The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (6 page)

“Moral? So let me get this straight, Reverend. I should say gays can shack up, but they can’t marry? That sounds moral to you? I thought we preached against shacking up, Reverend.”

Years later, after I got the MSNBC show, I got another call from this reverend, asking if I could come back and preach the anniversary program again.

“Can you come back, Doc?” he asked.

“I’d love to,” I said. But I couldn’t let him off that easy. “I want to preach about Steve and Ray getting married.”

He started laughing. I did wind up preaching his anniversary program that year, and I refrained from preaching about Steve and Ray. But I found the transformation amusing, reminding me of the old expression: Success is
the greatest deodorant. When you get successful, all your stench is gone.

The hypocrisy of the black church on this issue is absolutely breathtaking to me. As I said before, anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a typical black church knows how huge a presence gays are, particularly in the music ministry. But I’ve never seen a minister get up in the pulpit and say, “I’m not accepting gay tithes. I’m not accepting the offering from any gays.” If you really believe it’s sinful, go back through your church records, and for the church members you know are gay, refund all the money they’ve contributed to the church over the years. If you really think it’s a sin, shut down the choir, and ban anyone who is gay from participating.

Clearly, that’s never going to happen. So what these ministers are saying is that they will accommodate gays as long as it’s in their best interest to accept them.
Let’s just not talk about it. Don’t ask, don’t tell. I’ll continue to take your tithes and offerings, let you run my choir, but I don’t think you have the right to be you. And I won’t marry you. I won’t acknowledge who you are. I won’t even allow you to be married outside the church—and I will denounce those who decide that they will allow it.

But just keep those tithes coming.

To me, that’s the height of hypocrisy.

The history of black thought on homosexuality roughly follows the same evolutionary arc in this country as that of the mainstream community, and as a group, blacks are among the most religious in the United States. So you take this passionate
religious conviction and combine it with the black church’s long-standing opposition to homosexuality, and you will get a community still grappling with gay rights—and in many cases, standing staunchly opposed to it.

I often hear African-Americans expressing contempt at the fact that gays have begun to co-opt the language and methods of the civil rights movement. As the argument goes, the fight for equal rights for gays can never be compared to the fight for equal rights for African-Americans, because gays can conceal their sexual identity and assimilate anytime they want, while blacks never have that option. But the issue is rights, not levels or degrees of discrimination or victimization. Because the victimization of African-Americans was harsher or more widespread or more easily enforced, gays are therefore not entitled to the same rights as African-Americans? Is that what we’re saying here? Why are we setting a minimum standard for discrimination that another group has to reach before we can accede that they shouldn’t be discriminated against? Shouldn’t the goal be for all of us to be free? If we have 90 percent experiencing discrimination, and they only have 10 percent, then they aren’t entitled to equal protection? (And last time I checked, black people are allowed to get married.)

Along with the criticism I have heard on same-sex marriage is the idea that someone like me isn’t supposed to speak out on behalf of gays. I’m supposed to stay in my lane, fight injustices against black folks, and not get distracted by the battles of nonblacks. But anyone who tries to put me in that box doesn’t understand who I am. You can’t try to limit
a freedom fighter from standing for people’s freedoms. This is an attack that we’ve heard leveled against black leaders for years—from Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to Dr. King and Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Why are you worrying yourself about the Vietnam War, or poor white people, or undocumented immigrants? That’s somebody else’s struggle.
But you can’t take care of black folks in isolation. We are a global community, connected to the larger world. And you can’t help your own community without making alliances with like-minded people in other communities. That was my thinking when I decided to take a public stand with Puerto Ricans against the U.S. Navy in Vieques. Black people can’t just go off to a corner somewhere and fight for our space in a vacuum. It doesn’t make practical sense. And if you’re committed to what’s good and right, you’re committed to it across the board. You don’t segregate your passion for liberation and freedom based on the melanin count of the victims. That’s totally antithetical to the whole idea of being a freedom fighter.

When it comes to the nation’s struggles with gay marriage, let us take a step back and consider how this looks to outsiders, perhaps someone from one of those Muslim countries that Americans are constantly condemning because of their willingness to rule the land by the laws of their religion. We are quick to berate countries in the Middle East and Africa that are intent on imposing Sharia law, lecturing them about how undemocratic they are, about how they should consider separating church and state the way we do. We even invaded Iraq and used the spread of democracy as one of
our justifications—this after the “weapons of mass destruction” argument failed to stand up to the facts. We Americans are so infatuated with our democracy that we believe we can sprinkle it across the globe like topsoil and just watch it grow, naively believing it’ll take root in countries that have been invested in other governing systems for centuries. But as we scold Pakistan and Syria for their religious fundamentalism and preach to them about the healing powers of democracy, if we turned our gaze back on ourselves, we would quickly see how hypocritical we must look to the outside world.

When we try to deny rights to same-sex couples based on our religious principles, how are we not acting out our own form of religious fundamentalism? We look down upon these other countries for requiring women to wear veils, but I can remember when I was growing up in the Church of God in Christ, it was considered a sin for women to wear pants and lipstick. When we went to a gospel competition and I saw a first lady of one of the big churches wearing pants, I scurried over to my mother and said, “Ma, look, she’s going to hell because she has on pants!”

