OPINION: The second wind of a movement: Rev. Al Sharpton on the new battle for civil rights

By Dr. James Bridgeforth, Ph.D., M.Ed.

JA Guest Writer

“Every time there was a step forward, there’s always been a pushback,” Rev. Al Sharpton told me, his voice even but insistent, as though repeating a truth America keeps trying to forget. He leaned forward in the frame of our Zoom interview, surrounded by photos of marches past. “But progress,” he said, “only dies when people stop fighting for it.”

That warning lands hard in a nation growing restless with its own reflection. According to a July 2025 Associated Press–NORC poll, only 45 percent of U.S. adults now believe Black people face high levels of discrimination – a steep drop from 60 percent four years ago. Yet 83 percent of Black adults and 61 percent of white adults still agree racism is widespread. The belief gap is widening.

Sharpton sees danger in that drift. “We’ve entered a time when people mistake exhaustion for progress,” he said. “They think because they’re tired of hearing about race, racism must be over.”

A Familiar Battle in a New Disguise

The battles of the 1950s and ’60s were fought in the open – with police dogs, lunch-counter standoffs, and segregated buses. Today’s discrimination hides behind budgets, bans, and bureaucracies. A 2025 survey found that 57 percent of Americans believe Black people are still treated less fairly by police. Injustice didn’t retire – it just changed its uniform.

Sharpton calls this “the strategic stage of the movement.” “The marches gave us visibility,” he said. “Now we need sustainability. We have to organize economically, politically, and digitally – because injustice has learned to wear a suit.”

Through the National Action Network, he’s already drawing a new playbook. Eight legacy civil rights groups are tracking which corporations have quietly dropped their diversity commitments. “The law can’t make us buy where we don’t want to buy,” Sharpton said. “Economic pressure is still our strongest non-violent weapon.”

Mississippi: The Moral Compass

Today in Mississippi, where Fannie Lou Hamer once demanded to be heard, that message still echoes. I think about Sunday mornings in Hattiesburg, where church doors open to sunlight and sermons still sound like strategy sessions. Young activists sit in pews once filled by elders who marched, prayed, and registered voters by candlelight. The tools have changed – clipboards traded for tablets – but the mission remains: faith and action, working side by side.

Sharpton’s message to this generation is clear: organize locally, think nationally. “Every fight for civil rights always had whites and Blacks together,” he said. “If you let it happen to anybody, it can happen to everybody.” That coalition mindset built the Freedom Summer of 1964. It can build the Freedom Future of 2025.

Faith With a Blueprint

The elders never confused faith with passivity. They believed God could move mountains – but they also brought shovels. Sharpton calls that “faith with a blueprint.” “Hope without hands is hollow,” he said. “Faith without a plan is fantasy.” Across Mississippi, that faith is alive again – in pastors turning fellowship halls into polling sites, in teachers defending honest history, in small-business owners mentoring young men who just need a door held open. These aren’t nostalgic gestures. They’re acts of nation-building.

The Call Forward

We are again at a crossroads between fatigue and faith. The statistics may show a nation forgetting, but Mississippi remembers. The marches of the past were not the end – they were the rehearsal. Sharpton’s words still ring: “You can’t wait for history to move. You have to push it.”

And Mississippi has never waited. From the pulpits of Hattiesburg to the classrooms of Jackson, Mississippians always pushed – through fear, through silence, through the myth that equality was ever complete. The second wind of this movement has already begun. You can hear it rising again in every voice still willing to push.