The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (21 page)

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten an endless number of requests from magazines and periodicals asking me for the specifics of my diet, but what worked for me may not work for everybody. I came up with a plan by doing a lot of research, talking to doctors, and learning how my body works. I’ll give the basic outlines here, but by all means, don’t consider this a diet guide.

I don’t eat any meats. I eat fish maybe twice a week. Mostly, I eat salads and uncooked fruit and some whole-wheat toast which provides some grains and starch to give me sustenance for the exercise I try to do every morning. At first, I didn’t do the toast, but my doctor told me that if I was going to do the treadmill, I needed to have something substantial in my stomach. So I’ll eat some whole-wheat toast in the morning and maybe at night. Other than that, we’re talking fruits and salads and fish—but the fish is most likely on the weekends.

It took me about a year to lose the first hundred pounds. A rate of two pounds a week is about as fast as you want to go with weight loss. The people around me at first were startled. I used to be the kind of guy who ate all the time, big meals, heaping servings. That was something you could count on with Rev. Al Sharpton. When people realized this was something I was serious about, they began to get a little uncomfortable eating around me. I would tell them it didn’t bother me, but people were still self-conscious about sitting there with a heaping plate full of things I used to covet, while
I ate my salad. Eventually, they got over it. In the church and civil rights communities, people thought I was sick, which was understandable. There would be whisper campaigns: “What’s really wrong with him? Why’s he losing all that weight? Come on, tell me if something is wrong with him—I don’t want to read about it in the newspaper.” A couple of people actually worked up the nerve to ask me, “You all right, Rev?”

One morning, during one of our weekly Saturday rallies in Harlem, I said on the radio: “What’s been interesting to me as I’ve lost the weight is that when I was 300 pounds and obese, nobody asked me, ‘Are you all right?’ When I got healthy, everybody asked, ‘Are you all right?’ You should have been asking me that a year ago, when I was killing myself!” But it’s a consequence of the culture of obesity we’re dealing with in the country as a whole and particularly in the African-American community. A child is much more likely to hear, “Boy, sit down and eat—you don’t look healthy.” Really? You’re not looking healthy because you’re not overweight, not obese?

I’ve heard people actually say that I lost weight because I got a television show on MSNBC. But I had already taken control of my diet before I got the TV show. I acknowledge that many celebrities lose weight because they’re concerned about their public image, but my motivation was to personify what I believed and what I was teaching. It had nothing to do with the public. In fact, I never really thought about how the public was going to react. There have been other changes I have had to make as a result of my weight loss that I also hadn’t calculated, such as the impact it would have on my wardrobe. People see
me wearing these fancy suits on television and say, “Ooh, look at Sharpton, wearing the fancy Italian suits now that he’s on television!” But in reality, I had to buy a whole new wardrobe because I couldn’t wear the suits I used to wear. So when you restock your wardrobe and you have a few dollars in your pocket, you’re going to buy what’s in style. It has nothing to do with a television show; it’s just a practicality. If I wore one of my old suits on television, my shoulders would be down at my elbows.

I was already separated when I started losing weight, so that meant I was out on the dating market as the pounds were dropping off. I think at some point, I got caught up in the stereotypical middle-aged male mind-set—an old man dating young girls to try to affirm himself, prove he is still young and vital. But then I told myself,
You need to stop this, What are you trying to prove?
I knew I needed to settle down again. Carrying around those middle-age insecurities, needing a young woman to tell me I was still a man, all of that was antithetical to having a serious contribution to make in my life. From your diet to your friends to your social life, you have to say either you’re going to be serious about leadership in all aspects or you’re not going to be serious.

I’ve lived long enough to see with so many leaders that if you start living a life of contradictions, your enemies can use it against you. Even if you never get caught, the contradictions weigh down on your ability to be effective because you know you’re living a double life. It’s not even necessary for you to be a CIA director like Gen. David Petraeus; you can just be
a regular guy with a wife and a family. I knew it was going to help me as a man and as a leader to be whatever it is I’m preaching. And you have to be able to withstand the self-inventory if you’re going to seek greatness. I don’t think in any way that I’ve achieved greatness, but I have to be honest and admit that greatness is what I seek.

