Al Sharpton - Rise Up: Confronting a Country at the Crossroads

A rousing call to action for todays turbulent political moment, drawing on lessons learned from Reverend Sharptons unique experience as a politician, television and radio host, and civil rights leader.

When the young Alfred Charles Sharpton told his mother he wanted to be a preacher, little did he know that his journey would also lead him to prominence as a politician, founder of the National Action Network, civil rights activist, and television and radio talk show host. His enduring ability and willingness to take on the political power structure makes him the preeminent voice for the modern era, a time unprecedented in its challenges.

In Rise Up, Reverend Sharpton revisits the highlights of the Obama administration, the 2016 election and Trumps subsequent hold on the GOP, and draws on his decades-long experience with other key players in politics and activism, including Shirley Chisholm, Hillary Clinton, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and more, to shed a light on everything from race relations and gender bias to climate change and the global pandemic. Written in the wake of George Floyds death and the police killings of other Black men and women, Sharpton delivers an unflinching assessment of the state of our country. His message is ultimately one of deep resolve and hope despite the hard truths confronting us today.

A profound examination of the American soul and a clarion call to action, Rise Up offers timeless lessons for anyone whos stood at the crossroads of their personal or political life, weighing their choices of how to proceed.

Reading Rise Up was an informative and motivational pleasure to absorb. Full of history, honesty, and valuable suggestions, Rise Up should be a staple in every home, school, and library as an essential primer on civil and political rights in America. Reverend Sharpton addresses our nations original sin, explains why we cant afford to be satisfied with creature comforts while others still suffer, and offers solutions in the non-violent tradition of my father and others regarding where we go from here. I highly recommend Rise Up without reservation to anyone mature enough to read and grasp the necessity of living life with a heart full of love and devoid of racism.

Martin Luther King III

Reverend Sharpton has fought on the frontlines for civil rights for decades. As the events of 2020 have shown, that fight is far from over. In this inspiring, personal book, he shows us a path forward. If you want to learn how to use your voice to change a nation, you should study closely this manand this book.

Van Jones

My Bed-Stuy (do or die) brother has been at the forefront of our battles again and again. From way back in da way back to this present revolution the world is in now, Rev. has been about Black Lives Matter from the jump, also at a time when it was not the most popular or hip thing to be about. I look forward, standing next to him, to see, to witness this new energy, this new day that is about to be in these United States of America.

Spike Lee

This man is a gift from God to the world. This book is a gift from Al Sharpton to us. Lets appreciate them both.

Michael Eric Dyson, from the Foreword

Reverend Al Sharpton is the host of MSNBCs PoliticsNation and the founder and president of the National Action Network (NAN), one of the leading civil rights organizations in the world. With over forty years of experience as a community leader, politician, minister and advocate, Reverend Al Sharpton is one of Americas most renowned civil rights leaders. Sharpton also hosts the nationally syndicated radio show Keepin It Real, which broadcasts in forty markets, five days a week. He resides in New York.

@real_sharpton

@TheRevAl

Also by Reverend Al Sharpton

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

Al on America

Go and Tell Pharaoh

Rise Up

Confronting a Country at the Crossroads

Reverend Al Sharpton

I dedicate this book to my grandson, Marcus Al Sharpton-Bright. I hope that by the time hes old enough to read, America will have chosen the right path forward during this tremulous time so that he will not have to suffer, endure, nor fight the unfairness his grandfather brought to light. May he read this book to better understand the injustices of our past and not our future.

Contents

Foreword

AL RIGHT
By Michael Eric Dyson

Martin Luther King Jr. conquered the American imagination because he was cut from the most majestic moral and ministerial cloth. Barack Obama captured the Oval Office because he was a dream candidate plucked from central casting and featured as the nations first Black president. Jesse Jackson seized the nation by its lapels when he rose from modest Southern roots to global acclaim as a freedom fighter. And Fannie Lou Hamer shattered convention and the racial sound barrier with her earthy and eloquent demands for emancipation.

Still and all, there has never been anyone quite like Al Sharpton on the American scene. Like King, hes a preacher, but far grittier and rawer. Like Obama, hes a politician, but presidents, governors, mayors, and all the rest bow at his throne even though he never held elected office. Like Jackson, hes the brilliantly evolved product of the Black bottom, but his bottom seems more, well, bottom. And like Fannie Lou, hes got vivid vernacular, but he can make it resonate in the White House or on Harlem streets. Although its clich to say so, it is really true that Al Sharpton is an American original. He is a man who can, at the funeral for the martyred George Floyd, talk about how roaches flee when the light is switched on in ghetto homes, just as the light of justice makes roaches of racism scatter.

The reason Sharpton can pull it all off is because he has never stopped being himself, even as that self has matured over the years. He is an unashamed preacher, called to deliver the word at the age of four, taking as his text John 14:1Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. (That verse undoubtedly gave him comfort a few years later when his heart was broken, and he plummeted from middle class to poverty when his father left his mother to start a family with Sharptons half sister. I told you his bottom was more bottom.) If youve ever heard him preach, you can hear how he was born first in Pentecostal tongues of fire and then reborn in swirling Baptist waters of prophecy. He preached his first sermon the year I was born. He has honed his craft in churches high and low, Black and white, and beyond over the past sixty-two years. And hes been mentored by some of the best Black folk in the land.

Sharpton went out on tour with gospel great Mahalia Jackson as a youth, sat under preaching legends Bishop Frederick Douglas Washington and Dr. William Augustus Jones, was tutored by the political maverick Adam Clayton Powell Jr., nurtured by the electrifying evangelist for justice Jesse Jackson, and, perhaps most famously, he got taken underwing by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. It is well-known by now that it was Brown who, in exchange for his support and for bringing Sharpton on tour with him, got the minister to style his hair after the famous impresario of funk. As Sharpton has combed through controversies and criticism, he has maintained a permanent allegiance to his follicular forebear.

People readily identify with Sharpton because, despite his fame, he is a Black everyman. When he first broke through as an activist, he was clothed in the tracksuit and sneakers favored by young folk in his generation. Later he was sheathed in Brooks Brothers suits and other tailored fashions. He lost significant weight when he fasted in 2001 to protest military exercises on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and has since shed half a man, and with it, the unjustifiable image of a racial arsonist, to become the most well-respected leader of his generation. Sharpton is arguably the last great figure of a dying breed of charismatic Christian leaders thrust into a prominence he has maintained for decades. Along the way, he was youth director for the presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, youth director for the New York City branch of Jesse Jacksons Operation Breadbasket, founder in 1971 of the National Youth Movement to raise funds for poor youth, and, twenty years later, founder of the National Action Network to increase voter education, registration, and turnout, to help the poor and to stimulate local community businesses. And he ran for president in 2004.