Al Sharpton on 60 years since the civil rights march on Washington

Do have a listen to that episode and also to our sister podcast today. In Focus, they're detailing the latest charges and how they might affect the presidential election of 2024. But beyond the various courtrooms in different states where Trump is being summoned to appear, the world keeps turning, which is why this week we want to bring you a rather special conversation. This month marks the 60th anniversary of a critical moment in the history of the United States. When a quarter of a million people from the civil rights movement marched to the Lincoln Memorial and heard arguably one of the most famous speeches.

I spoke to him about why he still feels the need to march and how far he thinks America has come since that summer of 1963.

I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

Once derided for a style, then deemed outlandish and rabble-rousing. Reverend Sharpton has gone from a preacher in a tracksuit protesting on the streets of New York to a finely tailored political elder who increasingly finds himself at America's top table. He and I talked about that journey, but first, I asked Al Sharpton to take us back to on the 28th of August 1963 and how the March on Washington came about.

One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty, a hundred years early.

Abraham Lincoln, who was president, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Promising the freedom of the slaves if at the end of the civil war, and that they would become free and equal citizens. He said We come a hundred years later to say that you promised Washington, didn't promise us anything, so we didn't go to the Washington Monument, you promised, Mr. Lincoln.

That's why they came to Lincoln Memorial, with that great statue of Lincoln sitting in a chair and addressed the unfulfilled promises of America. That was made by Abe Lincoln by the people that fought and died in the civil war to save the union. And still was not equal in the United States. And that's why we're going back this year to the same place.

He went with our church, showing me the newspapers, and my mother had me sit and watch the TV news. Then it was black and white television. And how they were so excited.

Sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream.

We have more freedom, but we have the same index level of equality, which is why, yes, we've made progress. Yes, we can fly first class to the March this year instead of five-star hotel. But do we get the same job opportunities? do we get on the boards?

Do we get the contracts? We are still not economically equal, and that has just received a tremendous blow, with the Supreme Court killing affirmative action. Because many of our professionals were able to get in institutions they were blocked from, not because of their grades, but because of legacy and other kinds of considerations that give Whites an upper hand.

And what the Conservatives won't deal with is 267 years of chattel slavery, 100 years of segregation. And they say, Okay, now let's start equal.

In my life, my mother and father dropped out of school to go pick cotton because of segregation, which means when I went to school, I was able to go on to college. Because of the civil rights movement. My mother couldn't help me with algebra, she couldn't help me with geometry, she couldn't help me with my homework because she wasn't allowed to learn that. So that we're not starting at an equal place, and I think that that's what Dr.

King was trying to push us to a beloved community where we can correct the wrong, to make equal what was made unequal. This was not a Southern custom that we couldn't go to certain schools or that we couldn't eat in certain, it was the law. Rosa Parks, when she sat in the front of that bus, was arrested. She wasn't sent to a therapist to see if something was wrong with her head.

It was against the law, so by law we were unequal, so the law has to correct what the law did and enforced.

What is the purpose of?

We're down to an average. I was reading this morning of two mass killings a day, a day this year. And we still see voting rights laws being put in various states that erode people's right to vote. So those are the four areas to have a diverse march to say. We must now come forward and deal with the legal challenges today. Why in terms of gun laws, why don't we have a banning of military-style weapons and at least background checks?

Why has the Supreme Court stopped affirmative action? So, in many ways, we're protecting what was achieved in the 60s and challenging what's going on today. By this Congress and this Supreme Court, they just passed in the Supreme Court. Where a lady can say, Well, I don't have to put LGBTQ or same-sex stuff on my business, social media, because I don't believe in it. But what the court said today is that businesses, in some cases, can refuse to serve certain customers. If doing so would force them to say something they don't want to say. Like a business who designs websites. All of this is why we march, because there is a absolute, clear, concrete threat to try and bring us back to pre-1963..

Looking at the film now, it did strike me that, actually, yeah. People at the time were calling you a self-publicist and saying it was about getting on TV all the time and just getting yourself out there. I think even Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King's widow, admonished you for laying it on too thick, rhetorically. I watched the film and thought, Okay, all of that actually had a strategy behind it. There was a calculation in your mind which was in order to get these issues out there. You were going to do what it took to get on TV in front of cameras, and you knew that actually talking the way you did the look. All of it was part of getting attention to the issues you were raising. That's how it looks to me now, but you tell me if I'm.

King Avalanche Jesse Jackson, who was one of my mentors, who was a little younger than King, and I was 13 years younger than Jesse. They all came out of the South so you could send out a press release in Atlanta, but Jesse was from Greenville. Call a meeting and local press, everybody becomes an issue. I'm in New York, where you've got Broadway, Madison Square Garden, the Statue of Liberty, Empire, State building, a city that never slept. So you had to do things to get attention on issues. When the issues weren't there, it was no one was paying attention.

