Al Sharpton

SHERYL DAVIS: Reverend Sharpton, I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk to you and to be in your presence and have this conversation. So thank you so much for your time today.

AL SHARPTON: Thank you, Sheryl, and I’m very happy that you’re hosting it, and I look forward

to a very robust and informative

conversation. DAVIS: I have to tell you, recently a dear friend of mine who is assessor-recorder in San Francisco, Joaquín Torres, told me about . . . some of James Cone’s books and I’ve been reading them. I’m going through your book and I’m having flashbacks of, you know, the gospel as Black Power or Black Power as gospel, or the pedagogy. You know, this idea of the press. So I have so many questions.

And at the same time, I recently read some of the the sermons and Strength to Love by Dr. King. And so to know that you are rooted and grounded in that truth is just all throughout this book, I can’t tell you how many times I did have moments of emotion. As we start, I just wanted to ask you [if] the process of writing this was in some way therapeutic or cathartic?

SHARPTON: Yeah, it was cathartic in the sense that I say early in the book that in the middle of the George Floyd movement, I was asked to do the eulogy at his funeral in Minneapolis. When it happened his family and attorney Ben Crump had reached out to me and I had gone into Minneapolis with some of the marches and rallies, and then they asked me would I come back and do the funeral. And in the middle of the

Untold Stories from the Social Justice Movement

eulogy, Sheryl, for whatever reason, it just came out of my mouth, “We need to go to Washington. We need to march. We need to deal with this.” Now you have to remember we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Even at the funeral, people had to be distanced.

And I just announced this march. Martin Luther King III was on the front row. He and I worked together very cooperatively, the National Action Network [NAN] and we worked with his group, the Drum Major Institute. And he looked to me like, “What is he talking about, march to Washington? We have no plans. We have no budget. Does NAN have the ability to do it?”

But we pulled it off inside of 60 days, 200,000 people; [we took their] temperatures as they came around the Lincoln Memorial. And they came to get me out of the tent where we had the families— we had Ahmaud Arbery’s family there, we had George Floyd’s family, we had Eric Garner’s family, about 15 families there in the tent—and they were going to walk with us to the stage where I was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. As I was walking, you see all these hordes of people and there was an old man, look like he’s in his eighties, jumping up and down in the crowd with something in his hand. And for whatever reason, it caught my eye.

I looked at the security guys, I said “Look at that old man, what is he trying to tell us?” I said, “Get that old man.” They brought

AL SHARPTON

MANY ACTIVISTS HAVE

become prominent figures in the historical struggle for equal rights, but not nearly enough of them have gotten this attention. Al Sharpton, civil rights leader, MSNBC host and politician, joined us to tell their stories. From the January 19, 2022 program “Rev. Al Sharpton: Untold Stories of the Social Justice Movement.” AL SHARPTON, Host, MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation”; Baptist Minister; Author, Righteous Troublemakers: Untold Stories of the Social Justice Movement in America In Conversation with SHERYL DAVIS, Executive Director, San Francisco Human Rights Commission

him over to me, and he showed me it was a button. The button said “March on Washington—Freedom.” He said “There’s a button from 1963, I was here in ’63 for the March on Washington, with Dr. King, and I wanted to be here with you today.” And I love the man, and he went back into the crowd—and it haunted me, Sheryl.

I said, “It’s guys like that—I don’t know how they paid to get to Washington, I don’t know where they stayed in a hotel, I don’t know whether they ate—it’s people like that that make movements. And nobody ever talks about them.”

And that’s why I decided that

PHOTO BY MICHAEL FROST.

“IN MANY WAYS, WE’RE TROUBLE BREAKERS—CALLED TROUBLE MAKERS— ON A RIGHTEOUS CALL.”

—AL SHARPTON

I wanted to write about people that I know who did a notable thing, but never got limelight. And that’s why I’m calling them righteous troublemakers. Many of us are troublemakers, but we get media, we get some notoriety. But righteous people are those that go and know no one is going to call their name. They don’t go home to see if they’re on the evening news. They don’t pick up the paper the next day and see if they’re in the San Francisco Chronicle. They’re there for the cause. And I wanted to tell some of their stories.

