‘They’re going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country July 4, but that’s not our celebration,’ Sharpton said
National Action Network founder Al Sharpton said at his group’s annual convention this week, which featured several 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls, that it would be “crazy” for black people to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday later this year.
Sharpton, who interviewed Kamala Harris, Maryland governor Wes Moore, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker at the annual confab, proposed during a “fireside chat” with Rep. LaMonica McIver (D., N.J.)—who is facing felony assault charges—that black people hold a rally to counter semiquincentennial celebrations planned across the country on July 4. “We may need to do our own rally in Philly or somewhere that day, ’cause that’s not our background,” said Sharpton, who also hosts a weekend show on MS NOW.
“They’re going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country July 4, but that’s not our celebration. We was—we were slaves then, and they celebrate signing the Declaration of Independence 1776,” said Sharpton.
“It seems crazy for me to have on the birthday hat at your birthday party. That ain’t my party,” said Sharpton, who later claimed that “white kids” have not been taught the history of slavery in schools.
“So when white kids hear us talking about reparations or affirmative action,” he went on, “they think it’s an attack ’cause they don’t know what their granddaddy did to us.”
Racial issues were front and center at the convention, in which Sharpton held “fireside chats” with nine Democrats considering presidential bids in 2028. In addition to Harris, Moore, and Pritzker, Sharpton interviewed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, California congressman Ro Khanna, Arizona senator Ruben Gallego, and others. Sharpton in those interviews focused largely on issues like DEI and investment in black businesses, avoiding hot-button topics like the United States’ 250th birthday celebration and reparations for slavery.
Harris gave the strongest indication of any in the group that she will run in 2028.
“I might,” she told Sharpton on Friday when asked whether she will launch a third presidential bid. “I’m thinking about it.”
The Democrats who appeared at the convention did so in spite of Sharpton’s lengthy record of inflammatory anti-white and anti-Semitic remarks. The activist gained notoriety in the 1980s for representing Tawana Brawley, a black woman who falsely accused white NYPD officers of raping her. In 1991, shortly after forming the National Action Network, Sharpton helped stoke the Crown Heights riots, in which rioters in Brooklyn targeted Jewish businesses and murdered an Orthodox Jew. After the riots ended, Sharpton derogatorily referred to the neighborhood’s Hasidic Jewish population as “the diamond merchants in Crown Heights.”
In more recent years, Sharpton has been repeatedly accused of improperly using his MS NOW show and leadership of the National Action Network to engage in “pay for play” arrangements to shake down corporations and political candidates in exchange for his support or for him not to accuse them of racism. He has also been accused for years of self-dealing. Nevertheless, he has survived multiple programming shakeups at MSNBC/MS NOW, and Democratic presidential hopefuls are lining up this week to kiss his ring.
Indeed, other Democrats this week heaped praise on Sharpton, who ran an unsuccessful campaign in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries that ended after he failed to win a single delegate in the South Carolina primary.
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) lauded Sharpton at the start of the convention on Wednesday, saying the activist’s network “has stood at the very front of progress, of marches for justice, of the pursuit for a fairer New York City for each and every person who lives in it.”
“You are as synonymous with our city as the Empire State Building or a folded slice of pizza,” Mamdani told Sharpton.