But the church changed, evolved, and was overtaken by a measure of modernity. We need to keep this in mind when we get so set in our positions, so rigidly opposed to change. I’m as firmly ensconced in the principles of the black church as anyone; I started preaching when I was just four years old! If I can evolve in my own thinking on gay marriage, I am convinced that we can all do it. In fact, we must, for the sake of our children and our grandchildren. The last thing we want is for
future generations to look back on our politics and shake their heads at the rampant bigotry that masqueraded as conventional wisdom—much the same way that we shake our heads now at the segregationists who ruled the South fifty years ago. What was once unthinkable is now commonplace.

I want to know that when a child in 2063 looks back to study American society at the turn of the last century and she comes across the name Al Sharpton, she will see that I stood proudly for justice and equality—for every member of our society.

W
ith the publication in 1965 of the U.S. Labor Department report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan shaped an entire generation of analysis about the plight of African-Americans. An assistant secretary of labor at the time, Moynihan, who would soon become a U.S. senator from New York, wrote a persuasive treatise that not only deeply influenced President Lyndon Johnson in his crafting of the War on Poverty but also established the direction and tenor of the national conversation about the black community for years to come.

Moynihan’s conclusion, largely derived from statistics, was presented right at the top of his report: “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental
source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”

This was the overarching thesis of his report, which presented graphs, charts, and pages of powerful testimony to prove its insight. But right from the start, I think Moynihan got it all wrong, and much of the debate about black pathology over the past nearly fifty years has suffered as a result.

By using the white family and white society as his point of comparison, Moynihan essentially missed the fundamental truth of black American life: Black success has always derived from community, not from family.

In Moynihan’s paper and in much of the societal discussion since then, there has been a hazy nostalgia for a return to solid nuclear families, to strong patriarchal units, to
Leave It to Beaver
family unity and family values.
If we could only get back to that time, black pathology will disappear
, the thinking goes.

Well, my response to all of this nostalgia is, back to when?

I’ve never known a time when we didn’t have serious issues in the black family. As Moynihan pointed out correctly, much of it emanated from our history, a history during which it was against the law for blacks even to have a family. My great-grandfather, as the
New York Daily News
discovered in 2007, was the property of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s family in Edgefield County, South Carolina. That’s just two generations ago, not centuries, not some distant figures in a history textbook. It was against the law for my great-grandfather to name his children after himself and to marry his wife legally.

So when was this period of thriving black families?

It certainly wasn’t during slavery, when the idea of the black family by law couldn’t even exist.

Was it during Reconstruction, when the first generation could marry legally? I don’t think so.

It certainly wasn’t in the early or middle twentieth century. I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, and I grew up in a Brooklyn community surrounded by kids who came from single-parent families.

My point here is that I believe we are romanticizing something that was never there. African-Americans haven’t degenerated from some golden period of black family unity—because we never had a golden period of black families.

But my further and more important point is this: While we have always had family breakdowns and single-parent family structures, we have always had strong family values. And those values were derived from the black community that surrounded us, not from the existence of a mother and a father in the household at the same time.

My mother, Ada Sharpton, raised me on strong family values with no father in the home; most of my friends in Brooklyn had strong family values and came out of so-called broken homes. I think what Moynihan and a generation of scholars and pundits missed is that we may have come out of broken homes, but we didn’t have broken families. We didn’t have fathers, we didn’t have any means of an adequate existence, we didn’t have any kind of comfort level, but we had standards.

My mother raised me so that I was expected to be something, expected to take the strands of opportunity that were presented to me over time and stitch them together into a successful life. So even though my home was broken, I was never broken. I was challenged to live up to my mother’s expectations. I say often in speeches that I never knew I was underprivileged until I attended Brooklyn College, because I was never raised to focus on what I wasn’t, what I didn’t have. I thought I could be great. I thought I could be a minister. I thought I could achieve. I thought I was as good as any of my classmates, because my mother, my pastor, my teachers, the circle that compensated for me coming from a broken home, taught me about great possibilities.

All of that is what has been lost in this generation. We have been sunk by low expectations. We have come to define ourselves, and let others define us, by what we don’t have.

When I was growing up, we were intent on challenging the barriers we confronted, not submitting to them. And let me say this again: It had nothing to do with our family structure, whether we had a father in the house, not even with the amount of money our mothers brought home. We would never let somebody get away with telling us we weren’t going to make it because we were fatherless. That would have been like spitting in our eyes.

My mother went from owning a new Cadillac every year and living in a private home to becoming a domestic worker after my father left. She would walk to the subway every morning at five or five thirty to go down to Greenwich Village
to scrub floors for people, trying to take care of my sister and me and supplement the meager welfare check she would get. Sometimes I would make that walk with her to the subway to make sure she didn’t get her pocketbook snatched, and she would talk to me, feeding words into my head that had powerful messages behind them. “You’re gonna be somebody,” she would tell me. That’s family values. This was a woman whose life crumbled, who decided to live for her children and never give up, committing herself to them and their well-being. That’s more family values than some rich woman who has a nanny raise her children. So put me up next to a guy who had a daddy and a mommy and a trust fund to take care of all his needs, and he’s going to teach me about family values? Did his parents teach him more about family values than my single mother on welfare, getting down on her arthritic knees to scrub floors for me? I think not. I know more about family values than he does, any day of the week.

No one has fought harder than I have in my lifetime against inequality and unfairness. But I’ve never taught anyone that the inequality and unfairness they might face is an excuse or a justification not to do everything in their power to overcome. Yet somehow, that’s the message that has seeped through to the generations that came after mine. We allowed a spirit of dysfunction and surrender to supplant our spirit of determination. While women like my mother made sure that my generation was challenged by what we didn’t have, now it seems to define us. Limit us. Break us.