Rev. Al Sharpton on 'Righteous Troublemakers'

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Biden: Just a few days ago we talked about up in the Congress and in the White House, the event coming up shortly to celebrate Dr. King's birthday and Americans of all stripes will praise him for the content of his character. As Dr. King's family said before, it's not enough to praise their father. They even said on this holiday don't celebrate his birthday unless you're willing to support what he lived for and what he died for.

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Brian: President Biden from his speech yesterday, as he and almost all of his fellow Democrats, almost all are trying to get voting rights legislation passed by Martin Luther King Day next Monday. One big irony, Senator Joe Manchin is behind one of the main bills in play, but is supporting the filibuster of his own bill by not supporting suspension of the filibuster for voting rights legislation. We'll talk to civil rights leader and MSNBC host Reverend Al Sharpton in just a minute after one more clip from the president's Atlanta speech. It's 250 years of history in about 30 seconds.

Biden: Black Americans were denied full citizenship and voting rights until 1965. Women were denied the right to vote just 100 years ago. The United States Supreme court in recent years is weakened the Voting Rights Act and now the defeated former president and his supporters use the big lie about the 2020 election to fuel torrent and torment anti-voting laws. New laws designed to suppress your vote to subvert our elections.

Brian: With that, we welcome Reverend Al Sharpton, civil rights leader, founder of the National Action Network, host of PoliticsNation Saturday and Sunday afternoons on MSNBC. He has a new book called Righteous Troublemakers: Untold Stories of the Social Justice Movement in America. In addition to the book and the condition of the nation will also get some thoughts from Reverend Sharpton on Eric Adam start as mayor and Alvin Bragg start as Manhattan, DA both of which he's also been talking about. Reverend Sharpton, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Rev Al Sharpton: Thank you for having me.

Brian: I think I heard that you spoke to president Biden after the speech yesterday. Did I hear that right?

Sharpton: Yes, you did. I was there in Atlanta and I spent a few minutes after the speech talking to him and Vice President Harris. I had been for several months saying the president needs to speak out and he had met with the leaders of eight national civil rights group which included me as head of National Action Network and early in the summer.

We challenged him to speak out and he scheduled, we met with him on a Thursday scheduled that following Monday or Tuesday and made a speech in Philadelphia. I went and it was a good speech on voting rights and I sat with his sister. He came over after the speech and he said what do you think Reverend?

I said it was a great speech, only one word you didn't address. He said, "What?" I said, filibuster. He says, "How are you going to stay on me on that?" I said you got to do your job, I have to do mine. He answered it yesterday, I would've loved to have seen him do it early summer, but he did a very good speech yesterday around dealing with not letting the filibuster stop this one or of these two voting rights bills. I told him yesterday that you did what I've asked you to do but many activists are asking you to do some wouldn't come because it hadn't been done. The question now is whether him leaning in will move the two senators that seem to be not there yet.

Brian: Some Georgia voting rights activist, as you just said, boycotted this speech yesterday. I think because they didn't care what he said in that speech yesterday, whether he used the F word, filibuster or not because they say he doesn't have a clear plan, he just has words. Does he have a clear plan?

Sharpton: I think if the plan is that they're going to try and work out the carve-out and that is what he in inferred yesterday in his speech that they can do a carve-out or go around it as he cited. They did it for judicial nomination and they've done it around budget concerns. Then that's a plan and I think that anything other than how you either reform the filibuster or how you deal with a carve-out or way around it, I think would not be a successful plan either way. You must either deal with a carve-out or some way you go around the filibuster or outright filibuster reform.

Brian: Where do you see this headed because he and Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader, as you know want to vote on one or more of the voting rights bills by King day on Monday, but they don't have the votes. They don't have Joe Manchin on their team yet to suspend that portion of the filibuster, even for his own bill. Is this--

Sharpton: What I'm told is that Senator Manchin and Sinema are still talking and that they may be able to have something designed that would not change the filibuster as is, but that would still be a way to work around it. I guess where we are is to see if they're successful in that. Some of us including me have some scheduled conversations that I'm not going to say women and who-- I think that the fact that both Manchin and Sinema is talking means that the door is not closed.

Brian: We heard the same thing about Manchin and the Build Back Better bill for many Democrats for months and months and we see where that is. Do you have reason to believe this will turn out differently?

Sharpton: I have no reason to believe that it will and I have no reason to believe that it won't. I think that it puts us in a position that if Manchin and Sinema say we're willing to keep talking for us to say, we are not willing to talk, I think would be our shooting down and giving them an excuse saying we were willing to talk and they would not continue engaging in conversation.

Brian: My guess is Reverend Al Sharpton, your book Righteous Troublemakers is about some of the untold stories and lesser sung heroes of the civil rights movement and will get to some. Let me ask you about the most sung one first, Dr. King, am I right that you wear a Martin Luther King medallion around your neck?

Sharpton: Not anymore, I used to, yes. When I was very young, now I was in my 30s, Jose Williams, who was Dr. King's field director gave me that as an award. A lot of the New York tabloids tried to act like it was some hip-hop medallion or something. It was an actual award Jose Williams would give certain people that he felt they'd done things that made their movement proud. I wore that for many years that's in the days I used to wear track suit. Ironically when I had to go to jail for leading a day of outrage demonstration, you have to give all of your money, your wallet, your jewelry to the corrections officers.

