The Rev. Al Sharpton said Republicans in the South Carolina Senate did the “right thing” on Tuesday after they bucked President Donald Trump and joined Democrats to block a new congressional map that would have erased the state’s single majority-Black district, represented by longtime Rep. James Clyburn.
“Given the population in South Carolina, the percentage of Black residents, it would have been unthinkable to wipe out the only Black district and the only Democratic district,” Sharpton said on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe.”
Sharpton, the host of MS NOW’s “Politics Nation” and founder of the National Action Network, said he heard from activists in the state prior to Tuesday’s Senate vote, who said they believed enough Republicans would reject the president’s efforts to remake the map ahead of November’s elections.
“Rev. Nelson Rivers, who heads National Action Network for us in South Carolina, was there every day, and he kept telling me, ‘No, some of these Republicans are going the other way,’ and I said, ‘Really?’ and it ended up being that way,” Sharpton told the “Morning Joe” panel.
“I think this might be a story that a lot of us are not looking at,” he continued. “A lot of people, even in the Deep South, are saying, ‘Wait a minute, there’s only so far I’m going to go.’”
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Sharpton said Republicans may have chosen not to support the president’s effort for “different reasons,” including the possibility of their own districts being redrawn to include the impacted voters, which could have diluted their support, but ultimately showed that “in their heart they know what’s wrong.”
“The history of the civil rights movement was always reconciliation, and we had a small example of that yesterday,” he explained. “Some of them may have done it because they feel that their districts would have been impacted. But whatever the reason, they came to a conclusion that we benefit from.”
“The story could have been, here’s another reinforcement of the old South again. Yesterday, the opposite happened in South Carolina,” he added.
Whatever their motivations, Sharpton said he believes that if “people do stand up and do the right thing on the Republican side, we need to stand up and loudly say they did the right thing.”
You can watch Sharpton’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”