Donald Trump is looking for your favorite rappers and ball players to support his presidential bid. According to The Boston Herald, Trump is looking to bring big stars in the Hip-Hop community to Madison Square Garden for a campaign rally.
Trump is also looking to appear in Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta. There currently isn’t a firm plan to engage the Black community, which is alarming for Trump’s campaign with just five months left until election day.
“To be quite honest, the Republican Party does not have a cohesive engagement plan for Black communities,” said Darrell Scott, a Black pastor and longtime Trump ally who co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump in 2016. “What it has are conservatives in communities of color who have taken it upon themselves to head our own initiatives.”
Any sports or Hip-Hop luminaree will likely receive a negative reaction from Black leaders. One of them is Rev. Al Sharpton, who spoke against rappers who are standing in support of former President Donald Trump. During an appearance on MSNBC in Aug. 2023, Sharpton questioned how Black people, including rappers, could support Trump, recalling his history with the Central Park Five.
For a brief history lesson, in 1989, Trump, who was then a prominent New York City businessman, took out several full-page newspaper advertisements calling for New York City politicians to reinstate the death penalty following the brutal rape and attack of a female jogger in New York City. Five youth, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson, were wrongfully imprisoned for 7-13 years until the attacker was caught. They had been coerced into giving false confessions and received substantial settlements. All are involved in criminal justice activism efforts now. Trump never formally apologized to the five, especially since he took out the ads before their trials began.
“Let’s go to the 1990s when five young Black and brown men were falsely accused of raping a white woman in Central Park,” Sharpton said. “It was Donald Trump that took out ads in the papers in New York saying they should get the death penalty.”
Sharpton later said, “Black men need to know they were all young Black men. One spent 13 years in jail. He was with us for the March on Washington on Saturday. Let them come and tell the rappers and other Black men being seduced by Trump what he did in his hometown to innocent to Black men.”
