The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership Read Free

at an early age and did whatever she could to encourage it. When my family moved to a big house in Queens, she built me a little chapel in the basement, complete with three or four benches for pews and a little stage that was the pulpit. While the other kids in Hollis were outside playing punchball and stickball in the streets, I would go down to the basement and preach, lining up my sister’s dolls on the pews to act as my congregation. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to me at the time, though it might have looked a bit strange to outsiders. And no amount of ridicule or other kids calling me weird mattered to me, because I knew what I wanted to do, where I felt the most athome. In fact, the more I was teased or encouraged to do other things, the more it made me want to preach.
    As I got older, I continued to encounter pressures to do other things, and I continued stubbornly to say no. When I ran for mayor of New York in 1997 and just missed forcing Ruth Messinger into a runoff, I got an interesting visit at my home in Brooklyn by three New York luminaries. Former mayor David Dinkins, Congressman Charlie Rangel and former Manhattan borough president and business mogul Percy Sutton sat me down and tried to get me to run for Congress. They wanted me to take on Rep. Ed Towns, a Brooklyn congressman who had broken with the Democratic establishment and endorsed Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani for reelection. Because I had won the borough of Brooklyn in the mayoral primary, they thought I’d have an easy time beating Towns. I told them I would think about it; for weeks, they continued to lobby me to run. But ultimately, I decided I couldn’t do it. Some of my detractors said I didn’t want to hold office and be held accountable; my friends were telling me I could be New York’s star congressman. But the reason I said no was simple: I didn’t want to be a congressman.
    When you are being pushed into something by others, you have to look inward and ask yourself: Do I really want to do this? Will I be at peace with myself if I say yes? I wanted to be what I had become, a national civil rights leader and an advocate using the media to push important causes. If I had gone to Congress, I don’t know if we would have been able to pass racial-profiling laws; I wouldn’t have been ableto move around the country trying to protect voting rights; I wouldn’t have been able to march on behalf of all those who had been unjustly slain, such as Trayvon Martin. And I would have been miserable, because I would have been outside of my mission, away from my passion.
    Whatever your politics, you must find your comfort zone. And stick with it. Don’t let other people talk you into what seems to be a more appealing or lucrative career if it doesn’t match your purpose in life. If you succumb to the allure of money or prestige, the rewards will never be enough if it isn’t your passion.

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BREAKING THE SHACKLES OF CHILDHOOD
    M y father abandoning my family when I was nine was one of the most devastating and consequential events of my childhood. It also instilled in me a desire to break the generational curse of father abandonment that haunts so many families, particularly in the African-American community. Once my own daughters were born, I vowed to do everything in my power to remain a strong and influential presence in their lives, no matter what.
    This is a lesson that all of us from “broken” homes need to carry out of our childhoods: Don’t allow the shackles of a challenging childhood hold you down.
    Until the age of nine, I lived in a stable, middle-class, two-parent household in Hollis, Queens. My father had plumbing and construction companies, and he owned several pieces of property. He bought himself and my mother new late-modelCadillacs every year, which they parked in the garage connected to our house. It was the epitome of 1950s idyllic suburban life. I was happy. But it all ended when I was nine and my dad