The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership by Al Sharpton
Authors: Al Sharpton
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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 forfuture 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.
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VALUE FAMILY, VALUE COMMUNITY, AND, MOST IMPORTANT, VALUE YOURSELF
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 fundamentalsource 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
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 forfuture 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.
9
----
VALUE FAMILY, VALUE COMMUNITY, AND, MOST IMPORTANT, VALUE YOURSELF
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 fundamentalsource 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
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