A Bronx man at the center of New York City’s Black Lives Matter movement came after the Rev. Al Sharpton with both barrels over remarks the minister made last week about black-on-black violence amid a rash of shootings across the city.
Hawk Newsome, the chairman of Black Lives Matter’s Greater New York chapter, said the long-time civil rights activist is out of touch, and said Sharpton’s point-the-finger preaching has given Republicans and the police ammunition to try to discredit the cause.
“Black Lives Matter can be identified as the new civil rights movement,” Newsome told the Daily News. “Sharpton being a civil rights activist has to point fingers at himself as well. The older guard is to blame for some of this violence. They should have cleaned up this mess a long time ago. Why hasn’t he started a stop the violence program?”
Newsome said he took issue with remarks Sharpton made at a funeral for Brandon Hendricks-Ellison, 17, a promising college basketball prospect who was shot to death by a stray bullet in the Bronx last month just two days after graduating high school.
Sharpton pushed for stronger gun control measures and said the Black community has to work to fix its own problems.
“Yes, we’re going to deal with policing,” Sharpton said in his eulogy. “But we also have to deal with our communities. We can’t do anything until we learn to respect everyone one of us. The way to teach America that Black lives matter is to teach it to each other first.”
But Newsome said the roots of violence go much deeper.
“We fully understand that the true cause of violence is poverty and desperation,” Newsome said. “They are playing into the white racist narrative by pointing fingers at the community. The true cause of our pain is this shrewd capitalist society that leaves us living in unsafe housing conditions. We are under employed. The zip codes with the highest rates of poverty have the highest rates of violence.
“I would expect Al Sharpton to talk about that, but he is full of crap, and he’s an ineffective leader,” Newsome said. “Instead of pointing fingers and chasing news cameras, he should be doing the real work in our community.”
Sharpton declined to respond to Newsome’s remarks. But a Sharpton associate, the Rev. Stephan Marshall, said Sharpton has been speaking for 30 years about Black-on-Black crime and the need for Black communities to address the problem.
Last month, the official Black Lives Matter Global Network distanced itself from Newsome after Newsome said in a Fox News interview that the new movement “would burn down this system and replace it.”
BLM Global Network managing director Kailee Scales said Newsome’s comments at the time were not an official statement of the organization.
“Hawk Newsome has no relation to the Black Lives Matter Global Network,” Scales said.
Newsome is a former president of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, which is not an affiliate chapter of the global network. Although there are many groups that use “Black Lives Matter” or “BLM” in their names, only 16 are considered affiliates of the BLM Global Network.
Marshall said the official organization has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Sharpton on a variety of racial issues.
“We support that group. We respect that fight,” said Marshall, a liaison with Sharpton’s National Action Network. “There’s no division between the National Action Network and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Marshall said Newsome is just trying to stir up trouble.
“Saying that Black lives have to matter to Black Lives Matter is almost a curse to Hawk Newsome,” Marshall said. “We see who he is. He’s a fraud. Families from around the country wouldn’t be calling us if we were ineffective.”
Sharpton’s teach-it-to-each-other-first advice echoed the sentiments of at least one family touched by the recent spate of gun violence.
After 1-year-old Davell Gardner was shot and killed on July 12 as he sat in a stroller at a late-night Brooklyn park barbecue, his angry grandmother, Samantha Gardner wondered about the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement, as did many on social media who responded to Davell’s tragic death.
“I feel like this,” Gardner said. “You all are ranting and raving about Black lives. But you take a life that was only a year and half old. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair to the grandparents. It’s not fair to the mother. It’s not fair to the father, the whole family in general.”
A day after the Bedford-Stuyvesant shooting, angry residents looked for answers.
“They march for everyone else,” screamed a woman near the scene about Black Lives Matter protesters “Where they at?”
Newsome expressed his condolences to Davell’s family and the loved ones of all the recent shooting victims. He said protests are only the first wave of action against systemic racism and community violence, which he said are related.
“What we’re trying to do is next level,” Newsome said. “I’m protested out.”
He said the next level includes food distribution, financial and wealth-management training and advice on entrepreneurial opportunities.
“People can march and whoop and holler, but we’re actually instituting programs to make our communities safer,” Newsome said. “I’ve been marching for five years. It’s time to go in and build something.”
