When the Rev. Al Sharpton injected himself into the controversy over the Aug. 9 police shooting of young black man Michael Brown, he neglected the non-violent philosophy that guided the original U.S. civil-rights movement, a niece of slain rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. told
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
Conservative pastor and civil-rights activist Alveda King told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that she is "dismayed" by the conduct of some Brown family supporters — Sharpton in particular— in the months preceding Monday night's grand jury ruling on Brown's death.
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Jurors spared Brown's shooter, white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, from indictment. The decision was met with more violent protests — which King laid at Sharpton's feet after weeks of hearing him demand an indictment with his familiar refrain of "no justice, no peace."
"You can go in and stir up violence and then say you're the solution to the violence," King said in criticizing the New York civil-rights activist who became a vocal ally of Brown's family after the Aug. 9 shooting.
"Well, if you can stir it up, how are you going to solve it?" said King, alluding to the latest chaos in Ferguson, where businesses were burned and looted on Monday night.
King said Sharpton's words and actions not only contradicted her uncle's philosophy, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, they also went against the
pleas of Brown's family.
"So, to stir up violence and to say 'no justice, no peace' when Michael Brown's own parents said let's have peace and justice, let's resolve this peacefully, let's get solutions — the best way to honor Michael Brown is, honestly, to agree with his parents," said King.
"I'm not saying necessarily that they, on purpose, want people to be violent and kill people," King said of Brown family supporters, including Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "I'm not saying that. But when you stir up people's emotions rather than invite them to their knees and pray, you are more likely to get violence."
King said she was satisfied with the legal inquiry into Brown's death, describing the grand jury as a cross-section of the community in which Brown and Wilson both lived.
"Human justice, of course, has been realized by a grand jury of peers of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson — black jurors, white jurors, I guess, blended in age and gender, and all of that," said King.
"So, a jury of peers appears to have decided that there was going to be some reasonable doubt, based on everything that they had heard," she said. "So, that was not a racist decision. If you could admit that there were black folks and white folks on that grand jury, it's not a racist decision."
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