DAVIS: I was moved by that description. I can see you walking into the crowd as you were describing that in the book—the line where you say “We came to stop trouble,” like that idea of righteous troublemakers. When you are trying to stop it, you’re causing trouble for somebody else is good trouble, as John Lewis would say.

SHARPTON: Right. And see, I think the the old way of naming people troublemakers is like saying your knee on a man’s neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds is not trouble. But if I come to town and say, “Let’s march,” that’s trouble. Or chasing the guy jogging in Brunswick, Georgia and killing him, that’s no trouble. But if we come in for a trial, there’s trouble. So even the idea of what is a troublemaker [is important].

And in many ways, we’re trouble breakers called trouble makers on a righteous call. DAVIS: It’s really a narrative shift of sorts, right? You are changing how we see that, how we do that and how we respect it in so many ways.

In the [book], one of the stories there is about Darnella Frazier [who video recorded the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis]. You unpack it and you just see the humanity of people, but also the vulnerability and how they put themselves out there for the good of the people, and that people are doing that every day and it just has gone unnoticed.

SHARPTON: You look at Darnella Frazier, for example. The young lady who filmed [the attack]—the original video did not come from the police body camera. It came from Darnella Frazier, who was taking her little niece to the store and she saw this police officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. [She] had started filming and started filming it on a cell phone, made others stop and start filming it. She just innately felt this is wrong. What is going on here? She didn’t study political science somewhere. She wasn’t a member of my group National Action Network or the NAACP. She’s just an ordinary girl that said “Wait a minute. This is wrong. Let me record this.”

I don’t even think she knew what she was going to do with the recording. I remember when we came up to the repast after the funeral in Minneapolis and I met Darnella and her mother. They had to move out of their house and to a motel because they were under threat. Can you imagine? This young lady filmed a policeman who ended up convicted of murder, and they threaten her like she did something wrong? I wanted to tell her story, because it showed a real courage that this young lady had. And she stood up. I don’t believe there would have been a George Floyd case conviction if it wasn’t for Darnella Frazier.

DAVIS: You talk a little bit about the changing of the tides, and I do want to say this part here [that] really struck me, when you say, “God lifted up these sacrificial lambs so we could do His bidding in their names and in their honor,” just how heavy that weight is and how these people stepped into that and to do that. You talk about there have been people that did the videos and filming before without necessarily the same support that Darnella ended up with.

SHARPTON: Exactly right. For example, when attorney [Ben] Crump and Philonise Floyd—who was one of George’s brothers— called me right after it happened, they asked me would I go to Minneapolis and try to help organize, because they didn’t want to see the rioting. And it was only a day or so after George had been killed.

Immediately, I thought of Eric Garner’s mother; because Eric Garner, who was choked by New York City policemen and killed, they never indicted those guys. They never got to court. And there was a film, there was a video, 12 times with Eric Garner saying, “I can’t breathe” and a policeman kept him in that chokehold. And I’ve thought about Eric’s murder, and I said, “Man, it’s a pandemic.”

I called Miss Gwen Carr, who’s the mother of Eric Garner, and I said, “Gwen, did you see this video out of Minneapolis?” She said, “I saw it.” I said, “I’m trying to find a way to get there,” because it’s the pandemic; a lot of flights have been canceled. She said. “My bag’s already packed. Let me know.” And I [contacted a] Black billionaire, and I said, “I know you know about what happened in Minneapolis. Would you do me a favor and let me use your private plane?” He said “It’ll be there 10 in the morning and take you where you want to go.” And she and I flew in his plane going to the first rally.

And Tyler Perry gave us a bigger plane to bring the family in from Houston. Because what a lot of people didn’t know

“WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I NEED YOUR ACCEPTANCE? THE QUESTION IS WHETHER I WANT TO BE IN YOUR COMPANY.”

—AL SHARPTON

is that George was the only family member in Minneapolis. All of the brothers and sisters lived in Houston or North Carolina, so we had to bring them in. So we had the logistics of we’re moving in a pandemic, we’re doing all it is as people are all over the world starting to march, and we’re trying to stay focused on taking care of the family.

