Decades later, Sharpton still insists: No justice, no peace
John Lewis, Julian Bond and so many other leaders of the civil rights movement are dead; at 78, Jesse Jackson clearly is not the lion he once was.
But the Rev. Al Sharpton — once dismissed by some as a fraud, a jester — is still standing. This week, he will lead a commemoration of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, focusing on police violence and its ever-expanding roll call of victims.
The man who helped popularize the 1980s cry, “No justice, no peace,” is putting himself at the center of a new wave of activism, in a new millennium.