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

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 abrilliant 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