In response to the wins in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Tuesday night, Al Sharpton said that the era of “legal apartheid” may finally have come to an end.
Speaking with Joe Scarborough on “Morning Joe,” Sharpton said that Georgia’s decision to elect the first black woman vice president and its first black senator was a symbol that the old guard is over.
“Here we have in the state of Georgia, a state deep in the heart of the old Confederacy, a state that voted to elect America’s first black vice-president in November, and a state that just voted to elect the Democratic Party’s first black senator. What does that mean about where this country is after four years of Donald Trump?” Scarborough asked Sharpton.
“It means that this country has really come back unto showing that we’re not going backwards to the days of legal apartheid or segregation and divisiveness,” responded Sharpton.
Sharpton credited Donald Trump and his “asinine way” of behaving for the victories in Georgia on Tuesday night.
“I want to thank Donald Trump for being Donald Trump, because if he had not been acting in the asinine way he had, I do not believe we would have had the victory in Georgia. The fact that he is so bull-headed and stubborn, I think that he has aided and abetted the takeover of the Democrats of the Senate,” he said. “At least to match them 50/50 with a tie vote to the first black woman and the first woman vice-president. No one could have messed it up like you did, Mr. President. And we’re going to be ever grateful for you going out and ushering in a new day in America that brings us back to where we ought to be.”
Despite Sharpton’s hits against Trump’s behavior, he did concede after the election that the president did much better with blacks and minorities than “he should have.”
“He has done better than, in my judgment, he should have with black men and Hispanics, which means that we’ve got to really look in the civil rights community, both on the Latino and the African American side, on a real conversation in our communities on what it is to be different in terms of being entrepreneurial aspirants and being fair in terms of how we look from the whole,” Sharpton said on “Morning Joe,” as reported by Newsbusters.
“I think he appealed to some that wanted to feel that they had to be a certain kind of way to be aspirational and that you can be that and still be centrists,” he continued.
On the issue of Joe Biden’s involvement in the 1994 crime bill, Sharpton said that too many did not understand that the former vice president was simply going along with what the leadership said at the time.
“I think that a lot of them bought into the false view they were putting out on Joe Biden with the crime bill rather than dealing with the fact that Joe Biden was going along with the majority of people, even in the black leadership with the black crime bill,” said Sharpton.
Going forward, Sharpton said that Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) are going to have to work to capture those communities if they win the White House.
“I really believe there is going to be a lot of work in those areas,” he said. “If we ignore it, or act like it doesn’t matter, I think is not wise and I think if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, if they’re successful, are going to have to really work.”
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