The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (3 page)

Just because I was the boy preacher didn’t mean that I wanted to be isolated from my peers, but that’s what happened. If I went outside to play punchball, guys would play with me, but I could tell they really didn’t want to. And as for the girls? They found it all extremely weird. How are you going to do naughty things with a preacher? I was a rigid fundamentalist Christian, but I was still a growing boy moving into adolescence and puberty, with an escalating interest in girls. And no outlet for that interest. And the adults around me either exalted me or admonished me because they were holding me to an entirely different standard than my peers. In the middle of all that, I was still seeking a father figure. So it was a big, messy stew of difficult emotions I was grappling with at the time.

When I got older and had children of my own, I realized that I had no road map to follow, no role model to help me figure out how to do this thing called fatherhood. But I quickly realized that maybe the most important element of fatherhood was to be a bedrock for my children, to be there always as a support system for them—all the things my father never was for me. When my wife and I weren’t able to sustain our marriage and we separated, I became even more convinced that my job was to make sure I remained available to my two daughters. Developing a strong, unbreakable bond with them became one of the most important things in the world to me.

But it wasn’t easy, primarily because I had nothing to emulate. Many men move into the role of father quite easily, smoothly, because their own fathers had always been
there as examples. They could either duplicate their fathers’ strength or eliminate their weaknesses. But I had none of that. All I had was absence, emptiness. I didn’t know the elements that made fathers successful or the things to avoid. So I would find myself watching fathers, trying to figure out what worked or didn’t work and how to incorporate it into my own fathering style.

My goal was to break the generational cycle of dysfunction that hung over my family. I already had a failed marriage; I didn’t want a failed fatherhood, too. But I had to be honest with myself and acknowledge that I needed help, that I had many shortcomings in this area. I knew my goal would be impossible to reach if I didn’t figure out how to fix them.

The world is not a perfect place; none of our families are perfect, either. All of us who come out of “broken” or dysfunctional homes first must comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we’re not responsible for our family situations. I had to bear some of the shame, the embarrassment, and the lack of security from what my father did, but none of it was my fault. So while embarrassment might be an understandable response, I could not burden myself with guilt. Just as some people inherit wealth, I inherited dysfunction. And just as those who inherit wealth should not act as if the wealth accrues some sort of merit on them, granting them a superiority over those whose beginnings were more humble, you shouldn’t be humiliated if you’re on the other side of the ledger, grappling with family dysfunction, because you had nothing to do with it.

Those of us who come from dysfunction must take an important step toward healing. We have to admit that we are scarred and understand where our scars are located. I realized perhaps the most damaging consequence of my father’s abandonment was a feeling I retained, deep in my psyche, that I was unworthy, that I had been rejected. When you grow up believing that you have been rejected by the man whose genes helped to form you, whose name is stamped on you, whose face is clearly visible in yours, you can’t help but embark on a dire search for validation. That’s what I got from James Brown and Jesse Jackson and Rev. Bill Jones, a widely respected religious leader in Brooklyn—more than seeing them as father figures to emulate, I saw them as important men who could validate me. By spending time with me when my father wouldn’t, by advising me when my father had not a word of advice to offer, they gave me a sense of self-worth that I didn’t even realize I had lost until I got it from them. My thinking was, if these talented and influential men were taking time with me, then I must not be some worthless kid from the hood who had no value and nothing to offer.

When you come from a childhood as shattering as mine was, you have to be honest about your insecurities and your burning questions. Whatever process you come up with to deal with these issues, whether it’s prayer or meditation or a therapist’s couch, you must step into that den of painful self-inquiry and find some answers for yourself. If you don’t, the insecurities and the questions will remain buried deep in your psyche and become a threat to everything you do—lurking,
biding their time, ready to spring forth at the most inopportune moments and sink you with self-doubt and self-sabotage. If you come from dysfunction and you don’t grapple with it, bearing the inevitable pain, it can become a permanent fixture in your personality.

I was in my twenties when James Brown took me with him to the White House, and on that day, he told me that he wanted me to style my hair like his. For me, it wasn’t about the hairstyle; it was the satisfaction of having this man asking me to emulate him, something that had never happened with my own father. That’s why I didn’t even give it a second thought—he could have been telling me that from then on, we were going to wear short pants. I still would have done it. Of course, on the surface, it looked as if I was just copying my idol, but the deeper point was that he was giving me the validation I so desperately needed. Had I known beforehand that I was going through these psychological trials, that I badly wanted validation, I might have responded differently to the hairstyle.

Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I see how the traumas of my early years continued to reach far into my adult years and affect my experiences as a parent. Although I grew up swirling around in a stew of need and dysfunction, I think I was able to break the cycle and give my daughters a stable foundation to launch them into adulthood. Whenever I could, I would bring them with me, whether it was to the White House or just to a chicken dinner at some local event. Even now, although they are grown, I have a long-standing dinner date with them every week.

Certainly, their childhoods were out of the ordinary, because their father’s job was the farthest thing from a nine-to-five imaginable, always on the road, always fighting a new cause. But they could always be sure of one thing: Their father was nearby, anxious to shower them with all the love I could manage.

O
ur leaders aren’t always going to be perfect, but we can still learn a great deal from them about how to live our lives. This message was delivered to me with force and clarity by the great Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

As I moved into adolescence, I became fascinated with Powell, whose father had been pastor of Harlem’s iconic Abyssinian Baptist Church from 1908 to 1936. Adam Jr. was a huge figure in Harlem during his civil rights activist days, using rent strikes and public campaigns to force businesses to treat blacks fairly. He utilized the picket line to force the World’s Fair to hire more blacks in 1939. Two years later, he led a bus boycott to force the Transit Authority to hire more black workers. After succeeding his father as pastor of Abyssinian, Adam was elected to the New York City Council in 1941, the first black council member in New York history. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1944,
the first black congressman in New York State history. Once he got to Congress, Powell immediately became its racial conscience, as he was eager to take on the racists and segregationists who had been roaming the congressional floor for decades. Adam wasn’t afraid of anybody. His courage, brilliance, and outspokenness made him a figure of immense pride in the black community.

