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

Smiled on Me,” so that’s the one we were going to dobut reimagined with an up-tempo beat. He taught the band the tempo he wanted. After about two hours, when they finally got it, he started singing, “God has smiled on me . . . He has set me free . . .” And then he pointed at me.
    “What?” I said.
    “Preach!” he said.
    “What am I going to say?”
    “Just say it from your heart!”
    And so he started it again, then he pointed at me—and I started preaching. He’d break in and start singing again, then he’d point at me to preach again. We did that for hours, recording two or three songs that night, with James, me, and the JBs. James believed in improvising. He didn’t read music; he didn’t even really read lyrics. He mostly believed in going with what came from the heart. And that’s what he wanted me to do. The man was truly a gifted musical talent.
    James tried to get those songs out on the market for mass distribution, but he never found a willing partner in the music industry. I still have the recordings, though.
    After we made that record, James asked me to stay with him again. His manager at the time had just had a heart attack, and he needed some help keeping the proverbial trains running. He got me a house, and I moved back to Augusta. This was when I began a serious relationship with Kathy, one of his background singers, whom I had met years earlier during my first stint with him. We got married during this time and lived in my house in Augusta. But I woke up one morning and realized I needed to leave James again. I didn’t want to bein entertainment. Yes, I was making money. Yes, I was married now and had responsibilities larger than myself. But I wasn’t happy. I knew what I was doing just wasn’t me.
    I brought Kathy back with me to Brooklyn, and we lived in my mother’s house for six months. Again, James kept predicting that I would come back because of the money—and he was right; I was broke. But I had fixed it in my mind that I would establish myself in the ministry and by doing activist work. I was constantly being pushed in that direction by invisible forces. I was broke, but I was happy.
    A year or two later, on December 22, 1984, a white man named Bernhard Goetz, fearing that he was about to be robbed, opened fire on a group of four black male teenagers on the Number 2 subway train in Manhattan, igniting a blaze of controversy and media scrutiny. To me, the racial connotations were clear. While many were lauding this man as the heroic “Subway Vigilante,” I knew I had to call attention to the risks of allowing anyone who perceived danger to open fire on black males. As I began to stage protests in the Goetz case, I started to find my rhythm. My civil rights career was reborn, and I never looked back.
    I thought I had permanently left entertainment behind, but the music business wasn’t done with me yet. Don King, the biggest boxing promoter in the world, decided that I should become a major concert promoter, working alongside him to become to the music industry what he was to the boxing world. I had worked with King on the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984, which King had promoted, and I had helped promotea few other concerts. Even Michael Jackson and James Brown were urging me to do it. But that’s not what I wanted to be.
    When you know what you want to do, you get to the point where you don’t even need guarantees that it’s going to work. If you have that conviction, you will turn down guaranteed income, big stacks of dollars that could be very helpful in raising a family, and you will wander down the uncertain path. But I did have one guarantee: I knew I would be happier on that uncertain path.
    Over the next decade, I watched as James Brown’s half-beat became influential in another music form that was growing like fertile vines in my native New York City: rap music. Rap was a powerful rebellion against a cultural mainstream that was ignoring the pain and