The Rev. Al Sharpton told audiences in several Michigan cities Thursday that young Black men planning to vote for former president Donald Trump are making the wrong choice.
Sharpton and others made the case for African American voters that Vice President Kamala Harris should be their choice for president in November’s general election at events in Pontiac, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Flint.
A recent national poll shows 26% of Black men between 18 and 40 years old saying they plan to vote for Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee.
In Flint, Sharpton slammed the decision-making of African Americans who say they support Trump in this year's presidential election.
“You trying to act independent. And enlightened. When we both know you are ignorant and being imbecilic,” said Sharpton.
Despite Trump’s gains, Harris, the Democratic nominee, is expected to win the bulk of the Black vote in November's election.
“I believe Black men are making a choice between whether to vote or to participate,” said National Urban League President Marc Morial, one of the speakers during the “Wheels of Justice” get-out-the-vote tour organized by the National Action Network Michigan chapter.
“I’m confident that overwhelming numbers of African-American men will not vote for a person who denigrated them, a person who has disparaged them,” Morial, who’s also a former New Orleans mayor, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “Donald Trump has talked about Black men, the Exonerated Five, Black athletes, Black-led cities, like dogs. When you do that, you don’t earn my vote. You’ve earned my contempt and my opposition.”
In the 1980s, Trump purchased a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty after five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping and beating a white woman jogger in New York City.
The five said they confessed to the crimes under duress, later recanted, and pleaded not guilty. They were convicted after jury trials, but the convictions were vacated in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.
Two of the Central Park Five took part in Thursday’s swing through Michigan.