The one thing people don’t understand is that when a policeman is accused of a crime or violating policy, they have the union to back them up, and the union provides them with resources and lawyers, and they need therapy, whatever they need.

The victims don’t have any of that. So what National Action Network tries to do is be that institution for the victim. Help move them around, help them if they need somebody to give them some advice on how to handle interviews and logistics, many of them have to take off work so we try to give them funds so they can pay their bills. You can’t fight an institution like a police union as an individual, you need another institution to do that. Some people think I just come in and jump on TV and that’s that. We do everything for them that the unions do to the police.

DAVIS: I really appreciated you making this distinction about your own self-worth and this idea that at some point in time, you arrive to a place where other folks think that their validation now makes you feel like you are more important. I love your response to them, like you haven’t decided whether you want to be accepted by them.

I think that that is important in this work, the self-validation and self-worth that you bring to the space. SHARPTON: You’ve got to figure out early in your life what are your values and what’s important to you.

I remember Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. She got up at a rally one night and stunned me. She said that she never will forget Mark Twain said the two most important moments in your life is the moment you were born and the moment you find out why you were born. I told her “I never thought I’d hear you in the middle of a rally in Ferguson [quoting] Mark Twain.”

But it’s an appropriate quote, because people shunned us as activists marching about police brutality, marching about racial violence, marching about affirmative action, marching about LGBTQ rights. Once I ran for president and became host of a TV show and all that, they said, “Well, you know, we can accept certain things” [you marched about]. Well, first of all, I’m still marching. I’m still doing the rallies. I’m still doing the eulogies. I’m not stopping anything I did. And what makes you think I need your acceptance? The question is whether I want to be in your company. I don’t understand how intelligent people could be faced with these kinds of social crises and not be involved and have this elitist attitude like they can judge who is acceptable. Well, keep me on the unacceptable level if that’s the price I have to pay.

DAVIS: You talk about that in the same spirit with Colvin and Parks, right? This idea of who’s acceptable, who we’re able to kind of use to advance the work. And even when you talk about Josiah Williams, this idea of we’re all needed in this work.

SHARPTON: You know, when I wrote about Claudette Colvin, many people—I would venture to say most people—don’t know that there was this young lady in Montgomery, Alabama, that refused to give up her seat in front of the bus nine months before Rosa Parks did in Montgomery. And the Black community leadership—many preachers—did not want to try and make a symbol out of Claudette because she was dark skinned and she was pregnant and wasn’t married.

So in came the class thing, and I don’t think a lot of times, Sheryl, we want to talk about some of the class stuff that we have in our own community. Rosa Parks was inspired by Claudette; did it nine months later; she was light-skinned, married. She was the model.

Fred Gray, who was a lawyer for Rosa Parks, was also the lawyer for Claudette. He was beyond that. And one of the reasons why that story hit home to me: I didn’t come from a family of preachers. Many of the ministers that had been in civil rights are the second, third or fourth generation preachers. My father was not that; and my father left when I was 10, and my mother had to raise me on welfare and food stamps, my sister and I.

So I didn’t have the pedigree and the lineage of a lot of the high profile civil rights leaders had before me. I remember when I was 18, a guy joined my youth group. He got killed. His daddy was a big entertainer. Daddy took me like his son. He was James Brown, the godfather of soul. I remember a lot of the ministers I was around [working on] civil rights looked down on James Brown, he was “Gut Bucket.” And they were this refined thing. But James Brown was who we liked.

So I think that what I wanted to raise there was all of this “You’ve got to qualify to be a victim” and “qualify to be a leader”— James Brown had made an appointment to go to the White House to lobby for Martin Luther King’s birthday to be a holiday—in 1982. And on the plane, James Brown said to me, “Reverend?” I said, “Yes.” He never called everybody by this surname. He never called them by their first name. He was very much into you got be respect. And I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “I want you to do your hair like mine. I want people to see you. You’re like my son, made a connection to me.”

And I did. And I kept my hair like this all my life since then, because this is the

“I’M A BAPTIST MINISTER. BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN I CAN’T WORK WITH PEOPLE THAT ARE MUSLIM OR ATHEIST.”

