GREAT men are a function of great moments in time—and no one doubts that Martin Luther King was the greatest of our civil rights leaders. His greatness was a function of his era. Imagine being surrounded by all those transformative, historical figures: Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, the Kennedys, J. Edgar Hoover. All these people were transcendent. Everything was in flux. It was the fork in the road for this country. America was choosing whether it was going to be what it said it was. One way or another, we were having it out. It was the battle for the soul of our country. King was the right guy at the right time in the right situation.
I think that he understood the importance of his moment, and it overwhelmed him. He felt called to duty by the times because he knew that he could actually pull it off. But he also saw the flipside of the situation. Generally, people who change the world and make it better for all mankind don’t live to be ninety-something years old. Look at how messed up Chairman Mao, Pinochet, Mubarak, and all these people are. They live a long time. They live longer than the average black male lives in the United States. When you’re changing the status quo and bucking the trend, you’re doing something different. And if you try to make things different, there are going to be people who like the way things are just fine. They’re going to make sure things happen to you—and often, those things have the most dire consequences possible.
So when King said, “I may not get there with you,” he understood what that would mean. It wasn’t just a figure of speech for him. He knew that he would die for what he was doing, and he was willing to pay the cost. If you know that something will cost you your life and it ain’t worth it, you stop. I don’t mean cost you your life eventually, like smoking cigarettes or driving drunk. I’m talking about either you quit this shit right here, or somebody is going to put a bullet in your head for real. They weren’t fucking around with him. And that attitude, that defiance at the greatest possible cost, is generally what it takes to make the world move forward.
King framed what had previously been a political issue as a moral conflict. Protecting people’s right to vote, like protecting their right to speak or to worship, is a moral issue. That’s why it’s referred to as the “right” to vote, in the same way we talk about the right to free speech and religion. It’s not a voting privilege or a voting waiver. Rights are not up for political discussion. Politics is what happens after everyone has a seat at the table. Once everyone’s inside, then discussion can begin. King realized that, and he realized that he had to paint matters so vividly that any decent person would know he was right. Eventually even indecent people knew he was right. They got it—they just didn’t care.
It’s very easy for someone on a moral crusade to sound pompous and off-putting. The very word “crusade” has a negative, hostile connotation. So King needed to make sure people would listen to him—and he accomplished that with his humility and his very public and explicit appreciation for his predecessors. The thing about being American is that we generally believe history begins and ends with us. But King had read about Gandhi and other movements that had situations similar to his, and he learned from them. He applied foreign thinking and refined it for an American context—much the way the founding fathers did with the writing of the Constitution, right?
In one sense, Gandhi’s task was more impressive than King’s and more difficult to pull off. If you can make the mightiest empire in the world leave your country without fighting it, then you’re a bad motherfucker. The British Empire was so massive that they brazenly pointed out that the sun never set on it—and they were telling the truth. It spanned the whole globe. Gandhi defiantly told them to GTFO, and that he was willing to do whatever, peacefully, it took. If that great achievement was possible, then surely making some rednecks back off was feasible—and you can keep your shirt on, and you ain’t got to wear that robe or go on a hunger strike. No other black leader had such a grasp of what came before him as King did.
Martin Luther King was as bright as the people who were competing against him. He was not only an intellect but an orator. At that time it was very, very rare to have a black man that well-spoken, someone who changed minds regardless of the listener’s background. The people who were opposing him were degenerate rednecks. People heard them, and then they heard him, and it was like, “Wait a minute …”
Sadly, nowadays King has come to be known as “white people’s favorite black person.” I think there’s two big reasons for that. On the one hand, he is such a popular figure. You don’t need to know anything about him other than his name, and no one will question you. You can pretend you admire him, because admiring him is a given. On the other hand, many of the things he was saying were profound, universal truths. Republican candidates are quoting Martin Luther King. His words weren’t specifically for a group or for a person or for a slogan. They were for human beings.
Yet when Martin Luther King was alive, the parents of some of those very people who now celebrate him regarded him as a troublemaker—and that goes for black and white. People who are so close to it don’t have the power of perspective. They released Jackie Kennedy’s tapes in 2011, and she didn’t necessarily like King. It’s like how chemo makes you sicker before it makes you better. When people do something selfless and good, sometimes they have to be dead for a little while before they’re appreciated. History has to have time before someone’s contributions can be fully appreciated.
