“Loudmouth” is a brand new documentary about the life and career of The Rev. Al Sharpton. The retrospective focuses on the Brooklyn-born Baptist minister's origins and takes a detailed look at Sharpton’s journey from his early days as an activist fighting for justice around the 1986 murder of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach to his role in the George Floyd protests.
Sharpton returned to “You Decide” to discuss the documentary’s approach to chronicling his life and how the movie came to fruition.
Along the way, the conversation moved to Sharpton's thoughts on how racism affected Donald Trump’s Queens upbringing and what he hopes to accomplish in the years ahead.
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NY1’s Errol Louis has been interviewing powerful politicians and cultural icons for years, but it’s when the TV cameras are turned off that things really get interesting. From career highlights, to personal moments, to stories that have never been told, join Errol each week for intimate conversations with the people who are shaping the future of New York and beyond. Listen to "You Decide with Errol Louis" every Wednesday, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Note: Below is a full transcript of the episode. The following is a transcription from a third-party service. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases, it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Errol Louis: Welcome to You Decide. I'm Errol Louis.
“Loudmouth” clip: Those that oppress us have the nerve to try and advise us on how we ought to try to get free from them. We are intelligent enough not to let you tell us what tactics that you are comfortable with. That hold us enslaved. You don't have none of us under control. And you will never have us under control again.
Errol Louis: That was the Reverend Al Sharpton back in the 1980s sounding pretty much the same way he does now. There's a new documentary out that's about Sharpton. It's called "Loudmouth." And it is set up as a retrospective, with today's older and wiser and more sober Al Sharpton looking into the camera and talking about the different political battles he's been in over the years, especially matters of police killings of unarmed African Americans. "Loudmouth" is playing in theaters around the country. As they say, check newspapers for listings. I highly recommend it because it's a really interesting window into the tangled intersection of race and politics and criminal justice in the 1980s. It was really, really raw back then. This city was ready to explode. New York was about to explode. Things were happening in Los Angeles as well. Many cities around the country. The documentary makes clear, though, that the controversies back then set the stage for modern protests about the killing of Trayvon Martin and the killing of Eric Garner and the killing of George Floyd. And in all of these cases and many, many more, many of which never make it into the newspapers, Al Sharpton was front and center. And I have a little bit of history with Al Sharpton that a lot of people don't know about. For about two and a half years, almost three years, I was the morning man at WWRL Radio, the legacy R&B station here in New York City. And I would come in and do news and commentary and take phone calls from people and stuff from 6 to 9 every morning. Great experience. Nearly killed me. It was, you know, in addition to a full time job at the newspaper, it was, I don't know what I was thinking. But one interesting part of it was that Al Sharpton, which a lot of people don't realize, he does three hours of radio to this day. He does three hours of talk radio every weekday on all of these various stations. You can hear him on Sirius XM if you have satellite radio. But the real syndication is he's on all these little stations, these scratchy R&B or hip hop music stations. We'll take a break and there'll be three hours of Al Sharpton. Some of them are talk radio stations. I don't know what goes on in Huntsville, Alabama, at WTUP. He's on in Tallahassee, WTAl. He's on at WVON, which I actually have been to, I broadcast out of that, it’s on the South Side of Chicago in a converted frame house. They've got the big stick right there in the front yard. They broadcast right out of that location, 1690 AM WVON. He's on in New Orleans and in Baltimore and in Detroit and all over the country. Anyway, what would happen is, there were lots of breaks. If you've ever done this kind of talk radio, it's commercial radio. So there's all these commercial breaks. And so he basically was sitting in a studio for about 3 hours, taking calls from all around the country. And in between, he didn't have a whole lot to do. So it was an ideal spot for me to kind of go talk to him, squeeze him for history. He had great stories about being on the road for 10 years as the road manager for James Brown. He had great stories of doing activism as the youth director of Operation Breadbasket, which was the Reverend Jesse Jackson's main organizational institution. He's just, I mean, fascinating stories about the musicians on the road, about the activists in their unguarded moments, about the logic of what he was trying to do with his life, because he's clearly trying to do political work and activism and also media work. I mean, he is an incredibly busy man to this day. He holds a political rally in Harlem every Saturday. The National Action Network is the organization that he started and runs, and they've got a bunch of employees and they've got offices all over the country. So he's running this organization. He's doing this three hours of talk every weekday. He's got another radio show on the weekend that he does. And, you know, and then he's the host of Politics Nation on MSNBC, national cable television show. Anyway, very busy, man. I got a chance to sit down with him a few days before this new movie, "Loudmouth," was set to hit the theaters. Here is our conversation.
Errol Louis: Welcome back to the show and I guess congratulations.