—AL SHARPTON

first man in my life that validated that I was worth something. He wanted me to be like him, one of the biggest entertainers in the world. He gave me what my father didn’t. . . .

I say all that to say that it was getting beyond this needing for acceptance and validation for others that also inspired me to write this book about Claudette Colvin, who is as important as Rosa Park. Pauli Murray, who was an attorney that wrote some of the most insightful legal stuff that Thurgood Marshall used, and they would not exalt her because she was gay and a woman. I wanted to write a book about them, because I was them, because I didn’t fit the prototype a “civil rights leader” was supposed to fit, you know, come out of the north, out of the hood, you can go to an Ivy League school. That should not qualify you or not qualify to be a freedom fighter. It is whether you are committed, whether you’re disciplined and whether you will fight for people.

I know plenty people that are Ivy League trained, got the right pedigree and the right lineage, and don’t do anything.

DAVIS: [In the book,] you referred to Kimberly Crenshaw and the idea of intersectionality.

One of the things that I really appreciated, especially in this era that we’re in now, is that you call out these pieces of the intersectionality, like you just said, the classism, colorism, the sexism, all of these different things that do exist that almost create the division within the race. That makes it complicated to advance some of the work as well.

SHARPTON: And Sheryl, people play on those divisions to divide us, to politically break us down so they can make us uncomfortable with each other or feeling superior to each other based on these fictitious walls. Then they can, through the gap, do what they have to do.

I’m a Baptist minister. But that doesn’t mean I can’t work with people that are Muslim, or people that are atheist. Because if we believe in the same values and principles, how we get there is our business. How we intersect, as Crenshaw said, that’s the strength we have.

On the right, they are not all monolithic. They don’t have the same faith, the same belief, the same lineage. But whether it is William Buckley or Jerry Falwell, they get together to deal with [things] the same way that they want to block affirmative action or block certain voting rights. And we’ve got to be able to feel the same way.

The only way to deal with it is to put it out front. Expose it so people have to deal with it, rather than the unspoken, “Oh, we don’t want to talk about it.” We need to talk about. So we start these divisions and build a movement that’s going to stop these inequalities and these injustices.

DAVIS: You’ve been doing this work. It is a heavy lift. You talk about the eulogies and the families and the folks that you meet. How do you take care of yourself? How do you practice self-care? SHARPTON: You know, I started several years ago a whole kind of work on me.

I changed my diet. I’m a vegetarian, I work out every day. I lost a lot of weight. And I started meditations in the morning, so I do the Baptist minister’s prayer in the morning, but also meditate because it is a lot on you.

You know, at first you’re running from here to there, and then you are kind of not thinking about it. But then all of a sudden it all comes down.

In the last year, I’ve done the eulogy for George Floyd, I did the eulogies for several other cases, about 12 people killed by police—including just out West, with this young lady from Chile, 14-year-old that was shot with the police bullet ricocheting, going through the door of a dressing room.

And so many times you look at these bodies, I don’t care who you are, it’s going to bring you down. That’s why I go back to: If I’m not going to do it, who’s going to do it? Who had the resources and who can put a limelight on this to expose it?

You find yourself trying to talk yourself into it. But if people think that they get tired of seeing me out there, they are not more tired than me saying they killed somebody else. It’s almost like once you get down, you go back into another situation.

I will never forget, Sheryl, we were in the family room at the Minneapolis courthouse, listening to the summation of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the policeman that had his knee on George Floyd’s neck. And someone came into the room and pulled Ben Crump and I aside and said a policewoman just killed a young man named Daunte Wright 10 miles from here.

I mean, we weren’t even out of the trial. You would think, they’re in summation on a trial right there in the county of a policeman, and they would be on extra good behavior; they’d killed this boy at a traffic stop.

We waited for court to be over that day, and went and met with the parents 10 miles ahead and said we would help them. You know, we helped to give the funeral and all of that. I end up doing that eulogy a day after the conviction of Derek Chauvin.

So Derek Chauvin—we didn’t know how the verdict was going to be—found guilty of murder. Everyone’s happy, and we go back to, no joke, tears streaming down our eyes; national and international media. And then I had to get up the next morning and go to Brooklyn Center to preach the funeral of another victim.

