“Now is the time,” was the phrase that the Rev. Al Sharpton used as his slogan for Monday’s early morning meeting with students on NCA&T’s campus.
At 10:00 am in the Student Union, a crowd of students, faculty and community members gathered in the Stallings Ballroom for what Sharpton called an “emergency meeting.” Sharpton spoke on topics ranging from Wall Street, the Federal Government, to student loans and the war in Iraq.
Sharpton began the meeting by discussing the current climate of the nation’s economy. He believes the $700 billion bailout by Congress directly affects students at A&T and across the nation.
“At the end of it all, A&T students, their children and future generations will have to pay for the bad decisions our government is making. A&T students must register to vote in order to change things. If at anytime you all need to take life seriously, now is the time,” bellowed Sharpton.
Sharpton goes on to compare the events of the 1960’s with the events that have occurred during the present decade. He mentions the fact that many people of this generation claim that the 1960s was a bad time to live in, especially for black people who led the Civil Rights Movement.
However, he urges the crowd to realize that the time that we live in now, is just as bad as the 1960’s because of the crisis Americans are involved in with a Federal Government that has made disastrous mistakes for the past eight years.
“Now, banks are closing, corporations are going under financially, black 17 year-old kids in Jena, LA are being locked up and legally tried as adults and more and more blacks are facing death row because somebody under oath lied on them. Don’t talk about back in the day, these days are worse,” shouted Sharpton.
On a brighter note, Sharpton began to specifically urge the A&T students and all other Greensboro college students that they could be the ones to take the lead and usher in a new day for all of America. “Don’t underestimate the power of students. Will you be recorded as students who changed the course of history? Whether good or bad your gonna be in the history books one way or the other,” said Sharpton. On the subject of the war in Iraq, Sharpton says, “We are in a war that should have never been started in the first place. We went to war on lies. We were told that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but Iraq was never the perpetrator. Homeland Security tells us to leave it to them because they are the experts, but if they are such experts why is Bin Laden, who is the culprit, somehow still roaming the mountains of Afghanistan on dialysis and producing three videos a year?”
“People are losing their homes and are called ‘dumb’ because they believed what the lenders told them, instead of the lenders being called predators for lying to the people and telling them that they would be able to afford the high-priced loans,” said Sharpton.
Sharpton insists that students register to vote and volunteer for at least an hour to help other students register as well. “We don’t need votes to come up missing again like they did back in the 2000 and 2004 elections,” warns Sharpton. As Sharpton instructs helpers to hand out voter registration forms to unregistered students, he finishes by saying, “This isn’t about Barack Obama or even John McCain, but the life you want to have in the future. The hardest thing for a black preacher to do is conduct a funeral for an insignificant Negro. Don’t allow your life to end without doing something significant.”