So, yes, we had to march in neighborhoods that didn't allow us. People that watched this film that you referred to never understood that there were certain neighborhoods in New York City. I'm not talking about Alabama, that if a Black went, they'd be killed, and it was not talked about. When people in the 80s came to me and said, This young man got killed on Howard Beach because he was Black. And they said they didn't allow the n-word in the neighborhood. How do we get this out there?

I said, Well, the only way we're going to do it is we all need to go and march out there. And we went and people came by the hundreds calling us n-word, get out the neighborhood. And I becoming one that came out of studying the King Movement. Because, like I said, I grew up in the church, my mother brought me into the preachers that were involved. When I was 12 years old, I became the youth director in New York when I was 13..

I just transferred that drama to New York and I knew the drama would get the attention.

That's how we dressed, we wore track suits. So just like they were rebelling against the more suited down actors and musicians, I was rebelling against the suited down preachers. If you look at Spike Lee, Spike Lee didn't dress and behave like Sidney Poitier. That was the generation ahead of us.

So you have to put my age in context. Once we started, and they started mocking me being in a track suit and he doesn't dress like Dr. King. There's people around me says, Oh, this is bad. I said, No, this is good. Let their mockery bring more attention to the issue. Because if we can survive long enough, people will say, But why is he marching?

Forget about the track suit. The other thing was very practical. John. Many of our marches ended up with us sitting in somewhere and going to jail. I wasn't going to wear my good suits to jail. You can sleep in a track suit in a cell and just wash it out in the morning.

I never thought of that, that's good.

So I'm looking, listening to her, and she didn't criticize, she advised. She said. Al, let me ask you something you do understand that words have power and that you are trying to get a message out there.

You have a name now. The question is, do you want your message to get in the way of what you're trying to do to? Where you, being a certain character, got your attention? But once you got the attention, are you going to use it for what you're marching for, or does it just replay? The attention? Which made me begin to analyze, is your ego bigger than the agenda?

And that's what made me start being more cautious of what we do. Because now we're expanding and you've got people from other communities joining us. And you can't use the street talk and just play into the crowd. The other person that influenced me was James Brown.

James Brown was like a father to me, His son had joined my youth group, and both of us were 18 years old. Son got killed in a car accident. So James Brown kind of helped my youth group and became the father figure. Because my father left when I was 10. And I never forget we went to Las Vegas first time I ever gone to Las Vegas.

I might have been 19 years old. And when we were going in through the lobby of Caesars Palace, James Brown said to me, Brevin, you see that? I said, Yeah, he said. What's that? I said. It looks like a lounge, a bar lounge.

He said, That's right, he says. And you see that lady up on the little portable stage. I said, Yeah, he said. Do you hear her? I said, No.

He said. She's singing and she's dressed in a real risque way because she has to try to get those in the lounge to pay attention. He said. Tomorrow night I play in the big Showroom and we are going to be more refined. Rehearsed, the band's got to do sound check and rehearse, he said. Son, when you get to the big stage, don't do a lounge act because you go through the lounge to get to the big stage. That's what Coretta Scott King.

We're not talking about.

I would soak in all that he would say when he wasn't performing, which was rare. He was home, riding around in the backwoods of South Carolina, one of his 30 cars, and we would ride. I said, Well, tell me about this, Mr. Brown, and tell me about that. So in many ways, I became a son figure and he helped my group.

1980 When I started getting well-known nationally, he took me on Tom Snyder's show with Muhammad Ali. when I was 19, he took me on Soul Train. You don't do this for somebody that you don't have some affection for.

He said to me, We're in Florida, he said. You want to spend the weekend in Florida? I'm doing a show at Newport Beach Hotel. I remember I did a show.

We're back at the hotel like midnight. I go to the room he had for me, he calls me and he tells me, Come back to the suite. I went back to the suite. I didn't know what was wrong.

He said, What's your name? I said, What's my name? I'm like, What's wrong with it? He said. What's your name? I said. Alfred Sharpton.

He says, Too long. From now on, your name is Al Sharpton. you don't need four syllables, just three of new. That's how I became Al Sharpton. If you meet people in school, they call me Alfred.

People always say to me, When did you become AL? If James Brown tells you to change your name and you're 19 20 years old, you change your name. Despite taking the advice of his mentors.

A young white guy ran out. The crowd, stuck a knife in my chest and rushed me to the hospital as I laid there on that. Gurney didn't know whether the wound was serious or not. I came to terms with it. If I didn't make it, or if I was going to be permanently damaged, I was not going to regret it. You never know how sincere you are until you face the end, or what you think could be the end and know how you feel.

I was determined if I live, I'm going to keep marching and keep doing what I do. I've not stopped one day since then. Somebody told me, once it's easy to, under other circumstances, die for a cause, it's harder to live for one. I've been blessed for 30-some years to be able to live beyond what could have been.