Al Sharpton: Well, thank you. Glad to be with you as always.
Errol Louis: I know a lot of other journalists, documentarians, authors have wanted to tell your story. I haven't seen anything done with quite this amount of detail and footage. How did you meet this person and what made you decide to open up to him?
Al Sharpton: I didn't know him at all. The fact is that Kedar Massenburg, used to be the president of Motown Records, he came to me and said, I have this idea of doing a documentary on your activism, not your life story. I want to show from the ‘80s to now, how what you were saying then, you're saying now. You just got old and dressed different and so forth and on. He said, but three things. I said, what’s that? He said, you would not have any editorial control. You have to trust us. I’ve got John Legend partnering with me, the singer who's got a company. Second, he's a white director. We want to do it from somebody that's not Black looking from the outside. He grew up in the Bay Area and thought y'all were crazy. And three, we're going to call it “Loudmouth.” So I said, I'll sign off on the first two, the “Loudmouth” I had to think about. But when I thought about it, Errol, the civil rights leaders that were a generation or two before me, some of that I grew up on the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend William Jones. They came from the South, and you could have a church rally and pass out fliers in Montgomery, where Dr. King started his boycott or Reverend Jackson grew up. In New York, we’re competing with Broadway lights, Times Square, Radio City, Apollo Theater, for a long time World Trade Center. You had to be loud and have sustained movements to make an issue. You’re a New Yorker. You had killings before we got involved in Howard Beach, but we couldn't sustain the media attention. And you had people from Milton Galamison to Herb Daughtry that laid the way. I wanted to bring drama. I wanted to be loud. And I think that that was what was critical at that point, combined with other elements of the movement.
Errol Louis: Well, you know, what's interesting about the film is that you're talking in exactly that way, sort of strategically and sort of reflectively. Were you aware of that? Were you thinking that way in the moment and say....
Al Sharpton: Oh absolutely. In '86 when Michael Griffith’s cousin, a young man called Derek, called me and I went to the house, and they were then debating whether it was just some people mistaking people in Howard Beach where Michael Griffith was killed, whether it was a robbery. I said instinctively, we need to go out to Howard Beach because I know from growing up in Operation Breadbasket, the King movement, if you were in the neighborhood, look what they did to Dr. King a generation before that in Chicago, when we were in the neighborhood. So when we called the march, we did a motorcade out there. Immediately the whites in the neighborhood, “get out of here,” the N-word. And what is striking about it is that they're looking right in the camera's face with the mics and saying it.
Errol Louis: Oh, yeah, you know, they're not getting caught out there. They would push people aside to get in the camera and shout out the N-word. This is what I think is so important for people who were not here in the mid to late ‘80s, which isn't all that long ago, is that there were entire neighborhoods where if you were a person of color and you walked through there, you know, at night, people would come out of their homes and start calling you names. A crowd would gather. People would ask what you're doing there. The threat of violence was very real.
Al Sharpton: That was the best thing that would happen. Same thing happened in Bensonhurst couple years later with Yusef Hawkins’ killing. But what is very important about people seeing this film now and it goes all the way to now, is this is the Howard Beach that Donald Trump grew up in Queens. You’ve got to remember, Howard Beach is like a mile and a half from Jamaica Estates, where Donald Trump grew up. Donald Trump was here during Howard Beach. He was doing real estate with his father, who had been sued by the Justice Department for discrimination. So if you want to understand the crowd that Donald Trump played to with the racism, he grew up knowing that crowd. That was a definitive part of New York politics. And a lot of people that have seen the private screening say, I'm beginning to understand Trump a little differently now, because people think that racism and killings… was southern Mississippi and Georgia It's right here in New York.
Errol Louis: Right.
Errol Louis: We'll be back after a short break and continue our talk with Al Sharpton.
“Loudmouth” clip: Yeah. Chris did a walk through with the police. Yeah, I'm sorry. I went through with two other police officers, and it's a very open field. There's not a lot of uh, where you can see everybody. So it's, it's kind of open. I don't believe it's a security risk.
“Loudmouth” clip: So is the concern a shooter?
“Loudmouth” clip: Do you have a recommendation, Chris? Honestly, we really shouldn't do this. I don't believe it's feasible with the climate, with the reports that we're getting, even from the offices of the amount of people that are out there. I mean, I think, Artie, the best thing you can do is let them secure as much as they can. I'm going to do it. I don't. We get threats all the time. I'm not going to not do the rally.
“Loudmouth” clip: No justice. No peace. No justice. No peace.
