The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership by Al Sharpton Page A
Authors: Al Sharpton
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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 Villageto 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
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 Villageto 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
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