The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (24 page)

When James Brown died, I preached all three of his funerals, on three consecutive days. First, we took him to the Apollo and laid him in state, which was my idea. Then we did a private service in Georgia at the church of one of his daughters, and finally came the public funeral at the James Brown Arena in Augusta. At all three services, I wanted to talk about the
improbability of his life—a guy abandoned by both his mother and his father, who went to jail as a kid and then went on to transform this thing we call music. So for the living, every excuse you could conjure up about why you couldn’t achieve, James had robbed that from you. He was short when entertainers were supposed to be tall. He was dark-skinned when they were supposed to be light-skinned and have “good” wavy air. He broke every barrier there was for a poor, uneducated, young black boy from Augusta.

I was dealing with an incredible amount of pain, because it was as if I had just lost my father, but I had to push my personal feelings aside and describe to the world his legacy. The last time I saw him was when we were changing the name of the arena. Four weeks later, he was lying in a casket in that same arena. And sitting in the audience with me that day was Michael Jackson.

Two and a half years later, Michael was dead, too.

I was on the air doing my radio show in June 2009, when I saw a news item flash on the bottom of the television screen that I always keep on during the show: “Michael Jackson rushed to the hospital.” I got a bit nervous, but I hoped it wasn’t something serious. I knew Michael had had his share of health issues.

Joel Katz, one of the biggest entertainment lawyers in the business, called me and said, “Get ready to make a statement.”

“Yeah, I just saw they rushed him to the hospital,” I said.

“No. He’s gone,” Joel said. “They’re going to announce it in an hour.”

“What?” I said, my body starting to go numb.

“He’s dead.”

“Michael’s dead? But Joel, he wasn’t even sick. What are you talking about?”

“Al, they’re going to try to distort his life, make him a pedophile and a junkie. You should be ready to protect your friend’s legacy.”

I hung up the phone, the heaviness of the moment starting to pull me down. But I had to push through it. I called Rachel Noerdlinger, who’s been the head of communications for NAN and my personal publicist for more than a decade.

“Rachel, Michael’s dead. Be ready as soon as they announce it, to announce that I want to do a press conference to talk about his legacy.”

I wasn’t sure she’d even heard me, she was so broken up, crying into the phone.

“Rachel, please hold it together,” I said. “We gotta protect Michael’s legacy.”

“Where do you want to do it—you want to go to headquarters?” she asked.

“No, let’s do it in front of the Apollo,” I said.

So within an hour or two, we were in front of the Apollo Theater, where I talked about what Michael had done for music, for the world. From day one, I felt that it was crucial to protect Michael’s legacy. More than anybody, Michael broke down the racial barriers in music. Kids all over the world in places like Japan were not only singing his songs—they did that for other American artists, too—but they were dressing
like Michael, they were dancing like Michael. Before Michael, there were Elvis and Sinatra; Michael was American culture’s first black equivalent to Elvis. We had black artists who were like Elvis in the black community. But Michael was everybody’s Elvis. And I knew I needed to protect that.

When I called the Jackson family, Michael’s father, Joe, told me I needed to get out there, because Michael would have wanted me there, so I flew out to Los Angeles as soon as I could. When I landed, I sent a text to the family and told them I was on my way. I got a text back telling me not to go straight to the house but to go to the Shrine Auditorium, where Joe was attending the BET Awards. Before I got there, Joe had made a statement outside the auditorium, introducing a new group, which had upset everybody. I didn’t know anything about this, so there I was at the auditorium, sitting in the front row, with Joe Jackson on one side of me and Beyoncé on the other side. I started getting a bunch of text messages, but I ignored them. I was thinking,
People are teasing me because I’m sitting next to Beyoncé.
Finally, I looked down at my phone. “Man, Joe Jackson shouldn’t have said that,” a text said. Then I got two more saying roughly the same thing.

I leaned over to Joe. “Mr. Jackson, what did you say?” I asked him.

“Oh, man, they all upset ’cause I said we got to continue and I got my own record label,” he said in his usual gruff manner. To many observers, his comments sounded callous and insensitive, as if he wasn’t giving Michael the proper respect by using the clamor and publicity surrounding Michael’s death to introduce a new moneymaking venture.

