Rev. Al Sharpton plans to hold a rally in protest of President-elect Trump on inauguration day.
During Tuesday’s (November 12) airing of his MSNBC show “Politics Nation with Al Sharpton,” Sharpton announced that he would be holding the rally on Trump’s inauguration day, which coincides with MLK Day, per The Hill.
“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.”
Trump has previously faced backlash over his remarks about Dr. King. In 2020 the president-elect falsely claimed that his inauguration speech drew the same amount of people to the National Mall as King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said at his news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
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.”