Sharpton to hold MLK rally on same day as Trump inauguration

Rev. Al Sharpton plans to hold a rally in protest of President-elect Trump on inauguration day. 

Sharpton announced the rally on his MSNBC show, “Politics Nation with Al Sharpton,” on Tuesday. The rally and Trump’s inauguration coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 

“While Trump supporters will be on one side of Washington watching him take the oath of office, I will be at the nation’s capital working to keep the dream alive,” Sharpton said. “There has never been a more important time to peacefully organize and mobilize.”

Sharpton emphasized that the rally will be nonviolent, “unlike the 2021 insurrection.”

Sharpton has been a sharp critic of Trump’s since the 2016 election, often highlighting Trump’s controversial and sometimes racist rhetoric. 

Trump himself has repeatedly drawn the condemnation of the King family for remarks about the civil rights icon. 

The president-elect falsely claimed that his 2020 inauguration speech drew the same number of people to the National Mall as the March on Washington that saw King give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Trump also compared North Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, to King. Robinson later fell under scrutiny during his campaign for comments he allegedly made about King, including calling the civil rights leader a racial slur. 

Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, said the January rally will show the country and the world that there are millions who “still believe in what Dr. King stood for.”

“We fought too hard. We suffered too long. We took too many beatings. We spent too many nights in jail. We’ve been to too many funerals,” Sharpton said, adding in a social media post about the rally that “we won’t go back.”