Al Sharpton so far has not endorsed either candidate in the Democratic race. | Getty Hillary Clinton to meet with Al Sharpton

The Rev. Al Sharpton — who sipped tea at Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem on Wednesday with Bernie Sanders — said he is meeting with Hillary Clinton next Tuesday in New York City, along with National Urban League President Marc Morial and NAACP President Cornell Brooks.

The sitdown with establishment black leaders is part of a new push by her campaign — following Clinton's crushing defeat in the New Hampshire primary — to shore up the African-American vote it has identified as the most critical voting bloc to win the Democratic nomination. Attracting black voters is taking precedence over any attempt to attract support among the millennials who have been inspired by Sanders’ promise of political revolution.


On Thursday, the Clinton campaign announced the endorsement of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. Last week, Clinton traveled to Flint, Michigan, a largely African-American city suffering a crisis because of lead-contaminated water that has affected at last 8,000 children under the age of 6. The wounded Democratic front-runner is also set to campaign in the coming days with the family members of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed black men killed in incidents involving law enforcement officers.

Sharpton said he will host a news conference with Clinton after the closed-door meeting, which would mark the first time Clinton were to take questions from the press corps that covers her in over two months. A Sharpton spokeswoman clarified his comments after the interview, telling POLITICO that he would participate in the news conference and said it was not yet clear that Clinton would.

Clinton so far has demonstrated she has support of an older generation of black activists, like Georgia Rep. John Lewis and civil rights leader Hazel Dukes. But at the meeting Tuesday with Clinton, Sharpton said each of the organization leaders are bringing a handful of millennials so she can meet “young people in traditional organizations,” not just the activists with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sharpton's goal, he said, is to make sure the conversation stays on the issues because the race about race "has the potential to get ugly,” he said. "We need to set a tone that this has got to be about policy, otherwise it gets ugly. You got people that have credibility that are taking attacks on each other that could poison the general election in the long run. I want the debate to be around the economic inequality with blacks and criminal justice, not about who’s been around, and who marched 50 years ago, and who worked with Marian Wright Edelman 40 years ago.”

On Thursday, Dukes and Lewis raised questions about the depth of Sanders' involvement in the civil rights movement, when he participated in the March on Washington in 1963 as a student at the University of Chicago.

"I never saw him. I never met him," Lewis said. "I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved with the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President Clinton."

The Clinton campaign is planning to put an increased focus on her biography, including her work as a young student at the Children’s Defense Fund, which was run by Edelman.

The Sanders campaign isn't taking the onslaught sitting down. It rolled out the endorsement of civil rights icon Harry Belafonte on Thursday. “He offers us a chance to declare unequivocally that there is a group of citizens who have a deep caring for where our nation goes and what it does in the process of going,” Belafonte said in a video endorsing the Vermont senator.

Sharpton — who so far has not endorsed either candidate in the Democratic race — said he was left with a lot of questions after his photo-op with Sanders. “What I pressed him on was that I hear the general headline slogan but where's the backup — free college, how you gonna pay for it? You talk about income inequality but you don't talk about the race gap in there. I wanted specifics,” Sharpton said. “I told him you gotta earn the vote and that there is a difference between the white youth vote and the black youth vote.”

“He gave me no new information other than that he said he was calling on the governor of Michigan to resign. He doesn’t think Mrs. Clinton has done that, but she did go to Flint.”

Sharpton said Clinton is making progress with young black voters but still has work to do. “The Flint trip was very important,” he said. “The fact that she met with the mothers of brutality was important. She's making steps and I think that she's dealing against now the momentum of Bernie. They both need to be better, but they're better than they were.”

A Clinton spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about Tuesday's meeting and news conference.