Errol Louis: That was a scene from the brand new documentary “Loudmouth.” You know, for anybody who remembers the cases and controversies, again, it was revealing and a chance to sort of remember, it's like, oh, yeah, what a crazy city this was at the time. One of the things that I think folks don't really remember, the days of outrage that, you know, fairly early in this cycle of protests in the late ‘80s, you and some other activists basically shut down the city in a way that I've never seen before or since.
Al Sharpton: We had a plan that we wanted to shut the city down. The jury had been out for days, and we wanted people to understand our pain. Some groups took the bridge. I said I would take the subway tracks. I had done that before, protesting no blacks on the MTA board. And by hitting the artery at Borough Hall, we knew they had to cut off the juice around the city because Borough Hall was one of the main ones. So I was arrested at Borough Hall. Some went to the Brooklyn Bridge, I don't know that many were arrested. But our idea was to do mass civil disobedience. Where did you get that from? Martin Luther King, read his last book, “Where Do We Go From Here,” dealing with mass nonviolent civil disobedience. And the irony is, we were called the troublemakers, and there was never any violence. Day of outrage. You see in the film where people are admonished, you better not get out of line. It was always disciplined. We marched in Howard Beach, Bensonhurst and people were throwing watermelons at us. We never retaliated. But the media, that's part of the story, made us the troublemakers, us the problem. How could we be the problem asking for you to give up?
Errol Louis: But I mean, you know, the idea of civil disobedience, just as you were saying strategically, is to stop business as usual, literally. And that alone, forcing people to stop, or go out of their way or do something differently, can get a very, very strong reaction.
Al Sharpton: Oh, no, we’re guilty of that. That was the intent.
Errol Louis: That was the intent.
Al Sharpton: But it wasn't violent.
Errol Louis: They go through the Tawana Brawley accusation. It's the same tactics, seeking public attention, noncooperation with prosecutors, demand for a special prosecutor. But you got very different results than in most of the other cases.
Al Sharpton: I think that we got different results because I think that that prosecutor at the time wanted that conclusion. But you must remember, when the lawyers and Tawana's mother talked to me, I believed that they had the evidence to go forward and we went forward. No different than, I believe, Ben Crump today on George Floyd. What the media does not do is say within the same year that I stood up with the attorneys and Tawana Brawley's parents, I stood up for five boys in the Central Park case, and the same papers castigated me. Them guys went to jail, one for 14 years. So they'll take one case, 35 years ago and try to say, well Al Sharpton was wrong there. But don't say, but 35 and a half years ago, he was right about Central Park, or right about this. So you take your lumps. I mean, I told the guy, I don't have editorial control. Put it all in. I don't know where you got a lot of the footage from....
Errol Louis: I was going to ask you about the footage, because some of the footage, I reported on some of this and I read about the rest, and I'm thinking, man, I didn't even know this stuff existed.
Al Sharpton: He went and said he got it out of the archives at some of the local stations. He got some of the local videographers that have been around the movement, none of which was with National Action Network, some of that stuff. I'll be honest with you. He had a clip talking to my mother, someone was talking to my mother about me. I never saw that until they played the film at Tribeca. He had footage of me and James Brown, talking to James Brown, I never saw that. I knew about the clip with Muhammad Ali, James Brown and I on a talk show when they were introducing me on a national show. But there were things I never saw. And I said, well, who gave you that? Well, I met brother So-and-so who videotaped it. And I thought they put it together in a very interesting way.
Errol Louis: And I was interested. And of course, you know, it's not your film. You're not going to get a penny out of any of this, but it shows a lot of your work alongside Alton Maddox, C. Vernon Mason, these are guys, as a cub reporter, I used to cover them in some of the rallies that they did. Their politics, although you were aligned on a lot of things, they diverged from yours. And there's an interesting moment in the film where you talk about where you had a, not a complete break with them, but you stopped going to some of the rallies.
Al Sharpton: Well, no. We decided to go to Harlem and form the National Action Network. They continued what was going on at [inaudible], and on times we worked together, on times we wouldn’t. But we always had different ideological theories. I came out of the King movement. They came out of others. Vernon Mason still worked with us for many years. You know, I think the beauty of the movement is when people can have different lanes, but go down the same highway. Sometimes they get into abrasive arguments. I think over time it's where we're going that's more important than our differences.
Errol Louis: And then finally, real briefly, I don't want you to sell yourself short. I mean, you say towards the end, there's this kind of modesty. And I'm like, that doesn't sound like Al Sharpton to me, about what your legacy was or will be with regard to this branch of activism, this spate of activism over these decades. You pushed for special prosecutors over and over and over again. That is basically now enshrined in New York law.