When they gave me mine back, I didn't have the medallion. Jose's family gave me a duplicate of the medallion and I keep it at home. I don't ever lose it again.

Brian: Did you meet Dr. King when he was alive and you were young? Since we're at the holiday, people would love to hear any story along those lines, if there is one?

Sharpton: He came to my church that I was a boy preacher when I was very young and I saw him twice. Bishop Washington, my pastor said, this is the boy preacher because I had actually preached on some concert dates that Mahalia Jackson the great gospel singer who Dr. King was very close with was at and he said, "Oh, yes the boy preacher," and patted me on the shoulder. It's the only time that I met him, I did end up working very closely with the widow. Mrs. Coretta Scott King, she and all the way to her death. She would come to National Action Network, she would give me a lot of advice, she'd talk to me a lot about Dr. King.

As everyone knows, I worked very closely with his son Martin III. I feel I know a lot about Dr. King because of my relationship with his widow and his son, but I only saw him physically twice. I was 13 when he was assassinated and I was already the youth director of his chapter in New York.

Brian: Reverend AI Sharpton with us, his new book is called Righteous Troublemakers: Untold Stories of the Social Justice Movement in America. We're going to get to some of his takes on Eric Adams and Alvin Bragg, just a little more than a week into their terms in New York. Of course, Reverend Sharpton, a New Yorker and a long time acquaintance of Eric Adams, who has definitely some things to say about him. Let me give you the opportunity to talk about some of the people you highlight in your book. How about Polly Murray, a name not broadly known like Martin Luther King, but a very important person, right?

Sharpton: Absolutely. Polly Murray was an attorney and she wrote some of the critical legal analysis that even Thurgood Marshall used some of it in the historic 1954 Supreme Court argument around Brown versus the Board of Education that led to the Supreme Court ruling that separate was not equal in terms of education. She was not given the profile and the traction that she deserved because it was in the 50, when women were not getting that and she was LGBTQ.

At that time, even in the Black community homophobia was the norm and I felt that I wanted to write this book to talk about people that I think that had done critical work, but never got any of the limelight and I call it righteous troublemakers, troublemakers because that's what they always call activists when any of us come in, [unintelligible 00:11:12] back in the day, or even now, but righteous because these are people that would go out and do work like Polly Murray. Others that [unintelligible 00:11:22] that led marches and led initiatives and knew they were not going to be in the newspaper the next day, knew their name was not going to be in front.

They were not going to be on the news that night. They did it because they believed in it. I felt since I have somewhat of a public profile that I wanted to give them credit, their stories need to be known because they did contributions that were just as important as those of us that have become more well known.

Brian: Want to take another one? How about Claudette Colvin?

Sharpton: Claudette Colvin was a young woman. A lot of people are surprised when I tell the story. She was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for sitting in the front of the bus during the time of segregation, where Blacks by law had to sit in the back of the bus. She was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in Montgomery, sitting in the front of the bus nine months before Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks was arrested nine months later.

In the same city, Montgomery, Fred Gray who was Rosa Parks attorney who I write about in the book, was also Claudette's attorney, but a lot of the leadership in Montgomery did not want to rally around Claudette and make her a symbol because they said she was dark-skinned and was pregnant and wasn't married and she didn't have the moral character to make her symbol. She took the same stand Rosa Parks did and Rosa Parks was inspired by her and I felt that this puritanical analysis was something that should not rob her from her credit and her place in history.

Brian: Want to do one more because the two who we've talked about so far from were from the civil rights era in the 1950s, you also have some more contemporary people, including Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner. In addition to her loss and being a victim as a result of her loss, why is she an unsung social justice hero?

Sharpton: Down through the years, both before my experiences for the last 40 years and during it, I met a lot of victim families who were victimized by police brutality or racial violence or some injustice. Gwen Carr whose son, Eric Gardner was killed by police chokehold. Now going on eight years ago, was one of the few that literally stayed involved in the movement and has traveled all over the country, helping other families and I don't think people know that, she could have just gone on after the prosecutors would not prosecute policeman.

The city gave a settlement and she could have gone on with her life many others did, and I'm not criticizing them because, Brian unlike me or others, they did not volunteer to become activists. They woke up one morning and some loved one of the theirs was killed and their whole life changed. Then after the period of whether or not they got justice or not, they go back into life they was leading and the jobs they were doing, Gwen didn't, Gwen stayed in the movement. She's at National Action Network rallies. We have every Saturday in Harlem, she travels around the country.

I've never called on her as she wasn't there. She went with me the first trip in the Minneapolis around George Floyd. She has become an activist, she helped to organize what is called mothers of the movement. Other mothers that have gone through what she's gone through and I think that people should know the work she's done.

Brian: I think, Sharpton let me get your take on some of what's happening now in New York, I saw you quoted in Mara Gay's recent, New York Times piece called the rise of Eric Adams and Black New York, title of the piece. It includes the time that you and Adams first met in the 1980s and what you bonded over. Could you tell us some of that story?

