PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2016-07-18 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Al Sharpton's 1992 Speech Urged Blacks to Kill Police (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In the wake of the mass shooting at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas that resulted in the deaths of five police officers, several web sites published or referenced a video of a delivered by civil rights activist Al Sharpton at Kean College in 1992. For instance, the Proud Conservative web site reported that Sharpton was screaming kill cops in the video, and the web site Yes I'm Right asserted that Sharpton didn't know the camera was on during his speech: This is real video footage taken in 1992 at Kean College in New Jersey, but while it does capture Sharpton using language such as offing cops and crackers, it doesn't show him screaming kill cops or calling on blacks to go out and commit acts of violence. This same video has been circulating for decades and was famously used in an anti-Al Gore ad during the 2000 presidential election campaign. It gained even wider prominence in 2016 when it was featured on the Fox News show Watters' World which featured a full minute of Sharpton's speech but used selective captioning to highlight Sharpton's alleged hateful rhetoric. A transcript of the portion of the speech in question provides more context to Sharpton's remarks: It's clear from the wording that Sharpton was mocking those who made bold declarations but didn't follow through on them, and laughter from the audience also indicated they understood Sharpton to be poking fun at those who called for violence while not condoning it himself. Sharpton did not call on blacks to kill cops, but he did use inflammatory language such as pigs and crackers and insinuated that those who threatened violence but didn't have the gumption to follow through were deserving of derision from those who made other promises and lived up to them. Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters confronted Sharpton about the video in April 2016, and Sharpton reiterated that his intent was to mock those who called for violence, not to exhort them to kill police: Although this 24-year-old video was widely shared after five police officers were killed in Dallas in July 2016, Sharpton has denounced those recent attacks on police officers: (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url