That certainly is the case with Martin Luther King’s counterpart, Malcolm X. Martin Luther King was very general. He wanted the world better for everybody. For him, you shouldn’t judge a person by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. Malcolm X’s agenda was much less universal. For black people, he was that same sort of romanticized figure as Nat Turner. He was a man of the people, and those “people” were us.
From what I have read and understand, Malcolm X wasn’t big on integration. He never thought that was the way forward. His stance was, “You leave us alone, and we’ll find our way.” That’s why for whites—and for many blacks at the time—he was the boogeyman. It’s no accident that there’s that iconic photo of him looking out the window, holding a machine gun, saying, By any means necessary. Malcolm X was another man who knew he would die for his beliefs, who knew what they would cost him.
Malcolm X was as intellectual as King, and equally aware of history. He just came up with a different conclusion. History taught Malcolm X that you fight fire with fire. History taught him that you should be feared, and that fear begets respect. He didn’t want black people to suffer abuses at the hands of outsiders. He wanted to fight and let his opponents know that there wasn’t going to be an easy win. There are a lot of people who argue that King was starting to think more like Malcolm X toward the end of his life. I find it hard to believe that he wouldn’t have at least toyed with Malcolm X’s ideas and given them serious consideration at various points.
I think that King and Malcolm X are equally historic men. But because peace is more convenient and easier to wrap your head around, Martin Luther King is regarded as a bigger figure with the public at large. In our community it’s a little different. I grew up always hearing about who Malcolm X was (and who Marcus Garvey was) and respecting them. They were held up as role models of strength, intelligence, and passion.
Malcolm X’s legacy has been carried on by white people’s least favorite black person, Louis Farrakhan. I think it’s fair to say that Louis Farrakhan has probably been the most consistent black leader of our times. His message has never really changed. He was a polarizing figure, and he remains so. In many ways, his philosophy has become accepted and endorsed in my community. He speaks of self-reliance. He reminds us that no one is coming to save the inner city, so we’d better do the best we can with what we’ve got.
People are loath to give Farrakhan credit when they proclaim his ideas. Part of that, I’m sure, is about Muslim versus Christian. Another reason is his needlessly provocative approach. I obviously have no problem with harsh language, but glib antagonism engenders hostility in return. If you don’t explain the less palatable aspects of your perspective, people tune out the good things you have to say.
At one time in the late ’90s, Farrakhan sent word that he wanted to meet me and a few other black celebrities. They put us up in a hotel in Chicago and took us in black limousines to visit him at his house. At that time, Farrakhan had prostate cancer and was having a really bad reaction to the radiation treatment. I’m sure his mortality was weighing heavily on his mind. He was trying to gather a group of people who he believed could be influential.
When we got to his house, Farrakhan told us a bunch of stories. The point was that he was trying to find solutions. He basically wanted us to get black men to be black men: to take care of their families, to stress education, to keep their neighborhoods safe. There was no incendiary language or so-called “hate speech.” This was done privately, without any attempts at self-promotion or anything like that. It really was a meeting of the minds to see how we could make things better.
Some of the things that he said were the very things I heard opponents of black people saying: that we need to be more self-reliant, that we need to take education more seriously, that drugs were bad. But when Farrakhan was saying these things, they weren’t being raised to attack and to diminish. There was always a tone of compassion in his words. Despite his illness, I was impressed by how powerful he seemed. He just seemed like a strong guy.
I’ve seen and talked to him at length on several other occasions since then. I never saw the hateful, anti-Semitic rabble-rouser that people accuse him of being. I saw a guy who was honest. I can’t say I’ve agreed with all of the things that he’s said. I think it’s obvious that he may make statements whose controversial nature detracts from any truth that they might contain. But I can say some people have a part to play, despite their flaws and weaknesses, and he is definitely such a person.
For all his flaws, people forget his accomplishments. It’s almost unbelievable that he was able to pull off the Million Man March. No other leader could have done that. You can’t get black men to all go to the same game, to like the same broads, to see the same movies. But Farrakhan got more than a million black men from all over the country to come see an event because they wanted to be a part of something larger than themselves. There were grandfathers and fathers and sons. It was three and four generations of men together. They all wanted to be connected and, somewhat, to be given direction.
