Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Speaker 1: We began tonight with a man who's been called everything from a troublemaker and charlatan to a one person civil rights movement.

Speaker 2: A media manipulator, a rabble-rouser, a tireless harbinger of racial discord.

Speaker 3: A blabbermouth, a loudmouth, too flamboyant, an agitator, a racist, a race baiter. All of those things.

Reverend Al Sharpton: The question that I always hear from whites, Reverend AL, why do you make everything about race? The Black question that's just as troubling is, why are you doing that? Ain't nothing going to change.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's the Reverend Al Sharpton in a new full-length documentary called Loudmouth. The film is directed and written by Josh Alexander.

Reverend Al Sharpton: It's somewhere between these two questions that I've had to do a lot of my work in activism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When I sat down with Reverend Sharpton to talk about the new movie, he told me that when filmmakers approached him, they were clear he would have no editorial control over the film. Reverend Al said this didn't worry him, but he was a little concerned about the film's proposed title.

Reverend Al Sharpton: I said I'll do it. Then the only time I paused, Melissa, is when they came back and said, "We're going to name it Loudmouth." I said, "Loudmouth." As I thought about it, and Josh talked to me about it, I said, "No, use that. I agree with that." I said I think that what people don't understand particularly around the country and other parts of the world that I've been to speak, is that unlike the generation ahead of me, Dr. King, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, who was one of my mentors, I didn't come from the south. I was born and raised in New York, and racism here was more institutional.

We are competing with Broadway lights, we're competing with Times Square, Radio City. You had to be loud to even make an issue here. You couldn't have a church rally and do a press release and it became the issue that's being discussed. I had to have a loud in your face style to deal with issues that had been going on long before me but was not getting the kind of attention that I thought it warranted.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The film's director, Josh Alexander, also joined our conversation, and I asked him how he got involved in the project.

Josh Alexander: I grew up in the Bay Area, and in the late 1980s when I was coming of age, I would come home from soccer practice every afternoon and I'd get chips and salsa and I'd watch the talk shows. I watched Phil Donahue and I watched Sally Jessy Raphael, et cetera. My first exposure to issues of racial violence and police brutality was through that talk show lens. I was very much socialized within those narratives that I watched on those shows. I had a very grotesque picture of who Rev Sharpton and some of these other leaders were and what they represented based on the way that I perceived the narratives in those shows.

As I started to become more mature in storytelling, I became fascinated at the way that the narrative of race is written in the media. As you really look at New York City being the center of the media in the 1980s around race and these big events that occurred there, it's impossible to look at that time and not see Reverend Al Sharpton at the center of it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Reverend Al, you don't have any illusions about the caricature that others often have of you. What did it take to get to that point of being able to see yourself through the eyes of others as well as through your own?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I think the fact that I was blessed to have some role models and mentors, being that my father left when I was 10, and my mother raised me in a Black church, I was a boy preacher. She always would put me under people that were doing great things. By knowing and growing up, we're talking about formative years, 11, 12 years old, I became youth director of Operation Breadbasket, Dr. King's economic arm in New York when I was 13.

If you are in a room with Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm and all these people from when you're 13 and 14, Adam Clayton Powell is a mentor, idol of yours, and you seen how they were maligned and distorted, you almost train for that. It's like a boxer in the gym. You do your sparring, you expect when you get in the ring they're going to swing at you. When I started becoming known myself and for my own groups, and they would distort me in the tracksuits and this and that, of course they're going to do that. They did it to Adam, they did it to Dr. King, they did it to Jesse. They indicted Martin Luther King for income tax evasion. I was ready for the caricatures. I was ready for them to do it.

