CHICAGO — The Rev. Al Sharpton speaks this line in the documentary “Loudmouth,” the first on his legacy: “People call me to blow up issues. I’m the blow-up man and I don’t apologize for that.”
Sharpton, founder and president of the National Action Network, was in Chicago this week for the premiere of the film at the Chicago International Film Festival. Over the course of two hours, viewers watch Sharpton’s trajectory from a teenager honoring James Brown on “Soul Train” to becoming a face and voice for the civil rights movement for decades.
Written, directed and produced by Josh Alexander, the film features Sharpton sharing his thoughts and views on key moments of his past alongside footage of his activism surrounding the death of George Floyd, the Tawana Brawley case (a Black teenager who in 1987 said she had been kidnapped and raped by a group of white men in New York), and the death of Michael Griffith (a 23-year-old Black man who died in New York in 1986 after he and two other Black men were attacked by a gang of white people outside a restaurant), among other incidents of police brutality, systemic injustice, racism and white supremacy in America.
Sharpton said the director came to him wanting to do the documentary because growing up as a white kid in New York, he said he was shocked by what he found when doing research.
“He said I never knew you almost got killed,” Sharpton said. “He said all I saw was the last 15 years. He convinced me that his intention was to expose what he didn’t see, including flaws. I was convinced that it (the documentary) had to come now for people to have to deal with this stuff.
“Take the personal side of me out of it … You need to look at the kind of racism the North had and how the media had been building it. If the media had told the stories correctly of Bernhard Goetz (a 37-year-old white male who shot four young Black men on an NYC subway in 1984) or even the Tawana Brawley case on into now, we wouldn’t have been as shocked with Donald Trump,” he said. “Right now, America is living nationally what we had to live with all our lives in New York. ... I think people underestimated how biased people were and I think this documentary, more than telling my story, tells how bigoted a certain part of this country was — that we covered up until Donald Trump took the covers off.”
We spoke with Sharpton about his work, the film’s impact and the midterm elections. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: How did the documentary’s title come about?
A: Some will look at it as controversial. I said, “I’ve been called worse.” I intentionally became a loudmouth because those that were more reserved in how they spoke would not tell our stories, so I had to be loud in order to be heard, and to speak for the unheard. And it caught on. Now you’ve got not only young people in NAN, but young people all over the country standing in the streets like I did 30 years ago, stopping subways. Loud has become trendy.
Q: In the film, you talk about the media narrative more than once. Was that also part of your plan? Talk about it enough in this documentary, maybe somebody will get it right?
A: I intentionally wanted to say that because the reason I had to be a loudmouth is (that) the media was not covering those issues. The media would condemn me as a loudmouth, but if y’all would open up your mouth, they wouldn’t need a guy like me. And what the media didn’t understand, that you saw in the film, is I also built an organization being a loudmouth. I wasn’t the only one calling the march at Howard Beach (in 1986 in response to Michael Griffith’s death). I was the only one that got hundreds out there like that. All the way to George Floyd ... when you see that footage of how we wrapped 200,000 people around the Lincoln Memorial in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic, that’s because of 30 years of work.
A lot of people would say “we put out a press release, we’ll have a little rally.” I said, “No, we have to close the town down, they’ll have to cover that.” That’s what we did. I started doing things that I knew would make them have to deal with the drama and kept it nonviolent. I learned a certain amount from the generation ahead of me … I wanted the generation behind me to know you cannot do one or two rallies. You gotta keep going until you win. We were able to stop “stop-and-frisk” but that took years. We were able to get racial profiling laws — that took years. With George Floyd, we got an executive order by President [Joe] Biden, but that’s not enough. We need a law and we’re gonna stay on it.
Q: I sat down with Bishop Tavis Grant , acting national executive director of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, to talk about leading the next generation. Civil rights are still very relevant but how do you keep such organizations relevant?
A: Why were they ever relevant? Because they dealt with the issues of the day. Why does everybody from Trayvon Martin’s family to George Floyd’s family call the National Action Network? Because they know we’ll get something done. That’s how you stay relevant. We started the Martin case. From there, it went and years later it was Eric Garner’s case and then I get a call from Ferguson, Missouri — on and on and on all the way to George Floyd.
Relevance is based on filling the needs of people. Too many times I think people get involved with wanting people to come to them and they never go to the people. That’s why we get the calls and we respond to the call. We have an infrastructure that can produce.
Q: There’s a statement in the film that wonders if we’re going to be prophetic or pathetic in a time of action. Where do we tend to be leaning these days as a society?
A: We have been more prophetic, but if we blow the midterm elections we’re going to have pathetic results. We were prophetic and able to energize the biggest turnout of a presidential election in the history of the country in 2020. But we can be pathetic if, in three weeks, we lose all of what we built. Everything from women’s rights to affirmative action is in front of the Supreme Court this session. It can all flip.
A guy from the outer borough of New York (Donald Trump) stacked the Supreme Court and stacked the federal courts — he’s from Queens. I know that kind of manicured racism. That’s what “Loudmouth” is about, manicured racism. These are not the guys with the billy club, chewing tobacco. These are the guys that get manicures and pedicures.
Q: How do you keep the fires going when people can get distracted on the civil rights path?
A: You have to be determined and know in the beginning, that if they wanted to do it, they would have done it. You’re gonna be a long-distance runner, and you have to be strategic and sometimes strategy calls for you to be a loudmouth. You got to make noise. What I try to tell young activists is “don’t have the noise be the end, have it be the means to the end.” We convicted cops in George Floyd, we convicted those guys in Ahmaud Arbery’s case — all of that last year. A win now is to change the laws. The problem is sometimes people just get caught up in the noise. I always sort through the noise.
Q: How are we looking as far as translating action into legislation? Is there a certain state that you’ve seen in doing your work that is closer to it than other states?
A: We’ve been able to see some progress in Minnesota. Some progress in South Carolina, some in New York, with the Eric Garner “no chokehold” law. But we need federal law. And I think that if we could get the right results in the midterm elections … don’t forget the John Lewis (voting rights) bill passed the House, it didn’t pass the Senate. We can run it right back through if we get the right result.
Q: The film shows your 1991 stabbing, and security conversation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Does anything scare you?
A: I was stabbed leading a march. I was prosecuted, they showed that. And since then I’ve done 90 days in jail. I’ve been arrested 30 times. So on this side of heaven, death, jail, indictments are about as bad as you can get — they can’t do nothing more to me. So my thing is I get up every day, and I’m not looking at bars and I’m not in a grave, it’s a good day for me because I have been that close to death and I’ve been in jail.
I’m not new to this. I’m true to this. That’s the strength of this movie: to show that sometimes you got to risk being ridiculed to get your point out there. And if you can endure it, you’ll turn it around. You got to have faith bigger than your career. And it was always my faith that drove me.
———
The theatrical release of “Loudmouth” is set for Dec. 9.
———
