The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (7 page)

When I give speeches, I sometimes use a helpful analogy:
If I step off the stage and knock you off your seat, that’s on me. I’ve abused you, knocked you to the ground for no reason. But if I come back a week later, and you’re still lying on the ground, that’s on you. If you’re not responsible for being down, you
are
responsible for getting up. But that’s not what’s happening in our communities and families today. We’re not getting back up. We must figure out a way to reenergize and reignite the spirit of get-up in our communities. I am sad and burdened, almost to the point of heartbreak, that we let our young people lose it. We allowed it to slip away in a generation, disappear into a fog of disconnection and self-centered entitlement. When I meet with young people, I see it in their eyes, in their faces, in their demeanors, in their voices. They’re telling me,
I ain’t gonna be nothing nohow, so why bother? I’ll just join a gang, take me out in my twenties. I don’t care.

When things were much worse off, we didn’t surrender. We can’t accept it now. That is not the legacy of our ancestors. It is not us.

I started to notice the change in the mid-1990s, seeing young people who didn’t seem to hear what I was saying to them, who didn’t think all the talk about uplift and self-improvement applied to them. Whereas my generation grew up with songs such as “Say It Loud” by James Brown, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy, all records exhorting us to action, by the ’90s, that message had started to give way to more self-focused tributes, to weed and sex. It started to become acceptable, even in vogue,
to live a thug life. In one of the most damning developments, to young African-Americans, it seemed that blackness became synonymous with thuggery, hood life. It was the definition of what it meant to be black.

I remember how hurt I was when my daughters told me this way of thinking had so permeated young black minds that it was even present on their college campuses. Even in college, if you were well-spoken, well-read, eloquent, you were acting white, they told me. So the converse was that to act black, you were supposed to act like a thug, a street urchin? That’s a crippling and racist self-image. But it’s been sold, reinforced, and glorified by the last fifteen years of black culture. The music, the movies, and the literature all became a celebration of the thug. So if that’s blackness, what does that do to W. E. B. DuBois and James Baldwin and Leontyne Price? They’re not black? Or Dr. King—he’s not black? What are you talking about? Blackness was never about how low we were; blackness was about no matter how far down they brought us, we found a way to get back up. That’s the black legacy—not just to our children but to all of America.

Using the previous analogy, about me stepping off the stage and knocking you off your chair, what we are doing now is getting knocked off the chair, and not only are we not getting back up, but we are lying on the ground and rapping about it.

I’m down . . . bump bump bump . . . I’m down . . . I ain’t shit.

It may be entertaining, or even funny, but what kind of damage is it doing to the psyche? What you should be rapping about is,
You knocked me down, but I’m just gonna get right
back up
. Or,
Hey, you shouldn’t have knocked me down in the first place!
But instead, we’re making it fashionable to be down there on the floor, embracing it, making it cool and black to be doing jail time, to have eight kids from eight different baby mamas. I think that’s sick.

Please understand, I will always preach that black men must take responsibility for their children. That’s something I believe wholeheartedly, especially since I saw in my own life, with my own father, that too many men refuse to take proper responsibility for the care and upkeep of their children. But I have to take exception to this idea that the reason black kids aren’t excelling in school is that they aren’t reared in a traditional family. I feel as if I would be doing violence to the years of hard work put in by Ada Sharpton to accede to that. This message is especially bothersome at a time when we see the very idea of what is a traditional family transforming before our eyes. It’s clear that America needs to update its image of what a family looks like. How do we get sociologists and social commentators trying to instruct America to enlarge the view of a positive family environment, while telling African-Americans that the black community’s problem is the lack of traditional families? You can’t have it both ways. We have states such as Maryland and Washington deciding that same-sex marriage is legal, and we have gays adopting kids in big numbers—but blacks have to have a mother and a father in the home together in order to thrive? Is that what we’re saying here? Because it seems to me that if the contemporary societal message is that the traditional family is not traditional anymore, then please
don’t use that archetype of the traditional family to beat down African-Americans, particularly black single mothers.

What the black community needs in the current environment is a redefinition of community. We need to reinstitute a place where the teachers are committed to lifting children up and not teaching down to them, where institutions such as the church are dedicated to uplifting kids, where everyone in the community works together to implant in every young person the idea that the community expects success from them. But to count heads on who has a daddy at home at a time when the daddy might actually be another mommy is unfair and counterproductive. If I’m free enough to say people have the right to marry someone of the same sex, then don’t come to me wielding that traditional model. American society is feeding blacks a nineteenth-century family photo while giving whites a twenty-first-century liberated view of family. That’s not fair, and it’s not right.

This doesn’t mean we are removing responsibility from the fathers. No, what we are saying is that if you have a child, you are responsible for that child, regardless of your sexual orientation or family type. And to extend it further, if you live in a community with children, you are responsible to help all those children, even if they don’t share your DNA. If you’re an accountant or a hairdresser, or whatever profession you happen to be in, commit some of your life to teaching, molding, mentoring young people in your community. Your lifestyle choices are your own, but your obligation is to the community and to the children. That means all of us putting
aside our ridiculous, self-centered preoccupations and taking care of our children, making sure we create an intellectual climate in which they thrive, which pushes them to reject mediocrity and excuses.

Right now, what is happening in America is exactly the opposite. We are cultivating a climate that celebrates mediocrity, even idiocy. Just fifteen minutes of reality television illustrates everything that’s wrong with the American climate—five minutes with Snooki on
Jersey Shore
, five minutes with the ladies of the
Real Housewives
franchise in any of its many cities, and five minutes with Honey Boo Boo and her blissfully ignorant family. These shows and dozens of others provide a virtual dissertation on the modern failings of American culture. The dumber, more ignorant, and more anti-intellectual you are, the quicker your path to stardom. And that’s not even including the endless drumbeat of “niggas,” “bitches,” and “hos” on the radio airwaves.