It’s an admission we shouldn’t shy away from—that we want to achieve greatness. People might say, “Oh, but that’s vain.” But Martin Luther King said we all have a drum-major instinct. He didn’t say we have a want-to-be-in-the-band instinct. He said drum major, the man or woman who’s out there in front, leading the show. That’s where we want to be. You can certainly see that in the reality-show craze sweeping the globe. It’s a response to the human drum-major instinct. So, King said, if you’re already trying to be out front, pushing to be the drum major, then why don’t you be a drum major for justice? If you’re going to be out front, then you have to accept the responsibilities that go along with that. For my life, the full interpretation was, even though you’re a celebrity, you can’t date just anybody anymore. And you can’t eat just anything you want and look any old way anymore. And you have to consider what comes out of your mouth. And when that guy takes shots at you, you’re going to have to refrain from shooting back, because you represent a higher cause than yourself. You can’t aspire to be the drum major of a band but live by the rules of the regular band members. If you want to live by the rules of a band member, then you should just step back and be a regular member of the band.

If you’re going to be a drum major, if you’re going to be a front man, if you’re going to be a leader of your family, of your community, of your people, then there are different rules that you have to live by. I have accepted my role as a drum major, and I try every day to be as consistent as possible about the image and the message I project to the world. If I’m going to preach and protest whenever I see human life being disrespected and denigrated, then I must show the ultimate respect for my own life by demonstrating concern for my health.

And even though I’m not getting any younger, I have a confession to make: I feel great.

T
he notion underlying most of the fights I have engaged in as a civil rights leader over the years is that every life has value. It is an idea fundamental to Christianity and to human rights. But I was never more stunned at how easily lives can be devalued and rendered cheap than when I went to Rwanda in 1994.

I felt African-American leadership should be doing more at the time to challenge the Clinton administration to intervene in the massacre that ultimately resulted in as many as a million Tutsis—nearly 20 percent of the Rwandan population—being slaughtered by Hutus. On our trip to Rwanda, we first stayed in Goma, Zaire—now the Democratic Republic of Congo—and drove two hours across the border to Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Every two or three miles, we would be stopped by these unbelievably young kids, fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds, brandishing automatic weapons and demanding to search
our car to see if we were hiding any Hutus. The guys in my delegation were shaken by the danger of the situation, but I kept thinking,
How are these kids who barely have clothes to wear getting automatic weapons? Who is arming this tribal war?

Rwanda is so breathtakingly beautiful, as if you have stepped onto the most fertile, gorgeous land that God ever created; it looked as if you could spit on the ground and a tree would grow. But once you thought about the sights we were coming across, it was obvious that the forces of big business and transcontinental corporations that were exploiting the mineral resources of Rwanda—and many other African countries—were financing these tribal wars, arming the countryside, because as long as there’s chaos, they can manipulate the land and the minerals. So, heartbreakingly, you get people in these countries fed by greed and a hunger for power, driven by a total disregard for the worth of human life, who fall right into the trap, walking into villages and not thinking twice about killing an entire family, just because they are in a different tribe. I saw this with my own eyes—families and villages wiped out. Annihilated. There was no recognition that each one of those people had value—they were seen as representations of tribes, Hutus or Tutsis, not individual men, women, and children who could make a valuable contribution to mankind. One of those children who were slaughtered could have been the scientist who develops the ultimate cure for cancer or the next great African musician or athlete or political leader. All of that human potential, just wiped off the face of the earth. And it wasn’t potential that might have benefited only Africans
or people of color—each of those lives could have had value for all of mankind, no matter what complexion or country of origin. A great musician, doctor, scientist, or politician can have an impact far beyond his own people or her own country.