In fact, I would've felt that I wasn't being successful if they didn't. The key is, can you outlast them, and can you keep going? If you believe in this, you take the castigation and keep going. When I looked at the film that they did and saw what they would say about me 40 years ago and now I'm still doing the same thing a little older and a little more mature, then what are they going to say I'm doing it for now? I was doing it for fame. Now I'm well known. Why am I doing it now? I was doing it for money. Most money I make is from hosting a radio show and a TV show. When do they run out? The fact is that I'm not going to run out. They can't come with motives now, but you had to do that by passing the test of time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Josh, I think as Reverend Al is building out for us, this film is certainly about him, but it is at least as much about US media, about power, politics and representation around race, and in certain ways, on the one hand, it is disturbing these moments from 25, 35 years ago, but boy, it also resonates right in this moment.

Josh Alexander: I think that that's true. I think from the very beginning, my first conversations with Rev Sharpton was, this is not a film where we're going to re-litigate any of these cases. There's a danger in the way that the media ecosystem examines each of these cases because they want to look at them in isolation. They don't want to think of them as being in the context of a continuum. We were very clear from the very beginning that this was a system story and it was a system film. Those were very hard to do.

One of the great providences for this film of the pandemic, and Rev Sharpton talks about the providence of the pandemic in the film and about these series of deaths and police killings and racial killings during the pandemic and everyone being in the quiet of their homes and having to watch again and again these images and how that sparked those marches. There's an incredible providence in our ability to look at that summer of racial reckoning in 2020 in conversation to this period of time New York in the 1980s, to see that the no justice, no peace slogans of these marches in the '80s are the no justice, no peace slogans of today.

That if Rev Sharpton is celebrated today for saying the very same things he was reviled for saying in the 1980s, what does that tell us not about him, but what does it tell us about the media and the ecosystem that he was up against at the time?

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, let's take a pause right here. More when we come back about the new Reverend Al Sharpton documentary, Loudmouth. It's The Takeaway.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for sticking with us on The Takeaway. We're continuing with the Reverend Al Sharpton and director Josh Alexander, talking about the new full-length documentary, Loudmouth, which chronicles Sharpton's career.

Reverend Al Sharpton: All a preacher does is take biblical stories and use the story to therefore get to the moral message or ethical message they're projecting. I transfer that into social justice, whether it is Michael Griffith being killed in Howard Beach, or whether it's somebody choked to death by a cop in Staten Island years later, Eric Garner. It is the story, but the issue is racial violence. You need the story to make the issue live.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Although I knew his organizing work well, I actually first met Reverend Al during the years that I was hosting a TV show on MSNBC, and I can say this, it's pretty hard to surprise me, but Reverend Al did. He often defied the expectations I developed over the years based on how he was presented in media. I found him more genuine and generous than I would've imagined. During our conversation, Reverend Al said many observers expected he would fundamentally alter his style of organizing over time.

Reverend Al Sharpton: One of the reasons that I think this is so important, the time that this has come out, is not only given history of racism and media with me at the center, you cannot understand Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani without understanding where they came from. When you see the footage in this documentary of people in New York, not Mississippi, not Alabama, in New York, openly in front of cameras and knowing the cameras are there, the news cameras covering them, coming to the streets saying N-word go home and throwing watermelons at us every week.

One of them stabbed me. Somebody can pay me to get stabbed. When you see this, then you understand Donald Trump understood what to play to because he grew up in Queens, a mile or two away from Howard Beach. When you look at this, people said I never knew New York was that bad, because if you look at the national media, they act as though everything was Mississippi, Alabama, no, in New York they were killing people for going in the wrong neighborhood. People would come to me and I would organize and get my organization and we'd march out there.

These people would on a weekly basis, come out talking about we'll kill you Ns for being there. This is New York City while Giuliani was running for mayor. I think that people act as though this is some late venom they had, this is what they grew up in, and it's what I grew up in. Later when people started catching on to racial profiling and we changed some laws and all, and the media [unintelligible 00:10:39] offered me a radio show, then later Phil Griffin, a TV show, I looked at it in the context of my life, Melissa. When I was in my 30s, I used to go with Reverend Jackson when he hosted a show called Both Sides With Jesse Jackson on CNN for nine years, I said, "I'm doing a show, PoliticsNation, like Jesse used to do."