The next day, I went outside with him to speak to the press and try to clear up the dissension.

Meanwhile, the jockeying to be on the funeral program had already begun. Publicist Ken Sunshine, who handled big stars such as Barbra Streisand and Leonardo DiCaprio but whom I had known for years since he was a young guy working for Mayor David Dinkins, was handling the publicity for the funeral. He was getting all kinds of pressure from every corner. Who was going to sing? Who was going to speak? The family held a meeting to talk about it. Randy Jackson, who was very close to Michael, kept saying to me, “Sharpton, I want you on the program.” Everybody had told me they wanted me on the program, but I said, “OK, Randy.” The final decision came down to Michael’s mother, Katherine Jackson. She said she wanted Martin Luther King’s kids to say something, and she wanted me to say something, and they had a couple of people they wanted to sing, and that was it, except for a representative from the Congressional Black Caucus. Of course, when the program was released, everybody went crazy, still pushing to get on the program. But it had been decided by Mrs. Jackson. There wouldn’t be any changes to the program after she spoke on it.

Next was the jockeying over tickets. Even though it was to be held at the Staples Center, where the L.A. Lakers play and which has about 20,000 seats, it started to feel like a Michael concert. I had all these people reaching out to me for tickets. I remember teasing Diddy because he asked me for four tickets, which I gave to him. Then I saw his mother at the hotel, and she said, “Rev, can you get me some tickets?” I told her I had
just given four tickets to her son. “He didn’t give me any of his tickets,” she said. I joked that she should have gotten the tickets before Diddy. But it was a big deal, a crazy circus of activity.

On the day, as the hour approached, I sat down with Katherine Jackson at the house and told her, “Mrs. Jackson, it’s a great honor that you asked me to be on the program. Since I’m one of the only speakers, is there anything you’d like me to say or not say?”

“Well, no, Reverend Sharpton, Michael and you had your own relationship,” she said. “Y’all supported each other, y’all loved each other. Just remember, don’t get too far into your own dogma. I’m Jehovah’s Witness. And don’t get too emotional.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I knew her religious tradition didn’t include the kind of hollering and screaming that you find at Baptist funerals. I had to pull it back a bit.

As I sat there in the VIP section reserved for the speakers and listened to the comments as the program commenced, I thought to myself,
What am I going to say?
I felt very passionate about the points I needed to make, but I knew I had to keep my passion in check, which was a tall order. When my time came, I walked up to the platform and gazed down at the gold casket that contained this man I’d known for almost forty years, and I started talking about the meaning and importance of Michael Jackson.

“When Michael started, it was a different world,” I said. “But because Michael kept going, because he didn’t accept limitations,
because he refused to let people decide his boundaries, he opened up the whole world. In the music world, he put on one glove, pulled his pants up, and broke down the color curtain, to where our videos are shown, where magazines put us on the cover. It was Michael Jackson that brought blacks and whites, Asians and Latinos, together. It was Michael Jackson that made us sing ‘We Are the World’ and ‘Feed the Hungry’ long before Live Aid.”

The audience was into it now, clapping enthusiastically. I looked down at Mrs. Jackson out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was clapping, too. So I thought to myself,
Let me push the envelope a little more
. I raised it up an octave or so. I didn’t want to go further over my time; everyone was only supposed to have three or four minutes, and I was already past six minutes.

I connected Michael’s brilliance in making kids across America and across the world comfortable with a black idol, which made them comfortable watching Oprah on television a few years later and comfortable rooting for Tiger Woods on the golf course.

“Those young kids grew up from being teenage, comfortable young fans of Michael, to being forty years old, comfortable to vote for a person of color to be president of the United States,” I said. “Michael did that.”

The crowd was roaring now, fully in the moment. As I looked down at his family and talked about the pain they all must be feeling, I decided at that moment that I wanted to say something to his children. I knew if it was me in that box—and
one day, it will be—I’d want somebody to say something to my kids. I had been monitoring some of the coverage over the previous three or four days, all the disrespectful “Jacko freako” stuff. I needed to say something to those children as someone who knew their father well.

