the reverend alfred sharpton.on the road opening for the great gospel singer. you grew up in a nice neighborhood in queens. you had a mom, dad, older sister. and everything was really pretty good. your father was in the construction business. and you had cadillacs. >> yeah. he used to buy two a year. one for my mother, one for him. >> so you were a happy little guy. you even took your sister's dolls and lined them up as if they were sitting in pews and then you used to practice. >> yeah. he -- my mother had built me a church in the basement and i'd line up and preach to my sister's dolls. the best congregation i ever had, by the way. they never complained. >> you were kind of weird to your friends, but then one day something terrible, terrible happened and it really shattered your world. what happened? >> my father left the family, abandoned the family. my stepsister and he had an affair. >> this is separate from your -- >> from my mother's first marriage. and they moved out. and this incestrial relation broke the

, you would write reverend alfred sharpton.they had to explain to them i was a junior minister in my church. i was the kind of person that defined myself, which made me reject it in some circles. >> that's hard socially, yeah? >> it's very hard socially with your friends. i'm 7, 8 years old playing with playmates and their parents actually come hear me preach. try becoming a teenager and getting a date. it's a little weird. but not only do i talk about that, i talk about my father who abandoned us. and a lot of the complexes you have to go through of rejection. then the broader rejection, if you're black, if you're gay, if you're a woman, if you're -- and how we get by these rejections in society, and i use anecdotes throughout the book called my relationship with president obama and now that happened and michael jackson and james brown and mohommad ali. and what i learned about rejection and how you define yourself. >> what you say now is that society today should better understand that black success has always derived from co