Sharpton: Yes. Eric had decided to become a police officer. He used to go to meetings at Reverend Herbert Daughtry's church who headed at that time, the Black United Front, and Reverend Daughtry had challenged some of the young men to go in the police department and change it from the inside. I had started my own national youth movement and then we were fighting against violence and fighting for voter registration and fighting police brutality. Eric and I met because some of the more I would say nationalists circles did not like the fact that I was trying to bring a King-style kind of protest movement to New York, even though I was born and raised here because they were more nationalists.

They were more-- This was more what we would say Malcolm's town than Martin's town and I had a process hairdo because James Brown, who was the famous soul singer was like a father to me. Eric was a cop and we used to tease each other that between his police cap and my hairdo we're outliers even among some of the Black leadership. When I started 30 years ago, 31 years ago now National Action Network and started Saturday rallies in Harlem, Eric would come.

He had started 100 blacks in law enforcement, he was fighting from the inside and when we decided that-- Well, we didn't decide, our attorney, our general council attorney, [unintelligible 00:17:11] said, "We need to incorporate so we can build this organization." Eric was one of the five people that signed for incorporation of National Action Network and so we've been close and have a relationship ever since. We may not agree on it, the way we approach a given issue, but we've always been together.

Brian: Well, how much do you disagree on his approach so far, of course, there's so much push back by some people on him bringing back the plainclothes unit called the anti-crime unit of the NYPD and looking for modifications to the bail reform law and things like that?

Sharpton: I think that I'm concerned, but I'm waiting to see where he says the the boundaries are. We do have a problem in the city of gun violence, and I think that's got to be dealt with. Two weeks after I did the eulogy at George Floyd's funeral, I did the eulogy at a one year old kid who was killed by gunfire between gangs in Brooklyn. This is real to me and National Action Network deals with that, but I'm concerned about street crime unit. He says the boundaries will be there where they will not go back into stopping frisk and other things that violated their rights. I want to see what those boundaries are.

Brian: How about your take on Alvin Bragg, the new Manhattan DA, who is a progressive prosecutor with reforms including things that he won't prosecute or won't seek jail time for, including illegal gun possession if the gun wasn't used in a crime, resisting arrest, if there was no underlying crime and the resistor wasn't violent toward the police officer, you've probably seen the pushback from the new NYPD commissioner, from business community leaders who say he should be recalled, even though there's no recall in New York. What do you think of Alvin Bragg?

Sharpton: I had Alvin Bragg speak Saturday at the Saturday action rally, and he said that much of what they're saying is a distortion and what I thought was critical and not only did he speak at the rally Saturday, I had him on my television show on MSNBC Sunday night. All of what he is advocating, he ran on it's on his website, Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA. If the people of the borough [inaudible 00:19:43] him and he was very public about, he wanted to deal with what he says low level crime should not log up the court calendar where they-- I have all of these things that should in his judgment, be handled administratively and not clog up the court proceedings and certainly not the jails.

If he ran on this, then I don't understand the uproar. Is this some other agenda? I do not understand. Particularly, when I looked and saw this is the platform ran on.

Brian: Last thing. I know you got to go in a minute, one of the quotes of you in Mara Gray's piece was me and Eric used to tease each other. I used to say, you're the guy with the patrolman hat. I'm the guy with the conk hairstyle, like James Brown. We do not care if the bougies don't like us. We used to laugh about that. You were just referring to that in a previous answer. Does his election represent the rise of a different Black New York than the election of Mayor Dinkins?

Sharpton: I think that well, clearly it's 30 years later. It's a different New York, but I think it's also where a lot of our Black voters in New York and around want to see people that can deliver. We have now gone through having a Black president and we are now in the midst of a Black vice president. It's no longer not just to achieve high office, it's what you do with it. Do you have an understanding of the people on the ground? Where we at a certain amount of pride in the '70s and '80s could see Blacks achieve certain levels of office in the city and in the state, and then ultimately in the nation with Barack Obama. Now we want to see that they not only get in office, but that office effectively changes our lives.

What I said in Eric's presence on Christmas day, he came to National Action Network to help us feed the homeless and the seniors that, as one who's marched and been involved nationally, and in this city for decades, we now today, Brian have a Black mayor, a Black woman speaker of the city council, a Black woman police commissioner, a Black district attorney in Manhattan, a Black US attorney in the Southern District, a Black US attorney in the Eastern District.

We've never had this amount of Blacks in political power and [unintelligible 00:22:22] Now we have to prove we can do something with it. Otherwise, those of us that fought for empowerment and fairness are mocked by our own achievement. I want to see what we can do, not the noise, not the [unintelligible 00:22:37] what can we do that effectively changes the lives for the better, not only in Black New Yorkers for everyone else. I think that's the burden that we must put on them. We got you there, but we didn't get you there for your resume.

Brian: Reverend Al Sharpton's new book is called Righteous Troublemakers: Untold stories of the social justice movement in America. Thanks so much for making this one of your stops.

Sharpton: Thank you.

 

 

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