A Thursday press conference in Washington that was meant to announce a planned civil rights march on Washington DC instead turned into a eulogy for the attorney generalship of Eric Holder.
The National Urban League, the National Action Network, and the families of Michael Brown and Eric Garner asked for congressional leaders to pass a law requiring police officers to wear body cameras and announced a civil rights march on Washington, scheduled for later in the fall.
But in the midst of the conference came news that Holder — who has defined himself as an “activist” and repeatedly involved the Department of Justice in high-profile local cases — is resigning. MSNBC host Al Sharpton, the guest of honor, also expressed his fondness for Holder.
Sharpton trotted out the grieving parents of Brown and Garner — Michael Brown’s mother became so overwhelmed that she eventually left the conference — to condemn alleged police racial profiling and excessive use of force against black youths.
Marc Morial, CEO of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans, opened the press conference with a description of the cases involving Brown and Garner. He then listed names of past cases of police officers allegedly killing unarmed black men, such as Ezell Ford of California and Sean Bell of New York.
“A USA Today story put the number of people killed each year by local police at roughly 400. Perhaps, and yes, some, are undoubtedly justified, but the ones we talk about today are not,” Morial said.
Sharpton was introduced as being at the “forefront” of the civil rights debate “throughout his entire distinguished career.”
“We come to Washington to appeal to the Justice Department to set national law and to come in and deal with these cases,” said the longtime firebrand who participated in the 1987 Tawana Brawley hoax and the 1995 street agitation that ended with a fatal shooting and arson at a Harlem clothing store “There must be specific criminal investigation on excessive force in these cases,” Sharpton said.
Sharpton announced plans to bring “thousands to Washington this fall” in a “hands-up march and rally.” No specific date for the march was given.
The president-elect of the National Bar Association and the Brown family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, said that the family “asks members of the Congressional Black Caucus to convene hearings” so they could have public “findings” about the death of their son.
Crump also asked congressional leaders to consider the Michael Brown Law, which would require all police officers to wear body cameras “so we don’t have to guess anymore about what happened to our children.” Crump said that the family would ask the civil rights leaders how to craft the legislation.
The news of Holder’s resignation came as a surprise during the conference.
“There is no attorney general that has demonstrated a civil rights record equal to Eric Holder,” Sharpton said, to enthusiastic applause and a round of “Amens” from the audience. “If he is resigning, the civil rights community has lost, in effect, the most effective civil rights attorney general in the history of this country. His reward for standing up, though . . . was to be the only attorney general held in contempt by the U.S. Congress.”
Later, by means of a press release, Sharpton said he was “disappointed” that Holder was resigning because “he leaves at a critical time when we need his continued diligence most. We are engaged with immediate conversations with the White House on deliberations over a successor whom we hope will continue in the general direction of Attorney General Holder.”
Why Al Sharpton has any say as to who becomes the next Attorney General of the United States was not immediately clear.
— Christine Sisto is an editorial associate at National Review Online.