“It was so hard to get out from under his shadow. He was so...

“It was so hard to get out from under his shadow. He was so known in the community that I couldn’t do anything without people saying: ‘That’s Sharif’s son.’ I couldn’t try and fail and be a fuck up, because it was always his name that I was representing. He lived life on his terms. That’s who he was. The allure of being a public figure was always greater than the allure of being a present father. I remember him leaving the house at 6 AM and coming back at 3 AM. There were a lot of times when I looked into the stands at a track meet or a football game, and there was nobody there. Only when I was old enough to join his fight did I finally start spending time with him. If he was organizing a protest against the Board of Education, my brothers and I were the ones setting up the tent cities. He once told me: ‘I’d love for you to love me. But as long as you grow into a man who provides for his family and cares about his community, I don’t need you to love me.’ It took me a long time to stop resenting him for not providing the things that I wanted. But eventually I had to accept I couldn’t choose who he was. But I could choose to love him.” (3/3)