Al Sharpton: Well, I think that if I were to say the special prosecutors, I think the Eric Garner no chokehold law, that we were part of that movement. I think the whole thing of where Obama did the policing with cameras on policing, that came out of our fight. I think that we've lived to see some legislation. The George Floyd executive order. We want to make it federal law. I always was trained by Reverend William Jones and Jesse Jackson to go use demonstration for legislation. We've been able to do that. We have to do it even more. And if we're going to be recorded history, I want to say the issues in our generation was not coming from the back of the bus. It was policing. It was economic disparities. And it was political empowerment. I sit here tonight as the president of National Action Network, 31 years later, one of the guys that was on the incorporation papers when we started 31 years ago is the mayor of New York. One of the young guys that used to come to all our rallies, he is becoming the head of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. Congress. So it's been a nice, interesting journey.
Errol Louis: It has been an interesting journey indeed. So, Reverend Sharpton, when I watched this documentary and I think about kind of where things are going, just as you pointed out, there are young people, including an Eric Adams, and a Hakeem Jeffries, who are young people. And I can call the names of a whole bunch of different activists who have gone on to other things. Is that a conscious part of what you're trying to do at the National Action Network?
Al Sharpton: Absolutely. I think what we want to do at National Action Network is to give young people the inspiration to choose their lane and perfect it. And that's why I'm proud of Hakeem, who's about as young to me as I was to Jesse. Eric is about three or four years younger than me, he is not as young. But I think that activism and fighting civil rights is not one way of doing it. You have to have those inside. You have to have those outside. Raphel Warnock writes in his book, the first time he was arrested, he was arrested with a demonstration I was leading at One Police Plaza, where he was going to jail every day. So I'm glad that I lived to see some of the seeds that we planted grow and do different things.
Errol Louis: Okay. I should point out the one time I got arrested was, in fact, those same protests, after the killing of Amadou Diallo.
Al Sharpton: I wasn’t going to tell on you, I don't want anybody to know you were.
Errol Louis: Yeah. You know, it's funny, I waited to tell my father because, you know, he was retired NYPD. I didn't know how he was going to take it. And I finally called him later after I’d gotten out, it was too late for him to yell at me. He said, well, I'm going tomorrow. Yeah. He and a bunch of other cops went and got arrested the next day.
Al Sharpton: But that was a great civil disobedience movement around here.
Errol Louis: That was, that was a very special moment. The thing that I think most people associate with you, a lot of my listeners, is that they think you talk about race in a way that is almost designed to infuriate others. Right. That you're being deliberately provocative, needlessly provocative, needlessly divisive. And then, as always, if you're talking about race, people are talking about a million other things, about themselves, their neighbors, their history, their parents, their ancestors. And the conversation gets confused very, very quickly. The thing I've always said to people, and I've written about this sometimes, is that your hatred of Al Sharpton is actually an arrow in his quiver. It actually helps legitimize him to some people. It makes you so angry that he can outthink you and outmaneuver you. I mean, talk to me about that, I guess.
Al Sharpton: I think that you got to understand that I was trained by those that was around Dr. King. I was too young to know Dr. King. That your job is to make the comfortable uncomfortable, and to make the uncomfortable comfortable. So that is intentional, and those that come out of that tradition, the idea was to force people to deal with things that they would not deal on their own. So really their anger at me is more an admission that they were not dealing with these things. And what are you angry about? Me saying that a man shouldn't have a knee on his neck for nine minutes, or that a kid should be able to have his car break down in Howard Beach 40 years ago, not get killed? So really, are you angry at me for saying it or, oh, I get it, you ought to be able to tell me how to be upset about it. You want to instruct me on the proper behavior to respond to murder, and I'm not going to give you that power.
Errol Louis: Interesting.
Errol Louis: What's next? What should we be looking for?
Al Sharpton: I mean, we got to really see that the next two years with the Congress, the House of Representatives being slightly majority Republican, a lot of things that we were able to pull through and couldn't get through the Senate won't even be able to come through the House. We’re going to have to continue to mobilize. It's going to be a tough two years, but I'm ready for the fight.
Errol Louis: Okay. Thanks very much.
Al Sharpton: Thank you.
“Loudmouth” clip: What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country, in education, in health services, and in every area of American life. It's time for us to stand up in George's name and say, get your knee off our necks. We don’t want no favors, just get up off of us, and we can be and do whatever we can be.
Errol Louis: That's going to do it for this episode of You Decide. As always, thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this conversation or any of the others. You can find me on Twitter at Errol Louis, or leave a message for me at 212-379-3440. You can also email us at YourStoryNY1@charter.com. And if you're looking for more analysis of New York politics, you should subscribe to and listen to my colleagues’ podcast. It's called Off Topic/On Politics, and it's hosted by political reporters Zach Fink, Courtney Gross and Juan Manuel Benítez. Those episodes come out every Friday. I'll be back next week. Thanks so much for listening.