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

Author:Sharpton, Al [Sharpton, Al]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Cash Money Content
Published: 2013-10-07T18:30:00+00:00

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PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH

My social activism is my religion in practice. It is the daily embodiment of my lifelong service to God. As a Christian, as a man of the cloth, I am required to fight on behalf of those who have been wronged, on behalf of the downtrodden, on behalf of those facing injustice. That is my ministry. I don’t have a problem with ministers who build cathedrals—maybe that’s their calling. But my calling was to fight for those the Bible calls rejected stones. As the Bible says, Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders who became the cornerstone. I feel this intensely because I was a rejected stone myself in many ways when I was growing up.

My activism and its inherent dangers brought me one of the greatest tests that my faith has ever had to endure. It began amid the ugliness of our protest marches in Bensonhurst, a working-class Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, not far from Coney Island. Sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins had been shot twice in the heart in cold-blooded murder by a racist mob, upset that Yusuf and his friends were in their neighborhood. The mob thought Yusuf and his friends were linked to a neighborhood girl who had been bragging about dating a black man who was going to bring his black friends to the neighborhood to confront the young Italians. After the murder of Yusuf, we marched to assert the right of African-Americans to travel anywhere we wanted in our city, particularly after the same thing had happened in Howard Beach, another Italian neighborhood where another young black man, Michael Griffith, age twenty-four, had been killed by a racist mob in 1986. We also marched to ensure that the Brooklyn courts convicted each of the young white kids who were part of the mob that killed Yusuf, which was starting to look less likely. Right after the shooting happened, we marched to persuade the community to give up the identities of the shooters. During the weekly marches, we faced a revolting horde of racial hatred, with the residents of this neighborhood—mothers, brothers, grandfathers, sisters—crowding the sidewalks as we walked through, hurling the word nigger and its every variation while holding aloft bananas and watermelons and throwing garbage at us. While the civil rights struggles of the South and the hatred and brutality encountered on the Freedom Rides in Alabama and Mississippi—when activists like the young John Lewis, now the distinguished longtime congressman from Georgia, got beaten and bloodied—have certainly been well documented, I’m not sure that people realize the extent of the vicious racism we encountered up North in places like Bensonhurst and Howard Beach.

One of our lawyers got a call one day from Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, who had won election to that post largely because of the fame he garnered as the special prosecutor in the Howard Beach racial killing. Hynes let us know about something the government had picked up on a wire installed inside a social club in Bensonhurst with suspected mob ties.

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