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

ran off with my mother’s oldest daughter from her previous marriage—in other words, his teenage stepdaughter. One day he was there, the next day he was gone. I didn’t understand the gravity of the incest, but I knew that his act instantly transformed my life and traumatized our entire family. My world flipped overnight. The whole ordeal almost gave my mother a nervous breakdown, and it cast me out on a lifelong journey to fill the hole he left in my heart and to search for men who could act as stand-ins for the father I no longer had.
    For several months, my mother, my sister, and I lived in a house with no electricity or gas because my mother had no money. When she lost the house, we ended up moving to Brooklyn and living the typically grueling existence of the hardcore ghetto: welfare, food stamps, housing projects, single motherhood. This was 1963, so sociologists such as William Julius Wilson hadn’t yet applied their analytical microscopes to black poverty, but this part of Brownsville, Brooklyn, was the classic portrait of what sociologists would later call a “disadvantaged” neighborhood. They were difficult days. What made it worse for me was knowing that part of my mother’s struggle was to figure out how to get me a couple of suits for my growing body so that I had something nice to wear to my preaching jobs.
    The shock of my life changing so severely and drastically surely did some long-lasting damage to my psyche, but when Ilook back on it now, I think the most damaging aspect of it all was the raw, aching sense of abandonment I felt. My father just walked out of my life. It would be nearly four decades before we would reconnect. The abandonment was made worse by the fact that he had my older sister, Cheryl, the first child he had with my mother, come and live with him and his new wife for a while, leaving me behind in Brooklyn. I was named after him; I looked like him. But I distinctly remember feeling as if my father didn’t want me. It was incredibly debilitating. I was a nine-year-old boy without an anchor, unmoored in this new world. So I reached desperately for any father figure I could find, a replacement that could help fill the emptiness that ate away at my insides. I found a lot of what I was looking for in the church.
    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 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