The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (5 page)

For instance, when I talk about women, I’m honest about the changes I went through after my marriage ended, when I was trying to date a lot of younger women, stumbling through the stereotypical middle-age crisis, trying to prove I was still young and vital. But one day, I woke up and thought,
You can go out with a twenty-year-old girl, but you’re certainly not twenty anymore. You’re not fooling anybody but yourself.
That is an entirely different message from me preaching about it from a
lofty perch, as if I’m up on Mount Sinai. Similarly, I can talk in a personal way about vanity because I went through it myself, when my vanity outran my sanity, that period of wanting to be in the newspaper, rather than being more concerned about what I’m saying and whether I’m using it for good. That’s real. And the more real you are about your own shortcomings, the easier it is for you to help somebody get past his or hers. If you can’t be real about your own shortcomings, then you haven’t gotten over them. I can’t concede and confess openly to foolish pride or worthless vanity or middle-age insecurity if I’m still wracked by them.

In the ministry and in the civil rights movement, I’ve seen many men try to model themselves after a great leader who came before them, only to falter because of their inauthenticity. Rather than find their own voice and style, they mimic great pastors such as Gardner Taylor, C. L. Franklin, or Billy Graham. But as a firm believer in God and the idea that He gives everyone his or her own purpose, I don’t think He gives duplicate callings. I don’t believe He calls Joe and then has Joe 1, Joe 2, and Joe 3. No, that calling was for Joe. You can learn from Joe. But He doesn’t want you to be a duplicate blessing of Joe. You have your own blessing—you just have to clear your head and go find it. Yes, as I grew, I studied many other ministers, closely scrutinizing every minute detail of their style. But when it came time for me to step into the pulpit, I tried to do my own thing, knowing God had something special for Sharpton. Mine was not an overflow of theirs; I had my own flow.

What’s the danger in the duplicate? Well, no matter how talented you are as a mimic, it’s never going to be the real thing. A copy is never as good as the original.

There is also the question of authenticity. People can sense the fakeness. If they’re watching a copy, somewhere in their subconscious, they’re going to wonder, is the copy a true believer, or has he just perfected somebody else’s act? You can’t convince people that they should believe in you and follow you if they don’t think you believe it yourself. They won’t feel totally comfortable with you. They won’t trust you. Eventually, they will turn their backs on you. That’s one of the reasons I make sure I’m always working in the community, meeting with local leaders, speaking at churches across America, so I can stay connected to people. Speaking to the public through a television screen or a radio signal holds no comparison to standing in the pulpit and looking into their faces, seeing the anxiety and the fear and the hope all mixed together in their eyes as they listen to you, hoping that your words will bring them some sort of relief, even if just for the night. No matter what I am doing, I can never give up that authentic connection with people. It is an essential part of who I am.

J
ust like the rest of America, I have seen an enormous transformation over the years in my views on homosexuality and gay rights. I believe passionately in the equal rights of gays, and I have spoken out forcefully on issues such as same-sex marriage for more than a decade. But if I am being honest, I must admit that I didn’t start in a place of enlightenment.

I grew up in the streets of Brooklyn, running around with kids who weren’t exactly progressive on this issue. I remember freely using the word
faggot
to describe a guy who was not aggressive. It was just something that we did, letting that word easily fall from our lips without really thinking about the deeper meaning. We just knew that to be gay was to be soft, and to be soft was the most devastating label that a black boy in the hood could endure. When I look back on those years, my first thought—perhaps
rationalization
is the right word here—is
that we weren’t being homophobic in our use of that word. It was just a word that had entered the young black male lexicon, just like a long list of other profanities that I won’t mention here. We didn’t necessarily connect it to an actual person who was a homosexual.

Or so I used to think.

But as I have reflected more on this question over the years, I have to concede that those early rationalizations weren’t necessarily true. It is a homophobic term, a word directly and unmistakably connected to a general revulsion against the choices and lifestyle of gays. There’s no escaping that. You can’t try to sever a nasty word from its roots and pretend it no longer has any sting because you have declared it so.

After all, I would take great offense if somebody called me
nigger
, even if they professed to be free of any racial prejudice. If the member of the targeted group finds offense in the word, then the word is offensive. You don’t get to use it and also to conclude that no one can take offense because you didn’t mean any offense. Words have history, an etymology that can’t be avoided.

The idea of homosexuality wasn’t an abstraction to me. I wasn’t some naive child who grew up without knowing any gays. No, in fact, they were all around me. Anyone who has ever spent time in a black church knows exactly what I’m talking about. The black church has a long history of employing openly gay men in prominent positions, particularly connected to the choirs and the music. While this might appear to veer into the realm of stereotype, it’s hard to escape this reality if you’ve been in as many black churches as I have.

I also had gays in my family, one cousin in particular who wasn’t about to let me keep the issue at arm’s length. No, from a fairly young age, she would challenge me.

“Why do you get to choose who I love and who loves me?” she asked me one day.

I was a child of the church, so I had my answer ready. “Well, it’s a sin. It’s what we believe in the church.”

But this woman was always persistent. “But as you got older, you decided which things were just church dogma and what was biblical—so now you’re going to decide for me?”

That definitely broadened my perspective, made me start considering the issue from another angle. And with her words driving me, I started to fit the issue into my broader outlook on justice and equality and soon came to realize something important about civil rights activism: It cannot be applied discriminately. If you see yourself as an enemy of injustice, then you must be an enemy of all injustice. You can’t just pick and choose which injustices you’re going to fight. That’s the height of hypocrisy. And it’s also shortsighted—and dangerous.

