Producers of a new documentary on the Rev. Al Sharpton told him they had three conditions for his involvement: He’d have no editorial control, the film would have a white director and the title would be “Loudmouth.”
“I said, ‘Loudmouth,’” Sharpton recalled later. “Let me think about that last one.”
A day later, Sharpton was on board.
“All of the guys I grew up admiring, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, they were southerners,” Sharpton told the Daily News. “I grew up in New York. We had to compete with Broadway lights, Times Square, Radio City Music Hall and the World Trade Center. In New York, you had to be loud. You had to take it to the edge and not go over the edge.”
Sharpton, 68, has been called worse: Charlatan, rabble rouser, race baiter, poverty pimp, huckster, fraud, opportunist. He has been called those things by Black and white people.
After more than 50 years in the racial justice fight — from Howard Beach to George Floyd — Sharpton said the names he has been called just goes along with the territory.
“I was ready for the attacks, because I had been trained,” Sharpton said.
He said the attacks became difficult when his two daughters became old enough to understand what they were seeing.
Sharpton talks a lot about family in the film, the father who abandoned them, and the mother who steered him toward meaningful mentors.
“That clip they played of my mother, I never saw that,” he said.
Another clip he said he never saw was of him laying in a hospital bed after he was stabbed in the chest in 1991 as he prepared to lead a march to protest the Brooklyn shooting death of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black 16 year old who was killed by a white mob in Bensonhurst two years earlier.
Sharpton said it was crowds like that — shamelessly yelling the n-word on the 6 o’clock news — that gave rise to the constituency of Donald Trump.
“They just nationalize what happened here in New York,” Sharpton said.
“Loudmouth” follows Sharpton’s career from protest marches to political campaigns, from radio and TV programs to tours with soul legend James Brown.
He said he’s not tired yet.
“Movements are about continuity,” Sharpton said. “You have to be a marathon runner. But the problem is we have a lot of microwave activists. I’m committed for the long run.”
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