Hillary Clinton, he says, faces a different hurdle. Frustrated with her vision-free message in the early days of the campaign, Sharpton has come around. “Hillary, I think, has moved a lot further to where I would want her. I am very impressed with a lot of the stuff she’s saying.” It was Clinton, he says, for example, who pushed to have a Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, after meeting with civil-rights groups and Flint residents. “Her challenge,” Sharpton says, “is going to be turnout, how she energizes her base.”

Sharpton in the House of Justice with civil-rights activists and community leaders. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

As in 2012, the African-American electorate is a critical part of that base for the Democratic nominee. Those voters were the foundation of Hillary Clinton’s dominance of the primaries to date, and will remain essential for her to clinch the nomination. And, according to Democratic consultants, the presidency. The challenge won’t be just winning a decisive share of the African-American vote but also making sure that she is able to inspire the huge, record turnout of African-American voters who went to the polls in 2012. They made up more than 13 percent of all voters in that election, and they gave Obama 93 percent of their vote. “What they are going to need is people who can get that vote out in November,” says Sharpton. “When they get through who is the nominee, and it looks right now like it’s Hillary, you got to get people to turn them on, and to turn them out.”

The stakes are high, says Sharpton. “The enthusiasm, if you look at how the Trump candidacy has increased the Republican turnout, and how the Democratic turnout has gone down—there is an enthusiasm gap.” Sharpton has held back on endorsing a candidate so far. “My objective was never to be a power broker or whatever in the Democratic Party. My objective was to build a national civil-rights organization and to keep civil rights front and center. To endorse too quickly is to bring me from being an advocate to surrogate. That said, I am committed with every molecule of my body to making sure that the right wing doesn’t win in November. Everything that I have lived for in 61 years is at stake.

“Ted Cruz, I think, is very dangerous. And I think that Trump is dangerous but that he’s so bizarre he might be easier to beat. Might be. If it’s Trump versus Hillary, she has got to bring the fire to him. It cannot be a Rose Garden strategy here. This has got to be sticks, stones, and thorns, because he don’t understand nothing else.” Like many, he suspects that Hillary will be dealing with a lot of misogyny, whipped up by Trump, but also the sexism that is more widespread and deeply embedded. For that, he says, she is going to need surrogates to say what she can’t. “You got to say, ‘You’re going to have this guy who is a political clown run the free world because you got a problem with a woman?”

Sharpton worries that people don’t see the danger looming in November. “If we get the wrong Supreme Court justice, and the wrong president to stack that court—voting rights, affirmative action, the criminal-justice reform that Holder started, all that is gone. Roe versus Wade? Same-sex marriage? Gone. This is a real moment. This is time to put on your big-boy, big-girl pants, ‘cuz you’re dealing with some craziness.

“I take it personally,” he says. “I get up in the morning worried about that. I go to sleep at night worried. Everything that everybody told you all your adult life that I would never be, I was able to do personally. The rest of my life is about bigger things. Nobody in the world would have believed I would have access to the White House, access to MSNBC, and still have a movement that people come out to. So I got no Al Sharpton points to prove. It all means nothing if we lose voting rights and immigration rights and can’t deal with policing. I mean, nothing. I’ll be just another guy who got known.”