I came home thinking about how easily Americans detach ourselves from the rest of the world, romanticizing our relationship with our homeland—whether African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and so on—but not doing a thing actually to help the people still living in these countries. It’s a sort of mindless boasting—“I’m Irish,” “I’m Italian,” “I’m African-American”—and we pay lip service to the importance of our ancestors and our lineage. But how many of us take the next step and go back to our countries of origin to offer assistance, to make sure the citizens are thriving and able to sustain themselves? If I’m Irish, I should be concerned about the state of the economy in Ireland and the lack of jobs and opportunity. If I’m African-American, I should care that they slaughtered a million Rwandans or that there is slavery in the Sudan. How do you find pride in something but not be proud enough to preserve the integrity of that thing that brings you pride?

The painful lessons of intragroup hostilities also came up during my memorable meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana. I was in Jamaica for a gathering of Caribbean newspaper publishers in Montego Bay in 2000, and I was going to be flying over to Havana with several members of the U.S. Congress who were on the trip. But when they got called back to Washington for a surprise session of Congress, the Cuba
jaunt was called off. But I still wanted to see Cuba, so I asked one of my assistants to see if he could get us there anyway. It turned out that I was allowed to go on a religious visa.

So I got onto a plane with three others from my group, and we landed in Havana, where they immediately took us to the Hotel Presidente and put us up in very nice suites. Right away, I put in a request to meet with President Fidel Castro. The officials who were minding us looked a bit skeptical, but they said they would try. We went to an international gathering of Communist leaders at the Karl Marx Auditorium. We saw Daniel Ortega, the former Nicaraguan president whom Ronald Reagan had been trying to overthrow in the Iran-contra scandal. We sat there for hours, watching the proceedings. The next day, we went back, and it was the same thing, sitting in that auditorium for hours. I was supposed to be leaving the next morning, so I figured the meeting with Castro was not going to happen. That evening, I was sitting out in the plaza of the hotel, listening to the group of musicians who walked around to entertain the tourists. A stranger came over to me and told me that I was to go to the convention center again the next morning before my three
P.M.
flight, but I should bring all of my luggage with me, because I was going to meet Castro on the way to the airport.

“But you cannot tell anyone traveling with you,” he cautioned me, which I thought was odd. He walked away without another word.

Next, I had a meeting with Rev. Lucius Walker, the progressive activist preacher who had started a group called Pastors for
Peace, which focused on battling American imperialism abroad, fighting issues such as the trade embargo of Cuba and American policies in Latin America. Walker had been to Cuba many times to meet with Castro, so he briefed me on the protocol of such a meeting and once again warned me about telling the rest of my group about the meeting.

When we left the next morning, the guys in my group couldn’t understand why I made them bring all their luggage when we weren’t leaving until later in the day. We sat in the Karl Marx Auditorium for the third day in a row. But after about ninety minutes, a Cuban official came to get us and rushed us to a van, which drove us about a half hour to a modern building. We walked in and got into the elevator, which took us up to the second floor. When the doors opened, there was Fidel Castro, standing with his hands extended. I could hear the audible gasps of my delegation; they were stunned.

“I always wanted to meet you,” Fidel said to me.

After that, he spoke to me in Spanish through an interpreter. Over lunch, we talked about the ongoing election drama in the United States between George Bush and Al Gore. This was in November 2000, when Florida was counting ballots and the nation was fascinated by the specter of the “hanging chad.” Well, Fidel was fascinated, too. Clearly, the outcome of the election would have a significant impact on him and his nation—one can easily imagine that the last decade of Cuban life and politics would have looked much different if Gore had won. Fidel asked me who I wanted to win, Gore or Bush, although I’m sure he already knew my answer. I told him what
the election tally looked like when we had left the States, but he had more up-to-date numbers from the previous hour, which he shared with me. That’s how closely he was watching the proceedings. He told me he was familiar with all my work on racial issues in America.