If it had been an inch over, he might have killed me.

If you can't walk down the street without being afraid of the cops and the robbers, there's something wrong about it. I did it because I believed it, I did it because I lived it and saw it become what later became very popular. I remained in the front lines of No Justice, No Peace Movement and then Black Lives Matter that became the clarion call in the 21st century.

We were doing it since the 80s, when everybody else was saying, let Sharpton do that, that's ghetto stuff. It was real core civil rights. If you could not keep law enforcement to obey the law, then what else was all that we?

That moment in 2020, in fact, that's in some ways the question, was it a moment? or was it the beginning of a movement? I think it was a moment.

We came that close, we couldn't, we passed through the House of Representatives, couldn't get it through the upper chamber of the.

The movement has to continue, like any movement. You're going to some activists fall off, they're going to scandalize others. But we keep in focus and I believe that we will have federal legislation around policing.

It was to, in many ways, reform the policing we had fought for years to get Blacks and Latinos in the police department. And the question becomes, if you take all police out, then who protects us? In neighborhoods where you have all of these gun trafficking and all of these crimes? Because you haven't changed the economy, you must also remember this. Jonathan. Every issue I fought, including George Floyd, I was called in by the victims, the family.

People in the Y shop. Because the family asked me to come in and preach the funeral, and the family asked me to lead the demonstrations that they marched with me. Whether it was George Floyd, all the way back to the Haven. So the real question is, if the families are saying this is the aim and the lawyers for the family are saying it. Then how does somebody else come in and say no, no, no, this is what we want to do. You're not the victims here. How do you speak for people that you didn't even speak to?

Is your view that, look, it's not as crude, it's not as overt, but the racism is just as bad? Or is your view that it's not as crude? It's not as overt? And it is not as bad? In 2023 as it was when you were fighting those street.

There are some people who say it's actually better than Obama's record. Where do you stand on that? I've got to know Obama. He did not.

And I became a figure during his eight years that he would often have come to the White House, and he had a good relationship in those meetings. The tabloids say. I went to the White House a hundred times, I don't know how many, but it was numerous times in those meetings. Because Trayvon Martin happened under Obama, Eric Garner Chokwoke, on and on and on, and we would get some legislation through.

In those meetings, Joe Biden was there, and I used to fight with Biden in the 90s. Around the Omnibus Crime Bill, the country divided over a controversial, far-fetching anti-crime bill brought to Congress by former President Bill Clinton. Critics blame the law for record-breaking incarceration rates and with further devastating poor communities. The crime bill, which said there was mandatory time for people with crack cocaine sales, as opposed to loose cocaine. That disproportionately put Blacks in jail, even though he was against crack.

Joe Biden was the head of the Senate Judiciary committee that worked with then-President Bill Clinton. To get that through, we marched on it. I first was a little lukewarm about Biden in those meetings that we were asking for. In stand-your-ground laws around the Trayvon Martin case and other cases around voting, Joe Biden was absolutely passionate that we were right, even with Obama. So, by the time his vice presidency ended, he had spoken at my National Action Network Conference twice, we kept in touch.

When he decided to run, I said, This is a fair man. I've seen him in the back rooms when there's no cameras and he would stand up for us. I think he has been able to get some things done that we didn't get under Obama because he's had more to work with. And I think the climate has changed.

And I think the contrast. There's a big difference in running against a John McCain who was a statesman. Or even someone that is knowledgeable and civil like Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. All you have to do is be decent, and you are more of.

Now I want to hear what that's about, where that came from. But also, you know, you now have a seat at the table. You're on MSNBC with your own show, your regular Around the Morning Joe show, which is extremely popular on that cable network. You're no longer having to just, you know, grab 30 second soundbites on the local news in New York.

How much does the A.L. Sharpton of 2023 have in common with the A.L. Sharpton, who was there in the 80s? And even the A.L. Sharpton? Age seven, eight years old? Who was aware of that march on Washington in August 1963?

I was sentenced to 90 days in jail for leading a protest against Navy bombings in Puerto Rico. So I went on a fast and lost weight and I became more health conscious, so that's why I lost the weight. No surgery, nothing, I literally lost weight.

I'm a vegetarian now, I work out every morning, seven days a week, for 35 minutes, very health conscious. But the difference is, yes, I'm thinner. Yes, I have a TV show.

Yes, I do a syndicated radio show. Yes, I can meet with the president and the governor of any state, but it's the same message and it's the same commitment. And I think the difference is style and packaging, but not the content. Because what am I on Morning Joe, or on my show talking about the same issues that you and I discussed?

What am I in the White House talking about? The same thing I talked about at George Floyd's funeral. So it's like, I told you I was influenced by the Godfather. So James Brown, I may be in the big showroom, but I'm singing the same song.

I'm Jonathan Friedland, thanks as always for listening.

This is The Guardian.

AI.