I would go up to see him at Abyssinian on Sundays, entranced by his electrifying sermons. I would hang out after church and find a way to attach myself to his entourage. This was the kind of preacher I wanted to be. Powell knew my pastor, Bishop Washington, so he let me hang around him. He had a man on his staff named Odell Clark and a driver named Jack Packard, and even though I was just twelve, they would call me and tell me when he was coming to town. They got used to me being around, and Adam was intrigued by me, this kid preacher following him around like a puppy. I think my fascination with him probably flattered him. He had begun his political decline and was accused of misusing public funds, eventually being stripped of his chairmanship of the House’s powerful Labor and Education Committee, a position that he had wielded like a talisman in helping President Lyndon Johnson enact pivotal legislation in his War on Poverty.

Congress had voted to prevent Adam from taking his seat until the House Judiciary Committee completed an investigation, even though he had been reelected by his constituents. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that
Congress had acted unconstitutionally in keeping Powell from taking a seat to which he had been elected.

In the midst of his troubles, Adam appeared on the
David Frost Show
, a popular evening talk show at the time. Frost asked Powell how he would describe himself, since he had been a member of Congress for more than twenty years, had been the pastor of the largest Baptist denominational church, had been married three times, and had an untold number of mistresses.

Adam leaned back, puffed on his cigar, and said, “Adam Powell doesn’t give a damn.”

At first, Frost didn’t appear to understand. “What do you mean?” he asked.

So Adam repeated it. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody thinks. As long as it’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening, I’m going to live my life.”

I was amazed, exhilarated. Can you imagine the impact of that kind of bravado on an impressionable fourteen-year-old boy? I yearned to get to the point where I could be so bold and uncaring about what people thought. And when I was early in my career, during the Bernard Goetz, Howard Beach, and Tawana Brawley years, that’s exactly how I was. My mind-set was,
I’m going to do me, I’m gonna be me, I don’t care what anybody thinks.

But one day, as I started to mature, I realized that Adam’s mind-set was flawed. That was not leadership reflected in that way of thinking; it was selfishness. When you have accepted the mantle of leadership, when you want to ascend to the level
where people can comfortably call you a leader, you must accept the reality that people have the right to expect you to be different, better, more evolved than everybody else. If they are going to invest their faith and their hopes and their ambitions in you, then they have the right to expect that you are going to be the kind of leader who does care what people think. With all due respect to one of my early idols, they have the right to expect you to give a damn.

I’ve seen this over and over. When you go too far in not giving a damn, then you become the caricature rather than the conduit. So if I’m oppressed and I need you to be the one to bring my message, I don’t need for you to be distracted by whom you’re going to bed with, being intoxicated in public, not giving a damn. Because all of that quickly gets in the way of the work at hand.

After going through the Adam period, with the memory of that David Frost interview stamped in my mind, I eventually saw a transformation in my thinking. I started to realize that you need to give a damn, not because of your adversaries but because of whom you claim you want to serve. This was an extremely important revelation for me. If you’re going to call yourself a leader, do you love the people you want to lead enough to discipline yourself? If you don’t, then are you worthy of leading them? It goes back to the Bible, Luke 12: “To whom much is given much is required.”

Let’s bring this idea down to a more personal level, to those of us who are trying to be leaders of our families. If you’re a father, do you love your wife and children and family
life enough to summon the discipline to turn away from the pretty girl in accounting with the come-hither smile? Is half an hour with her in a stairwell or a hotel somewhere spectacular enough for you to throw away all that happiness and possibly wreck your children in the process? If you’re a mom, are you going to succumb to the nice guy in marketing who listens patiently to all your complaints about being bored or unsatisfied in your marriage, one day finding yourself in his arms and in his bed, or are you going to be strong enough for the sake of your family to walk up to your husband and ask him to help you fix what’s broken? If you’re a business owner tempted to cut corners or do something illicit to bring in more cash for your family, think about what might happen to that family if you were hauled away to jail. Being a leader is hard, whether you’re leading a nation, a community, a company, or a family. You’re going to need vast reserves of discipline, patience—and love.

In all of the work I’ve done over the years, I’ve always been motivated much more by the people I aim to serve than by any accolades or pats on the back from the media or the politically powerful. It’s an inclination that I believe can be traced back to my earliest influences, being drawn to men like Powell not because of the power he had accrued but because of the changes he was able to make in the lives of those he led.

T
wo great men from very different spheres of influence taught me a crucial lesson about the importance of timing: knowing when to move on.

Even before the end is nigh, as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. showed me, you have to start thinking about it, working on an exit plan. If you don’t, if you blithely pass the days thinking you’re going to stick around forever, you end up leading yourself into ruination.

Powell was dying of cancer and had just narrowly lost in the Democratic primary to Charlie Rangel. The year was 1971, and for the previous two decades, Adam had been the king of Harlem. Everybody wanted him to come back fighting, to take Harlem back from this young upstart Rangel, who had been in the state assembly for four years. I traveled up to Harlem from Brooklyn that Sunday after the election to see him at
Abyssinian. He had announced that he was resigning from the church and wasn’t going to fight Rangel. He was gone, retired, and heading to Bimini, the island in the Bahamas where he had a home and spent a lot of his time.