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

ofthe eyelashes, and the next thing you know, you can wind up in something you can’t get out of without causing heartache and pain. It can happen anywhere, everywhere—the church, the entertainment world, professional life, doctors’ offices, law firms. In this age of technology, you don’t even have to be in the same place to fall into something unseemly. I tell the people around me all the time, whatever you do in life, assume it’s public. So the consequential thinking is, weigh what you’re doing compared with your destination. If it’s going to get in the way of where you’re trying to go or how you want to be perceived, then don’t do it. And just as important, don’t lie to yourself and claim you don’t have temptation. That church song says, “Yield not to temptation.” So the presumption is that there is going to be temptation. I get tempted every day, but I realize you can’t have your cake—success and respectability—and eat it, too. I don’t think I need to explain the rest of that saying; you get the picture.
    Public life can be lonely. I learned that early on during my days with James. It was probably one of the reasons he liked having me around, companionship that didn’t make a lot of demands on him. It’s a lesson that has been hammered home for me as I became nationally known. You can’t just walk out of your house and go to the movies like everybody else, because people are going to bother you. Walking to the corner becomes a public display. So you tend to withdraw a bit, and there are very few people you can talk to who really understand what it’s like, who operate at the same level as you do. That means your circle gets smaller and smaller, the bigger you get. As aresult, entertainers, political figures, and athletes may wind up using drugs and having reckless sexual liaisons, among other things, to fill in that loneliness. I saw what happened to James Brown, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson. I took them as cautionary tales, warnings about what happens when you get reckless. I loved James Brown like a father, but I saw him getting himself deeper into legal trouble, having bouts with demons like drugs, totally undermining his career and maybe the length of his life.
    A big issue becomes, whom are you going to trust? I tell young entertainers all the time, you can go out with some random woman you meet somewhere, some woman you don’t really know, and if she’s outside your circle of trust, if she doesn’t understand the game inside the circle, then after you have your fun, you end up on some website with buck-naked pictures of you sleeping or doing something worse. That’s the world we live in now. I’ve committed myself to talking about this stuff with young people, because a lot of my role models and mentors wouldn’t talk to me much about such things. They didn’t want to admit that they had flaws. James Brown was one of the few who invested a lot of time in making sure I knew all about his mistakes. He would tell me, “I did this, Rev, and you should never make that mistake.” But most of them wanted to look infallible. I think you wind up looking stronger when you can discuss your flaws and then overcome them. If you can’t even admit to them, you’ll never overcome them.
    While I was with James, sometimes I got powerful reminders that I was in the company of one of the mostimportant musical legends of our time. There was one night in Augusta in the early 1970s that stands out for me. I was just a teenager, but even then, I could understand that I had just been granted a peek at something magical. James and I were driving in his van, just the two of us, with him at the wheel—as a New Yorker, I’ve never learned to drive—down a dark street in the heart of Augusta’s black community. Suddenly, James pulled the van over to the side of the road. He was staring across the street at a big church. I could see that it was the United House of Prayer for All People, the