This enthusiastic American celebration of decadence, debauchery, and ignorance transcends race—we’re all there now; no community is immune. In a classic illustration of American inclusiveness, we’ve even given a vehicle to the Arab community to parade its own unique brand of brainlessness on a reality show called
Shahs of Sunset.
Ah, the beauty of America. Let’s show our young people—hell, show the world—how low, irresponsible, undisciplined, and uneducated you can be in this great nation and still get paid.

Our children see the condition of their schools and understand what the society is telling them: You are not
important. If you’re black, Latino, or poor white, and your school is falling apart—and the fancy public school across town is dripping with amenities—and you’re already inundated with videos and music that says you’re nothing but a nigga, a bitch, a spic, a ho, what are you supposed to think but that you’re nobody? You don’t have a sports team, you don’t have a pool, you don’t even have computers in your classroom.

It all matches the message you’re hearing on the radio:
You ain’t shit.

But if each of us looks upon these children as our own, if we consider that we all have a responsibility to not only the young people in our families but also the ones in our neighborhoods, our communities, and across the nation, we will all feel it intimately when children in a particular community are forgotten or disrespected. That should be a requirement for citizenship in this country we profess to love: If you truly love America, you will also love Americans.

I
first met James Brown when I was a boy growing up in Hollis, Queens, not far from the big house where Brown lived. The kids on the block would stand by the gate outside his house, which loomed before our young eyes like an urban castle, and wait for him to come out and talk to us. He would tell us the sorts of things that older black people liked to tell kids: “Stay in school” or “Don’t do drugs.” He’d also say things you were not likely to hear from a lot of other black people at the time, such as “Be proud of being black.” He was already a towering figure in the music industry by then, the creator of both funk and soul music, with iconic hits such as “Cold Sweat,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” (a song that many credit for making the African-American community begin to favor the descriptive moniker
black
instead of
Negro
).

The relationship I had with James Brown turned out to be one of the most meaningful associations I’ve had in my life, one that shaped a lot of what I eventually became.

In 1973, when I was eighteen, James heard about my National Youth Movement and decided he wanted to help me raise money by doing a benefit concert. James seemed to really like me and took me under his wing. He started inviting me to his shows to help out, eventually bringing me all around the world with him and even appointing me as his manager because he knew he could trust me. Our relationship became like father and son. In fact, James’s father, Joe Brown, once said I brought out the best in James because he wanted to live up to my admiration of him.

Those years with James were a heady, glorious time for me. I learned a great deal about human nature, about business, about the black community, about the music industry, and I met huge stars in just about every field imaginable.

In fact, James was the one who told me to shorten my name to Al. Up to that point, I was known as Alfred Sharpton.

“Reverend,” he said to me one day (he always called me Reverend). “Cut it to Al. You don’t need four bars [as in ‘Al-fred Sharp-ton’]. Just Al Sharpton. Alfred’s too much.”

If James Brown tells you to shorten your name for the aural benefits, you do it. From that day forward, I was Al Sharpton.

In a profile somebody wrote on me years back, the writer recounted how I was kind of adopted by James Brown when I was eighteen, after his son Teddy died in a car crash. He said this period with Brown defined me, because that’s where I got
my style and where I learned to deal with the grass roots—the people with backgrounds similar to James’s, the marginalized and the dispossessed. But I don’t think that’s completely accurate. What really defined me during that time was my decision to
leave
James Brown.

During the year and a half that I stayed with James, I was thrown smack into the middle of a teenager’s dream: nights in Vegas, parties in Hollywood, shows in London. I was there when he left to perform before the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight, the famous “Rumble in the Jungle.” I was nineteen, and I was a player at some of the most intoxicating cultural events of our time. Can you imagine? He was one of the biggest figures in the entertainment industry, and I was his right hand. What more could a kid ask for?

But I wasn’t happy. I knew this was not what God intended for me, to be a road manager and assistant for James Brown. There were bigger things in store for me, a path that I needed to begin to walk. That’s why I say don’t get hypnotized by the shiny objects, the so-called bling. It would have been easy for me to stick around and live large, but it didn’t feed my spirit. So I left James and went back to my mother’s place in Brownsville, Brooklyn. James couldn’t believe it.

“Oh, he’ll be back,” James told the people around him. “He can’t make a living.”

I wasn’t exactly certain what my purpose was in life, but I knew following James around wasn’t it. I dedicated myself to building my National Youth Movement. There were no guarantees, but it’s what I had to do.

When I counsel up-and-coming young leaders, I try to get them to practice consequential thinking: If I do this, what is the consequence? It’s something my best friend, Dwight McKee, has been saying in my ear for decades. I tell them the two things you have to be most careful of are money and sex. Those are the twin evils, the flagrant, tantalizing mistakes that will bring the media firestorm every time. When you fall in those two areas, everyone’s coming after you. I’ve made mistakes with money—not really doing anything wrong or egregious but not being obsessively careful. I got lax with my recordkeeping and accounting, and the government came along and accused me of unpaid taxes in amounts that exceeded a million dollars. Even if you didn’t do anything wrong, you can’t say, “To hell with them!” and walk away. The Bible tells us to avoid even the appearance of wrong, so even if you didn’t do the things you are being accused of, it becomes a huge distraction.

Huge distractions also come in the form of sex scandals. This is obviously the most lethal trap in public life, the area where a monklike discipline is sometimes required. Yeah, that young lady looks great, but is she worth it? Is it worth you not being able to have the moral authority to stand up and raise issues? What’s more important to you, a weekend in Bimini with a young woman or standing up and changing the course of history?