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Senator Bernie Sanders wove issues of race and civil rights into his standard speech about income inequality and overhauling the campaign finance system on Thursday as he sought to win over an influential crowd of black leaders.

“I have a history of being blunt, so let’s be blunt today,” Mr. Sanders said to open his remarks to the National Action Network annual conference in New York, put on by the group’s founder, the Rev. Al Sharpton.

He listed his usual litany of complaints with the political system and the influence of Wall Street, but he tried to root that message more distinctly in race, weaving quotes from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into his remarks.

“Dr. King recognized it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis, in a full-time job, getting part-time income,” Mr. Sanders said. “That was the 1960s. Sad to say, it is still true today in many respects.”

Mr. Sanders spoke a day after Hillary Clinton received a lukewarm reception from the crowd, partly because her remarks were heavily reliant on policy proposals rather than rallying cries.

Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, did not talk policy and did not overly adapt his remarks to the crowd. But his words played well. At points the audience chanted, “Bernie! Bernie!” Cries of “Tell it, Bernie!” rang out when he listed unemployment statistics for African-American youth.

“How is it possible we have trillions of dollars to spend on a war in Iraq we should have never gotten into but somehow we don’t have the funds to rebuild inner cities?” he said to a roar of applause.

Mr. Sharpton, who has not endorsed either Democrat, had urged Mr. Sanders to tailor his message of taking on Wall Street to the audience.

“What are we going to do about inequality, not just from Wall Street to Main Street, but to Martin Luther King Boulevard?” Mr. Sharpton said as he introduced Mr. Sanders. “The race gap and the income gap is what we are trying to center on in this campaign.”

Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders hit similar themes, vowing to end mass incarceration and crack down on infrastructure failures like the lead-tainted water in Flint, Mich., that disproportionately affect poor and black communities.

“This is America 2016. We should not be poisoning our children,” Mr. Sanders said. Mrs. Clinton, in her remarks on Wednesday, unveiled an environmental plan to eliminate the threat of lead poisoning in five years.

Mr. Sanders’s speech wasn’t anything new, but it was “on point,” said Robert McMillian, 38, a retail worker in the Bronx who also attended Mrs. Clinton’s speech on Wednesday. “She said all the right things, but I just don’t necessarily believe her,” Mr. McMillian said.

“He covered some very, very pertinent issues to African-Americans,” said Salaam Ismial, 57, a youth counselor in Brooklyn. “He seems like an honest person and has been very ahead on issues like jobs and joblessness.”

But there was one major issue that Mr. Sanders did not broach, and that left some audience members unsatisfied: guns.

As Mr. Sanders spoke, Iesha Sekou, an anti-violence activist in Harlem, chanted, “What about gun violence?”

Mrs. Clinton has intensely criticized Mr. Sanders for his voting record on gun control. On Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton called gun violence “a national emergency” and said, “My opponent, who will be speaking to you tomorrow, and I don’t see this the same way.”

The issue left some undecided voters, like Ms. Sekou, conflicted. She said some things about Mrs. Clinton make her uneasy, like the 1994 crime bill and 1996 overhaul of the welfare system that President Bill Clinton enacted.

“I remember the language she used about black people then,” she said.

But, she said, Mr. Sanders not addressing the gun problem “raises a red flag for me.”