And that’s your life, and you only do that if you’re committed. And that’s what people I write about in their book—they were committed, because you can’t stop until you change the system that keeps allowing this to happen without penalty and accountability. DAVIS: The idea of that commitment and

“I THINK IF YOU DECIDE WHAT YOUR LIFE IS, YOUR LIVING WILL COME FROM THAT DECISION.”

—AL SHARPTON

that, when you talk about the spiritual calling, that even of a Ben Crump or of Eric Garner’s mom, there was something in that. I think about your story [about] Mamie Till Mobley, even the stories you talk about Washington Temple or the breadbasket. I’ve said this before; there is something about the foundation of the faith and culture of Black folks that helps to seed some of that strength.

I loved how you talked about [how] you knew you wanted to be a preacher from early on, like that was poured into you. And this idea that you know you weren’t as impressed with Thurgood Marshall as others, that there was something about the spiritual that’s always called you to this work, but also to the space.

SHARPTON: When I was very young, even before my father left, I would always look at those in ministry that were in social activism.

I loved Adam Clayton Powell and I’m like, 19 years old, already preaching in our Church of God in Christ. I wasn’t attracted to the side of preachers that were doing the pastoring of the big churches. I was attracted to the activist side. [When I was] 10, 11 years old, I was reading about Cecil Williams out there in San Francisco. These are the kinds of preachers when I grew up that [I saw and felt] I wanted to be like that. Jesse Jackson ended up a mentor of mine. When I was 12, my mother brought me to him. He was 25, 26 years old, he was twice my age then. So he was like a father figure that later became a big brother for me, because as you grow older, the gap of 13 years is different than father and son.

So I knew what I wanted to be. And I never changed that. I never let nobody talk me out of it. I remember some of the guys that were with me in the ministry would say, “Well, how are you going to make a living out there doing civil rights ministry?”

I said, “I don’t know. But this is what I believe we’re supposed to do.”

Ben Crump is an excellent lawyer. I’m sure Ben never thought he would become the face of the civil rights legal profession and how he was going to make a living.

I think if you decide what your life is, your living will come from that decision. There’s no way anybody could have told me, you know, the right wing can talk about I’m an opportunist and all of that. How is anybody going to tell me that doing what I would do that I would one day host a cable national show or a syndicated radio show? I mean, how could I? There wasn’t even MSNBC in existence when I started. So they will always assign you motives, because it shows you their value. It doesn’t show you ours.

DAVIS: I think reading the book was helpful for me, because you give all these stories of just the pushback that folks receive. And yet it becomes very clear you are not in this for the money, right?

There’s no way that you have gone through the things that you have gone through. The stories are so helpful to give the bigger context of what it is that people are experiencing, and that there is no amount of money that can absolve the things that have happened over time.

SHARPTON: Let’s go back to Ahmed Arbery. When Ahmed was killed and the police came, they said that this was selfdefense. The local prosecutor refused to arrest those three guys. That’s when they came to people like Ben Crump and Ben Crump brought me in and we started raising issues, and local activists in Brunswick were really consistent and persistant to the point where the governor brought in another prosecutor and they got the case.

So we weren’t chasing the ambulance; we were the ambulance. The ambulance came and left the way it was. And that’s what people don’t understand. If we did not come, who was going to stand up for an Arbery or other [victims]?

That is what is really crazy to me. Then when I look around, there was a case in New York in ’89. Yusef Hawkins, a young man killed in a section of Brooklyn, Bensonhurst, where they didn’t want Blacks there. I led marches out there protesting, calling for the killers to be arrested. One Saturday, a man ran out of the crowd, stuck a knife on my chest, a few inches from my heart. How much are you going to pay me to get stabbed and almost killed? My daughter four or five years old.

I once spent three months in jail for leading a protest in Puerto Rico, around Navy exercises. How much you going to pay somebody to lose their freedom for three months?

So the absurdity of your attack is not to vindicate me; it’s to show people made sacrifices, even though . . . they know they’re going to get attacked. And I know that the Fox Newses of the world are going to call me names. You do it because you have to do it, because that’s who you are.