“I want his three children to know, wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy—it was strange what your daddy had to deal with,” I said.

The crowd stood and cheered at the sentiment. Even his mother and his siblings and his children stood up. What I was talking about was all the fighting Michael had to do—how he had to fight to keep his catalog, how the record companies used to run up crazy bills and try to charge them against him. That was strange. It was strange to open doors for people and have those same people turn around and slam the same doors in your face. That was strange. They talked about him being weird—well, what was weird was that he would outsell everybody, outperform everybody, and still they wouldn’t give him his proper credit. I wanted his kids to understand that.

When the whole place stood up, cheering, I was a bit taken aback. I was thinking,
Wow, what do I do now?
I looked down at his daughter, who had jumped out of her chair, clapping, and I thought,
I might as well go all the way now.
So for the next two minutes, I went ahead and did what Al Sharpton does.

“Some came today, Mrs. Jackson, to say good-bye to Michael. I came to say, thank you. Thank you because you never stopped. Thank you because you never gave up. Thank
you because you never gave out. Thank you because you tore down divisions. Thank you because you eradicated barriers. Thank you because you gave us hope. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael.”

At the repast, Mrs. Jackson thanked me for everything. After I left and went back to New York, I made sure to stay in touch with the family.

Randy called me about two weeks later and asked, “Are you coming to the burial?”

“I thought there were only two hundred invited guests,” I said.

“Of course, you’re one of the two hundred,” he said.

So I flew out again. At the burial, I was sitting there at this mausoleum with the Hollywood elite—Elizabeth Taylor over here, Berry Gordy over there. An hour passed, and still no family, no body. Just a restless crowd of bigwigs, not used to waiting. But for Michael, we all waited. Finally, after an hour and a half, a hearse pulled up, with the family behind it in limos. The ushers escorted Mr. and Mrs. Jackson to the front row, followed by Janet, Jermaine, and all the rest of the brothers and sisters. I was in about the seventh row, waiting for the service to start. The head usher walked over to me and said, “Mrs. Jackson would like to speak to you.”

“Now? The service is about to start,” I said.

He shrugged. “She said to get you,” he said.

So I made my way down the aisle to the front row, where I knelt down next to Mrs. Jackson. “Is everything all right?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes, I’m fine,” she said. “We wanted to talk to you for a minute.”

Mr. Jackson chimed in. “Al, we want you to say some words for Michael here tonight,” he said.

“Now?” I asked, clearly surprised.

“Yeah,” he responded with a nod.

Mrs. Jackson put her hand on my wrist. “I want you to do the eulogy,” she said. “And I want you to tell the truth for my son.”

I was moved by the request. “All right,” I said quietly.

I went back to my seat, my mind racing. Gladys Knight got up and sang a beautiful song. Then they announced that I would be doing the eulogy. The people who were sitting with me turned to me in surprise, asking why I hadn’t told them I was doing the eulogy. I didn’t even have time to tell them that I didn’t know I was doing the eulogy until a few minutes earlier.

I got up and walked to the stage. I preached for about twenty minutes on what Michael meant to us and to the world. But I felt I needed to get a bit more pointed at the end. I looked out at the crowd and wondered aloud how many of those out there crying wouldn’t even return Michael’s phone calls before he died. I recounted how Michael walked me around Neverland, showing me where certain celebrities had gotten married, where others had big social events, and how broken up he was that people wouldn’t return his calls after the molestation charges and the fight against Sony. I said to let the lesson be that greatness is not determined by what you are challenged with; greatness is that you can be great no matter what your
challenges are. It’s not what you go through; it’s what you get through. And you should never be disloyal to a great person who was loyal to you.

After I was done, we said a prayer and took Michael’s body into the mausoleum. As we placed the body, Gladys Knight sang a breathtaking version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” I’ve never heard anybody sing it like that—if there is such a thing as the voice of an angel, Gladys was as close to it that night as I’ve ever heard in my life. One of the images that is still with me is of his daughter, Paris, holding her aunt Janet’s hand as she watched them place her father’s body in the mausoleum.