-outs to work on ourselves. It feels almost antithetical to the growth process—how can you grow and improve yourself by doing nothing? But I think many of us use the busy work as a distraction, a way to avoid asking ourselves the hard questions. It’s like what happens in a troubled marriage when a baby comes along and takes the focus off the fraying marital bond; but then the baby starts growing up, needing less attention, and the couple turns back to each other, only to realize there’s very little left to save in their marriage. If we can allow ourselves to step off the hamster wheel from time to time, maybe even go somewhere to get away from the craziness that swirls around us, I think it can be enormously beneficial. I got my little vacation right there in my hometown of Brooklyn, free of charge.

O
ne of the most valuable lessons James Brown taught me was the importance of defining yourself instead of letting others define you. Considering the incredible amount of nasty attacks and characterizations I’ve gotten in the media over the years, this became one of the most vital lessons I’ve ever learned.

James was born in the woods in South Carolina and raised in Augusta, Georgia. When he was three, his mother left. He never saw her again until he was starring at the Apollo Theater. When James was six, his father left him with his aunt, who ran a whorehouse in Augusta. Before James went to live with his aunt, his father would be gone all day, trying to find trees to tap for turpentine, leaving James alone in the woods for long periods of time. He said his best friends were the doodlebugs and insects. But this time allowed James to develop his own
personality, one that was quite independent of what others thought of him.

One day, James said to me, “Reverend, there’s one thing I always want you to promise me.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Don’t ever be one of the boys,” he said. “Always define yourself. I learned in the woods that I had to depend on myself, make myself what I wanted to be. Don’t mold yourself after somebody else.”

In the end, I wanted to be able to go to my grave saying I had helped build a movement that made a difference. In order to do that, you have to build alliances, extend yourself, push the envelope. Move outside of your comfort zone. Otherwise, what’s it all for?

If not for those months of reflection in 2001, I might not have been open to taking a path that would ultimately lead me to my own show on MSNBC. That wasn’t something that was in the script of a civil rights leader. Yeah, Jesse Jackson had a show at one point, but being a TV talk-show host is not really in the activist handbook. If I had been listening over the years to the nasty ways in which I had been defined by others, if I had let the negativity of those
New York Post
cartoons seep into my soul, I probably would have been too afraid to put myself out there on a national television show, where my continued existence, my survival, would be determined by a national viewership of predominantly white Americans. I would have run away from such an opportunity, because I would have believed my press and accepted what others were saying.

I work eighteen hours a day now, because I’m purpose-driven. I’m trying to make a difference, on my own terms. I wake up at four or five most mornings, hopping onto a plane to somewhere, to the next crisis, pushed by the thought in the back of my mind:
What can I do today to make a difference?

I think people sense that drive and purpose in me, which is why they don’t begrudge me the first-class flights and the fancy hotels to which I now have access. They know I’ve earned it. People know that I bear the marks of the struggles on my body. I’m fifty-eight years old, as of this writing. I’ve been stabbed. I’ve spent months in jail. I’ve gone through all kinds of controversies over the years. There’s not much left you can do to me, except kill me.

Even when I was marching in the early days with the pressed hair, the jogging suits, and the medallions—all objects that certainly added to the scornful characterizations of me, items that made me an easy caricature—I wasn’t too worried about how others would perceive me. If I had been afraid of the ways I would be portrayed in the media, I would not have chosen that particular style as my introduction to the world. But I was all about the movement, the message. I didn’t care what they wrote, how they tried to ridicule me, because in my mind, I had a clear idea of what I was trying to accomplish. I knew what Al Sharpton stood for.

There aren’t many bad days for me, because I can always think of something worse. Having a turbulent flight to Cleveland in first class isn’t a bad day for me, not with everything I’ve endured. When you live your life like that, on the edge, you
don’t ever let yourself get too high or too low, too excited or too depressed, ’cause you’ve seen it all.

Too many of us spend our lives as spectators, watching other people, rather than trying to do things ourselves, make our own contributions. Maybe one of the reasons is that it’s not easy to step out there by yourself, especially if you’ve been spending too many of your days letting others define you. But as I tell the young folks all the time in the National Action Network, if it’s easy, it ain’t worth having. I talk about my ninety days in jail, but can you imagine Nelson Mandela sitting there for twenty-seven years? And he never had any idea whether he’d ever get out until the very end. He certainly never dreamed he’d be president of the country; I’m sure in his mind, that was never in the realm of possibility. But at some point, he defined for himself who he was—he’d rather be incarcerated than be free and not fight for liberation.

When I was protesting in Howard Beach or Bensonhurst or Vieques, I didn’t say, “I want to do this so that one day, I’ll have access to the president of the United States and go to the White House and the inauguration and have my own MSNBC show and have social stature.” I did it all because I believed in what I was doing. Those other things were all rewards, but they weren’t the reason.