Read The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership for Free Online Page A

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.

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DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHANGE AND EVOLVE
    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—isthat 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