The voting rights of black Americans are once again under siege — and Al Sharpton's ready to fight back.
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00:00Under the Bush administration, George Bush, they studied voter fraud and came up with
00:060.0003% fraud. So it looks like a solution looking for a problem rather than a problem looking for a solution.
00:31Voter ID laws, where it takes on a racial aspect, is that any number of studies, including
00:38the Justice Department, said that the forms of ID they're asking for are disproportionately
00:45not available or not used a lot by African Americans and people of color, like passports,
00:54because they don't travel a lot overseas because that's not within their lifestyle and life income.
01:02In Texas, they will say they will take a gun permit but not take a state student card.
01:09Well, a lot of us are not members of the NRA. So the question becomes, if the impact is
01:17that it's going to hurt disproportionately a certain segment by Justice Department studies,
01:24then why would you do it other than to hurt that segment?
01:28Fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, there are still too many barriers to vote and too many people trying to erect new ones.
01:35We've seen laws that roll back early voting, force people to jump through hoops to cast a ballot,
01:40or lead to legitimate voters being improperly purged from the rolls.
01:45Over the years, we've seen provisions specifically designed to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote.
01:52In a democracy like ours, with a history like ours, that's a disgrace.
02:16What surprises me is how blatant it is. The Secretary of State, purging over 50,000 voters,
02:23saying they're on hold pending whether they can vote, and he's the candidate for governor.
02:30Now, I mean, you can't get more blatant than that. Not only is it something that suppresses a vote,
02:36Associated Press says it is 70 percent blacks that they have on hold of this over 50,000.
02:44And it's done by the guy running against a black woman for governor.
02:49And I think that is what is stunning, how blatant and open they are with playing just raw political power games.
02:58Part of our commitment is that we all celebrate Dr. King, but we've got to protect what Dr. King stood for.
03:07I was youth director of the New York chapter of his organization as 13 years old when he died.
03:13It's not enough to say Dr. King got the Voting Rights Act and then, in our generation, allow it to be violated or diminished.
03:20So it's the maintaining of that. So we are passionate about it because that's part of our purpose in existence.