AL SHAR
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 for ward to a ver y robust a nd 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
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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 of f inside of 60 days, 200,000 people; [we took their]
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | April/May 2022
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