Farrakhan didn’t get them there for fun or to throw some sort of party. He told them about being men, and that gave him some credibility to the media. It felt like a movement, like something spectacular was going to happen as a consequence. We showed up—but we didn’t know where to go after that. He started something, but he just never finished it. Those black men got disenchanted and moved on. If we had followed through, now, many years later, there would be a generation of boys going to college, raising their children, and not going to jail. That could have seeded a moment that turned our fortunes around. But the moment passed, and what a shame that was.
As I said, Greatness is often a function of the times. Muhammad Ali was a great boxer and is a great human being. But there have been other men who were equally as physically gifted who do not get anywhere near the reverence that he gets. It was all the things around him that helped us to see those facets, to see him as so much more than an athlete. It was a combination of the times, and his talent, and his political stance. Here was a man whose fame came from a nonpolitical context—sports—taking a stand against the war. He was folksy and he could articulate how he felt about things: “No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger.’ ” The moment called for a guy like that, and he rose to the challenge. Even then, many Americans couldn’t love him until he was shaking, holding that torch in the Olympics. It was only once he was so feeble that they didn’t fear him anymore that they felt comfortable embracing him.
Ali, King, and Malcolm X were men who never looked for causes. The causes found them. But imagine being around men and seeing what causes could do for you; being around men who were so passionate about what they believed that it cost them everything. Imagine wanting that—and it never finding you. That’s what I think of when I think of Jesse Jackson. He was a great orator. He had seen a lot of things firsthand. He was a man in search of a cause that would raise his standing. He was a guy in search of a reason to be great. He came from greatness, saw it every day, was around it, saw what it cost, believed that he had it in him. But for some goddamn reason that cause—the cause that could have solidified him, that could have catapulted him—never happened.
Later on, he kind of realized that it wasn’t going to find him, so he started trying to somehow manufacture it. He gave what I consider one of the greatest speeches in American history with his “It’s morning time” speech. But that was it. He was reduced to running around with chicken blood on his shirt, claiming that it was Martin Luther King’s. He enriched himself by going to the corporations and telling them, “I can make your black problem go away.”
I’ve been in meetings in Hollywood where certain TV shows had people mad at them. The shows were being accused of racism because, say, they didn’t hire black writers. Whatever the case may have been, the first thing the executives did was reach out to Jesse Jackson. They believed that if you gave him some money, all your negative racial press would go away. Can anyone say they were completely wrong in their thinking?
I know for a fact that Jesse succumbed to venality, because it affected me directly. In 1999, I had a house that I wanted to sell in Baldwin Hills. I had a property-management company taking care of the sale for me, and we got a bid on the house from a young woman. “She really wants the house,” the broker told us. But the bid was significantly less than we wanted—I’m talking forty grand less. At that time, the market was pretty solid. There was no need for us to take a bath on the sale.
“No,” I told the broker. “If she really wants it, you tell her that the asking price is the actual price.”
A couple of days later, the buyer matched the price. There was a check from the Rainbow Coalition making up the difference between her original offer and our final price. I instantly thought that somebody down there at the Coalition had himself a little chippy on the side, but I didn’t care one way or another. What mattered to me was whether the check cleared—which it did.
Several weeks after the sale closed, I was on the set of The Hughleys. “Is that your house?” someone asked me.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“That’s your house on the TV news!”
And it was. Everyone from the show gathered around to watch the TV set. The reporters had cameras in front of my old house, and the newscasters were proclaiming that this was the home of Jesse Jackson’s love child. His mistress had had a baby, and they were saying that he had bought the house for her.
At some point in the following days, the government even called me investigating whether Jesse had used funds improperly. Obviously, I played dumb. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Talk to my lawyer.” I kept my mouth shut about the whole thing—with one glaring exception.
In 2002, Jesse got mad about some of the jokes Cedric the Entertainer made in Barbershop. One of the lines that bothered him was a quip about how Martin Luther King “got more ass than a toilet seat.” Now, let’s be honest. No one who admires King thinks that his alleged womanizing detracts from his accomplishments. The people who do bring that up are only using it as an excuse to denigrate a man whose goals they have always opposed. Besides which: It’s a joke.
