These days, you can find the Rev. Al Sharpton hosting a cable TV talk show, you see him at presidential fund-raisers and inaugurals. But it wasn’t always that way. In these excerpts from his new book, “The Rejected Stone,” Sharpton touches on various stops of his life journey, from child preacher to time on the road with James Brown, through the Tawana Brawley scandal, from his own brush with death during a march for slain teenager Yusuf Hawkins to the White House Super Bowl party.
My preaching career started at the age of four, when Bishop Washington allowed me to stand on a box at the pulpit and sermonize to a congregation of 900 people on the anniversary of the junior usher board. When I started to become known in the community as the boy preacher, it was not looked on kindly by my classmates. Their reaction ranged from outrage to amusement, with a bit of everything in between. I never got beaten up, but they clearly thought I was a strange kid. They were either laughing at me or trying to avoid me. It wasn’t helped by my insistence in writing Rev. Alfred Sharpton at the top of my papers in school, which upset my teachers so much for some reason that my mother had to come to school to intervene. It was my first real confrontation with authority, but it was also affirming for me, my insistence that I was something , someone of worth, despite the rejection by my father, despite the craziness that my life had become. My growing identity as a boy preacher undoubtedly helped my self-esteem at the time, but it also increased the sense of isolation I was feeling. It put me further out of step with my contemporaries, made me an oddity. After all, I was their mothers’ preacher on Sunday. How were they supposed to act toward me on Monday?
Bishop Washington took me under his wing, with the intent of nurturing and guiding me so that one day I could succeed him as pastor of the church and maybe even become a bishop in the Church of God in Christ. I began to do the church circuit, preaching at different churches in the area. That’s when I went on the road at the age of nine with Mahalia Jackson, traveling with the most famous gospel singer in the world as her opening act, as the astounding boy preacher from Brooklyn. I knew Mahalia was huge, but I had been preaching for so many years already that it became second nature to me. One of my distinct memories from that period was opening for Mahalia at the 1964 World’s Fair, at the circular pavilion and replica of the globe in Queens that you can still see when you fly into LaGuardia, next to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center where the U.S. Open is held. This made a serious impression on my classmates. So what was at first odd and amusing soon became a reason to hold me in a certain amount of esteem, or at least respect. They’d point to me, saying, “There’s the boy preacher.” But no more “ha ha ha” to go along with it. Opening for Mahalia Jackson at age nine will do that for you.
* * *
The relationship I had with James Brown turned out to be one of the most meaningful associations I’ve had in my life, the 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 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. …
During the year and a half that I stayed with James, I was thrown smack in 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/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.”
* * *
Whether it was my search for a father figure or for a clearer idea of how to turn myself into a great civil rights activist, one big lesson I took away from all of the men I followed early in my life was the notion that in order to rise, I had to be focused and intentional and committed to a cause greater than myself. The word focus here is key. It’s something I believe I was lacking early in my career, when I too often allowed my emotions to control me. That was a mistake I made with one of the cases with which my name became indelibly linked: Tawana Brawley.
If I had it to do over again, there are things I would do differently, knowing what I now know about human nature, about the criminal justice system, about the media. The entirety of the case hinged on whether this young black girl in Upstate New York had been violated, as she said she was, by a white police officer, among others. Sensational stuff, sure, but there’s no way I would ever turn my back on a young teenage girl in need, even if her claims were going to turn into an explosive media story. That’s just not in my nature. But my first miscalculation was in making the case so personal — us against Robert Abrams, the special prosecutor. The lawyers I was working with and I did a whole lot of name-calling. In these instances, the right approach is to fight the case, not demonize the actors. Because when you allow it to become personal, you take away from the objective. Here’s a young lady who says she was violated. Let’s deal with the facts, what we know. You can conduct an investigation and try to determine what happened to her, but you can’t just ignore it because she said the perpetrators were law enforcement. That’s what we feared was happening, that the authorities were automatically dismissing her as a liar.
Years later, when I got involved in the Trayvon Martin case after he was gunned down by George Zimmerman, who still hadn’t been arrested, I never once even used the name of the sheriff in Sanford, Florida. That was after years of learning the danger of making it personal. Are you about the issues and getting justice, or are you about the sound bite and the name-calling? Hell, we used to call David Dinkins, who was New York’s first black mayor, names. What did that get us? Rudy Giuliani.
But it took time, maturity, and growth for me to transform into the kind of leader who had the discipline to control myself and my emotions. I learned by trial and error, making some painful mistakes along the way.
* * *
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 they had 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 like drugs and numbers running. I had seen enough mob movies to know Rule No. 1: Don’t mess with the cash flow …
On Jan. 12, 1991, we went to Bensonhurst for a march, the twenty-ninth week that we had done so, starting the weekend after Yusuf was killed. We pulled into the schoolyard where we usually gathered. The police always cordoned it off to keep the hate crowds away from us while we set up. Usually they would line us up and form two walls of police protection, one on each side, so that there would be officers on each side to protect us. I was in the car with Moses Stewart, Yusuf’s father, who by then had joined NAN. When someone tapped on the window and said we were ready to go, Moses and I got out of the car and headed toward the front of the line to lead the marchers. This is called the “frozen zone” because only police are allowed in the area. As I’m walking to the front, I feel somebody brush past me. I said to myself, Damn, that cop just punched me in the chest! The guy had on a blue jacket — blue was the color of the day for the undercover cops, so I figured he was a cop. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something and looked down to see I had a knife sticking out of my chest. By instinct I grabbed the knife and pulled it out. When the cold air — remember, it’s mid-January — hit the wound, I went down in pain. People started screaming when they saw the blood gushing out of my chest and yelling for an ambulance. But even though this was a potentially violent protest march and there were a couple hundred police officers, there was no ambulance. A quick-thinking fellow protester threw me in the back of his car and said he would drive me to the hospital. One of the police captains told an officer to drive the car — and the officer responded by saying, “Wow, this is my first day on the job!”
I thought, Not only are they killing me (I still thought it was a police officer who stabbed me) , they gonna give me a rookie cop!
* * *
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 can’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.
