MSNBC’s Al Sharpton on Friday warned that the United States is “on the precipice of” eroding the voting rights of minorities.
Sharpton, who was part of a group of civil rights leaders that recently met with President Joe Biden to discuss battling new voting restrictions put in place in some Republican-led states, said on “Morning Joe” that he and other protesters will “turn up the street heat” to fight for voting rights because they “cannot sit by and allow them to erode our voting rights.”
“We met with Joe Manchin, eight of us a couple of weeks ago, and he even convened 13 Republicans that met with us by Zoom,” Sharpton advised. “I think that a lot of us will be reaching out collectively to meet with people. But more than meeting is there’s going to be a lot of rallying, even in their districts, even in their state. Martin Luther King III and the Drum Major Institute, his wife Andrea King, and I called this massive national march August 28. There will be rallies, and there will be state rallies and a lot of movements on the ground from a LaTosha Brown to a Melanie Campbell leading up to that. So, there has to be how did we get the Voting Rights Act in the first place? There was a combination of what Johnson and others were doing in Washington and what Dr. King and Roy Wilkins and others [were] doing on the streets. That’s what we told the president we were going to do.”
“We’ll turn up the street heat as we hope he and others would do what they do in Washington,” he added. “But we cannot, I repeat, cannot sit by and allow them to erode our voting rights, which we are on the precipice of.”
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