When I was a teenager, I was appointed youth director of the New York branch of Operation Breadbasket, the group started by SCLC and Dr. Martin Luther King to improve the economic conditions of the black community through the use of boycotts and economic pressure. Not too long after, I decided to start my own organization, which I called the National Youth Movement.

I needed advice to get my group off the ground, so the first person I went to see was Bayard Rustin. Rustin was a
brilliant leader and a gifted organizer who had been a guiding force behind the establishment of the SCLC and an influential adviser to Dr. King, whose leadership skills Rustin recognized early on. Rustin was widely known as the architect behind the pivotal 1963 March on Washington. He was the Socrates of the movement. But from the standpoint of leaders in the civil rights movement, Rustin had one big problem: He was gay. He had even been arrested in 1953 for engaging in a homosexual act, which was against the law in many parts of the country. Because he was viewed by many inside the movement as a pariah, Rustin had to lead from the shadows, allowing other men to be the public face of the movement while he had to be content to stay in the background. A. Philip Randolph got the credit for leading the March on Washington, but Rustin did much of the crucial planning.

Rustin had an office on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, in the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers union. When I walked into his office, I was overwhelmed by all of the African masks, sculptures, and art I saw everywhere. It was like walking from a staid Midtown office into a museum. I had never seen that much African art in one place in my life. Although Rustin was from Pennsylvania, he spoke with a British accent.

“Explain to me your program, young man,” he said. “What are you planning to do?”

I told him I wanted to work on voter registration, even though I was too young to vote. I discussed wanting to fight for community control of education in New York. This was during
the battle in Brooklyn over community control of the schools. Rustin was supporting the teachers over the local community in the fight, so we debated that a bit. I asked him to speak at the opening luncheon my organization was having at the New York Hilton.

“I will speak at your luncheon,” he said. “Who else are you having?”

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who was running for president, was also going to speak, and I told him that I was the youth director of her campaign.

“Well, I’m not supporting Shirley,” he said, “but I’ll come. And I’m going to give you five hundred dollars. Do you have any money you need to start?”

Believe it or not, I hadn’t even thought about money.

“I guess I do need money,” I said.

So he handed me a check for $500 to start my organization, the first contribution I got. He followed through and spoke at the luncheon. We actually stayed in touch through the years until he died in 1987.

I have an enormous problem with the way the black community downplayed the contributions of men like Bayard Rustin to the cause of black liberation because of our homophobia. If we’re really serious about honoring the importance of black history, how are we going to write Rustin out of the history books because of his sexual orientation, pretend that he wasn’t a crucial figure in our fight for freedom in this country because he was attracted to men? This just does not sit well with me. It’s tragically wrong.

Likewise, are we going to pretend that James Baldwin, because he was openly gay, wasn’t one of the giants not only of black literary history but of American literary history? We’re supposed to discount his forceful and courageous voice, his perceptive and scathing critiques of American society, his unique and groundbreaking talent, because his lifestyle didn’t conform to the tastes of the majority? If you’re a black nationalist, firmly committed to the advancement of black people here and around the world, you’re not going to put Baldwin near the top of the list of iconic figures in black history because you don’t like gays?

You can’t write Bayard Rustin out of civil rights history. You can’t write James Baldwin out of literary history. We don’t have a problem honoring black leaders who have been adulterous, who have been involved in financial scandals, who were some of the most narcissistic, unpleasant individuals you could ever come across. You could sleep with half of your congregation and still be a revered pastor—as long as those congregants were women.

I have been fighting since I was fourteen years old to push our society to recognize the value of every human life, struggling to force the state to acknowledge the importance of human dignity, so how can I sit by and think that this treatment of gays is OK?

How can I call myself a civil rights leader if I am blind to this grossly unjust civil right being trampled right in front of my face?

Indeed, as a nation that sees each of its denizens imbued with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
how can we accept the denial of this right to such a significant portion of the American populace?

Is there anything more un-American than that?

I would like for my country to view gay rights as one of the great human rights issues of our time.

My evolution on this issue has also demonstrated to me the importance of staying strong and resolute in your beliefs, even if you’re confronted with denunciation and attack.

I came out in support of gay marriage in 2003, long before President Obama made it a major issue in the black community. This was as I prepared to run for president myself in 2004, and I think it took a lot of people by surprise. Those who knew me and were familiar with my thinking had watched me evolve over the years on the issue. But for others, having a Baptist preacher publicly announce support for gay marriage was certainly unexpected, and it was a big deal.

Although my announcement might have created some buzz in gay circles, it certainly wasn’t of much political benefit to me. I wasn’t running for the gay vote; I had much more to lose in my own base, which was African-Americans, than I had to gain by picking up political support from gays. It was the same calculation for President Obama, which made the accusations kind of ridiculous that he did it for political gain. Even in the civil rights community, I was standing out there nearly alone when I made my announcement. Andrew Young, the iconic civil rights leader, Atlanta mayor, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was one of the few who publicly stood with me on the issue.

After the announcement, I had prominent ministers, men I’ve known for decades, tell me that they wouldn’t let me preach in their churches if I was going to stand up at the pulpit and take that position. A pastor of a prominent church where I went every year to preach the anniversary program called me after my announcement.

“Doc, I don’t think I can have you this year,” he said.

“I understand,” I said.

“Can’t you moderate your views a little bit?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him. I wanted to hear him say it.

“Why don’t you just say you’re with civil unions, not marriage?” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s just not moral,” he answered.