Rev. Al Sharpton was forced to fly to Atlanta from Miami given the closures of all city airports. The civil rights activist, who had been in Florida for a voting rights rally and to encourage early voting over the weekend, will be taping his evening MSNBC program PoliticsNation from an Atlanta studio.
Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has announced a list of guests for tomorrow’s Triumph Awards. Those to be in attendance include stars like Diddy, Samuel L. Jackson, Tamara Tunie, and director George Lucas. Though Mr. Lucas, whose second Star Wars trilogy featured a crude racial caricature in the form of pidgin-speaking alien Jar Jar Binks, may seem Read More
At a recent party to toast the one-year anniversary of MSNBC’s 6 p.m. hour, one of the news net’s on-air personalities offered up a confession. “I don’t know if I would have brought Al Sharpton on to do a show!” he told the assembled guests. Read More
Last Friday night, huddled together at the corner of 111th street and 5th Avenue in Harlem, a circle of about thirty individuals held hands. Their eyes were closed in prayer. The orange glow of the headlamps formed neon smudges against the black night sky. Two NYPD officers stood nearby, arms crossed, waiting. Opposite a church on the corner of 129th Street and 7th Avenue, a similar crowd looped around a stage, surrounded by blue lights and peace signs painted gold. Some youths lined up to perform raps and songs, which they had written themselves.
This was the last weekend of Occupy the Corners, an initiative created in response to the recent wave of shootings and organized by National Action Network (NAN), a not-for-profit civil rights organization. For the past four weekends, community activists, politicians, church leaders and local civilians have stood in solidarity at the most dangerous corners in New York, watching for any signs of violence.
On Friday, NAN founder and president, Reverend Al Sharpton, joined the campaigners. Read More
We were waiting in line outside Red Egg, an unassuming Chinese restaurant in Nolita, a little before 1 a.m. on Saturday night, when we overheard something we wished we could unhear.
“I just love waiting in line like a nor-mal person,” said a female voice, dripping sarcasm.
We knew where she was coming from. There is a certain terror involved in toting one’s friends to an unheard-of ethnic restaurant in an unfashionable neighborhood with the promise of a good party and then finding oneself stuck in a line. In her defense, she was an abnormally tall, abnormally symmetrical and abnormally blond person.
But such is the hazard of clubs like Red Egg, especially tonight, with a party thrown by Interview’s hunky creative director Karl Lindman underway.
“I like the old New York mix,” Red Egg partner Travis Bass told The Observer. “Young, old, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly.” Read More
Tamika Mallory, the 31-year-old executive director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, has some words of warning for African-American reporters. On Friday, Mallory wrote a column titled “Time For Black Journalists To Stop Criticizing Rev. Sharpton.”
Mallory’s column, which was published on NewsOne.com and linked on National Action Network’s web site, was addressed Read More
Hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, dressed in a bow tie, reflected upon President Obama’s speech at the 20th-anniversary conference of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network on the second-floor ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel in midtown, his highest-profile speech since kicking off his 2012 reelection campaign. “[It] was O.K.,” he told The Observer. “But listen, Read More
“I’m not an insider, I’m just one that has access,” Sharpton told me at his annual conference this week, where he hosted President Obama and several top White House aides.
Sharpton said he was surprised his embrace of Obama made the front page of a few New York newspapers.
“Every time something happens, it’s the Read More
2012: “We didn’t realize until late in the game that we would be facing the worst recession in generations. Some folks have amnesia about this,” said Obama. [Jake Tapper]
2012: Obama acknowledged people sometimes “lose hope.” [AP]
2012: “The president heartily embraced the once-embattled reverend.” [Leonard Greene and Todd Venezia]