There's always a continuity that I look for in what I'm doing, because that is what I was raised and trained to do. While I was hosting A PoliticsNation, people said as soon as they heard MSNBC gave Sharpton his show, "Well, he's not going to march no more. He's not going to be raising hell no more." I did Trayvon Martin, I did Michael Brown, I did the case in New York of Eric Garner, all the way to George Floyd while I'm still hosting the show and covered it, because again, I studied what Jesse and them did. They could do TV and still be active. That's what I did. I never stopped. I'm in Harlem every Saturday during the National Action Network rallies.

When you look at where they cast you and then you look at where now you can do some of the casting, it becomes a different world. Like just this week, Hakeem Jeffries became the first Black to be the head of the Democratic caucus. Hakeem has been a member of National Action Network for 20-something years. When I started National Action Network 31 years ago, we got 5 people to sign the incorporation papers. One of the incorporators was a cop in Brooklyn named Eric Adams, who's now the mayor. I just had to live long enough to see a lot of things change. Then at the same time, see some things have not changed at all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Reverend Sharpton, you're going to go ahead and mess up poor Mr. Jeffries' whole political career here talking about he's been hanging out with you for two decades.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: You better let that young brother just go ahead and lead the Democratic Party.

Reverend Al Sharpton: Well, he has told it himself. He comes on politics [unintelligible 00:12:35] he's told it himself.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now Rev, it is a story about systems and power, but it's also personal, and you're willing to get pretty personal in this film.

Reverend Al Sharpton: My father left when I was 10, and as young men do, Black and white, Latino, Asian, you need that hole filled in your life. Being that my mother was a very, very, religious fundamental Pentecostal and wanted me to stay in the church, I was already a boy preacher. She would put me under some of the ministers. Then when I was 11 and 12, I'd watch the news a lot because being a boy preaching, you didn't go out and play with other kids because they like, "I don't know if we want him on the baseball team. My mom goes to hear him preach."

It's hard because the adults are looking at you as a preacher and the kids feel awkward because they don't want to swear in front of you, and believe me, it was hard getting dates until you got a little older. I'm inside watching the news and I became totally just mesmerized by Adam Clayton Powell. I finally convinced my mother, when I was about 11, to let my older sister, who was three years older than me, bring me up to see and preach at Abyssinian Baptist Church. I said, "This is what I want to do." It just clicked. My mother got upset and she thought I was going to leave the church because she wanted me to grow up to be a Pentecostal bishop. She brought me to our bishop and he said, "I know what to do."

He brought me to Reverend William Jones who's in the film. Jones said, "We'll take the boy preacher under our wing." This was Operation Breadbasket. Dr. King had just been killed. Later, my youth director, because he knows all the young people in all the churches. He introduced me to Jesse and they put time into me. I was nurtured by guys in that area, and I'm very open about I had a need for that. It filled that need. I couldn't fight segregation because I wasn't in that era. What Reverend Jackson and John Lewis and them did, I didn't do. I knew in growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, about policing.

When I started fighting police brutality, started that we couldn't go in certain neighborhoods, it was not fashionable. Most people were saying, "Well, let Sharpton and them do that. That's a street thing. Them kids were getting in trouble anyhow." Now it has become an issue everybody deals with. Now it's trendy, Melissa, to deal with police accountability.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. Let me just ask this final question for you, Josh. What is it you hope people take away from the film?

Josh Alexander: The biggest takeaway for me in this film is to question the stories that are being told and the way that audiences in this country, without question, just see the media or government officials or prosecutors or attorney generals as being always reliable is deeply problematic. I think we all need to develop our own, and it's part of civic engagement, our own capacity to listen, to discern, to understand when things are slanted, to understand that systems and structures are stories, to question storytellers and question the story that's being told.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's been such a pleasure to speak with both of you. Josh Alexander, director and writer of the new film, Loudmouth, and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Thank you both for joining us today.

Reverend Al Sharpton: Thank you.

Josh Alexander: Thank you.

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