For years, gay rights organizations and major civil rights organizations viewed each other warily. African-American leaders often saw the gay rights groups as insensitive to racial concerns, and some resented the movement's use of civil rights language to make the case for same-sex marriage. Advocates for gay rights, in turn, sometimes blamed socially conservative African-Americans for their defeat in crucial electoral battles.
But since the relationship reached something of a crisis with the passage of Proposition 8, California's ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, in 2008, leaders in both movements have made an effort to bring their groups closer together.
Now, conversations among leaders in the gay, black and Latino communities have borne significant fruit: On May 19, the board of the N.A.A.C.P. voted to endorse same-sex marriage.
And then, last Tuesday, representatives of several national gay rights organizations gathered at New York City's Stonewall Inn, often described as the birthplace of their movement, to announce that they would march to protest the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk practice, under which the police each year have been stopping hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, most of them black or Latino, in an effort to prevent crime.
Some of the gay rights leaders specifically cited support from the N.A.A.C.P. for same-sex marriage as a reason they decided to oppose the stop-and-frisk policy.
"We need to find ways to strengthen our alliances and really strengthen our commitment to one another," said Jeffrey Campagna, a national gay rights organizer who is coordinating the involvement of gay rights groups in the march on June 17 against the stop-and-frisk practice.
Julian Bond, a former chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. and a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said he saw the association's support for same-sex marriage as a way to acknowledge the contributions of gay rights advocates - most had not come out publicly at the time - in the civil rights movement.
"I knew these people, whom I just assumed to be gay, and I knew what they were doing on my behalf - and I hoped on their behalf, too," he said. "I was grateful for it, and when the chance came, I wanted to pay them back."
The same-sex-marriage and stop-and-frisk issues are only the most visible signs of closer collaboration.
Around the country, gay rights groups have joined minority advocacy organizations in political battles on behalf of voting rights and affirmative action. And in California, Oregon and Colorado, gay rights organizations have formed partnerships with immigrant rights groups to fight aggressive immigration laws.
And even before the national board of the N.A.A.C.P. voted to support same-sex marriage, that organization and other civil rights groups got involved in marriage battles on the state level. In North Carolina, the N.A.A.C.P. paid for radio and print advertisements, direct mail and "robocalls" urging black voters to oppose an amendment banning same-sex marriage; the amendment passed in May. In Maryland, where the State Legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriage in February, the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network and Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights were prominent supporters.
"You must be for the civil rights of everyone, or you're not for the civil rights of anyone," Mr. Sharpton said last week.
One indication of the new rapport: Chad Griffin, who is taking over on Monday as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's leading gay rights group, plans to have lunch on one of his first days in Washington with the president of the N.A.A.C.P., Benjamin Todd Jealous.
Mr. Jealous explained the newfound collaboration with a reference to Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and civil rights advocate who was black and gay.
"In the last four years, with the increase in hate crimes across the country, with states attempting to encode discrimination into their state laws and constitutions," Mr. Jealous said, "it's become clear that, just as Bayard Rustin admonished us all, that we would either stand together or die apart."
The distance that has long existed between the gay rights and civil rights movements has complex roots. In addition to the strain of social conservatism that pervades many black Protestant churches, gay rights advocates' use of the phrase "civil rights" and comparisons of the two movements have sometimes offended African-Americans, according to Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University.
"When gay and lesbian people say, 'Hey, we understand, because we've been oppressed, too' and 'Like black people, we...,' that's a nonstarter for many black people," he said.
Keith Boykin, an author who has written about homosexuality in the black community, said that "when people hear civil rights and gay rights, they think that people are trying to equate the two movements." As a result, he said, "we sometimes get caught up in these hierarchies of oppression."
For its part, the gay rights movement has sometimes struggled to be racially inclusive.
For the leaders of this people cause [them] to err; and [they that are] led of them [are] destroyed. |
Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life: |
I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness: they are all of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah. |
Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe [be] to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? |
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