I was at the Trumpet Awards in Atlanta that year, and so was Jesse. He was standing near me when he started being very vocal about the film and how offensive it was. He wanted them to censor some of the dialogue. He was complaining loud enough for me to hear him.
“Well,” I interjected, “some people need to not have those kinds of moral views.” Meaning, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
He’s no dummy. He instantly knew what I was talking about, and he dropped the matter right then and there. I maintain that if he hadn’t had “Reverend” in front of his name, none of that stuff would have mattered—and his downfall would not have been as severe as it has been. That title provided a moral component to his views, but it also held him to a higher standard.
Back then, there wasn’t the concentration on people being exposed to everything that you did. There wasn’t TMZ or Media Takeout or all these kinds of blogs that exposed behind-the-scenes goings-on. Even someone as well-known as Jesse Jackson could still have some auspice of anonymity in certain contexts, which I am sure he took advantage of for years. So when it came out publicly that he was saying one thing and doing another, people were disappointed. He was very well regarded in the black community. Many white people, of course, thought his comeuppance was long overdue. The animus toward him in certain pockets was intense. Bill O’Reilly basically made his name by taking Jesse Jackson to task on the air, for example.
Yet the proposition that Jesse Jackson was shameless in his actions was demonstrably false. When all his dirty laundry got aired in public, it was shame that immobilized him. He didn’t sweep it under the rug, make an insincere apology, and pretend nothing of importance had happened. He really fell back in his public persona—and that allowed Al Sharpton to basically take Jesse Jackson’s place.
If Jesse Jackson was a reduction of Martin Luther King, then Al Sharpton was a reduction of Jesse Jackson. He was a copy of a copy. When Sharpton started out, he was less crisp, less focused, less sure, less sharp than Jackson was. But as their careers went on, they sort of switched roles. Jesse went down and Sharpton got more nuanced and much more sophisticated. The copy actually started to be crisper than the original. Sharpton transitioned from being this black-radical marcher to someone who wants to talk about education with Newt Gingrich and meets with Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton would not have been caught dead with the early Al Sharpton, the fat man in sweatsuits and gold chains. Newt Gingrich probably wouldn’t even have wanted to be in the same state.
I watch Sharpton’s television show all the time. Clearly, he is trying to be seen as much more than a civil rights leader nowadays. The more Sharpton becomes a statesman, the more of a dance he is going to have to do. He is always going to have to work his answers so that people who have loved and supported him for years will be comfortable—or at the very least, not put off. You can’t be a civil rights leader/political player and not have that connection to your base. But as you broaden your appeal, you necessarily broaden your focus. It wasn’t “black rights” for Martin Luther King: It was a human rights issue. It was something everyone could get behind, even though the problem was primarily hurting one group in particular.
That’s why I think that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have focused so much on racial discrimination as a cause. The 1960s were the last time we had a national consensus on race. They were probably the only time we had a national consensus on race. Those who opposed this consensus had their views driven out of civilized discourse. A person can openly argue for colonies on the moon, shutting down every U.S. embassy abroad, and defaulting on the national debt. But racist views have to be couched in code words and deceit. So to fight discrimination is a winning fight, because no one will fight with you openly.
But the consensus means that the fight has been won, at least ideologically. Of course racism is a huge problem, but it’s not the only problem—and it’s not the biggest problem. It doesn’t stop black women from going to school in record numbers, for example.
If there’s a problem with a company that discriminates, that shit doesn’t fly anymore when exposed to scrutiny. It’s very easy to point the finger when the danger is external. “Us versus them” is a common human mindset.
But what about when the dangers are internal? Civil rights leaders can’t be as candid. They can’t alienate their own audience or they will lose their power. We are at a point in America when every community, every person, can create their own reality. If something makes you uncomfortable, you can successfully avoid hearing it. The thing is, it is truths that make a person feel uncomfortable. Some part of your mind registers the fact they are trying to deny, and that’s where the unease creeps in.
I am not a civil rights leader. My constituency is fluid, and I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself. If the NAACP types often want to suppress what they see on the screen, it’s no wonder they are uncomfortable with what they see on the streets. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem.