The niece of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left a meeting with President Donald Trump and 19 other faith leaders Monday defending Trump as someone who is not a racist. Alveda King is a daughter A.D. King, the younger brother of MLK.
“The president spent a long time with us, and the meeting was not a photo-op,” Dr. Alveda King told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning. “He’s not a racist. Absolutely is not, and the programs he has moved forward, the higher job market is helping African-Americans, the criminal justice reform is helping African-Americans.”
Trump has recently come under fire for telling four congresswomen of color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
He then got into a Twitter war of sorts calling out black leaders, including Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rev. Al Sharpton, whom Trump called a “con man” and a “troublemaker.”
Sharpton, a civil rights activist, responded Monday:
“Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man. I do make trouble for bigots. If he really thought I was a con man, he’d want me in his cabinet.”
Related: Rev. Al Sharpton Unleashes on Trump After President Calls Him a ‘Con Man’ and ‘Trouble-Maker’
The feud with Cummings, however started even earlier.
It began Saturday when Trump responded on Twitter to Cummings’ criticism of conditions at migrant detention facilities at the southern U.S. border.
The president called Cummings “a brutal bully” and said his district is “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and that it’s “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the southern border.
“If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place,” Trump said of Maryland’s majority-black 7th Congressional District.
Cummings responded, “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
The feud sent celebrities and civil rights activist alike to social media, where they used #IStandWithElijahCummings on Twitter.
King, however, characterized Trump as the attacked party.
She told him she had photos of him with Sharpton and activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, Fox reported.
“They began to hurl insults at the president. Nobody wants to understand that,” King said. “What the president’s simply saying is your communities need to be fixed and he said to Representative Cummings, Elijah Cummings …”
King then accused Cummings of saying “either abort the babies now or you’ll kill them later.”
“He says things like that and then you look at his community and you see individuals suffering, communities suffering, and families suffering,” King said.
