Are Sharpton and Jackson exploiting Trayvon Martin?

Updated: Former NAACP leader C.L. Bryant and Dr. Alveda King are accusing Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton of “exploiting” the Trayvon Martin tragedy to “racially divide this country.” 

“His family should be outraged at the fact that they’re using this child as the bait to inflame racial passions,” Rev. C.L. Bryant said in a Monday interview with The Daily Caller.

The conservative black pastor who was once the chapter president of the Garland, Texas NAACP called Jackson and Sharpton “race hustlers” and said they are “acting as though they are buzzards circling the carcass of this young boy.”

Jackson, for example, recently said Martin’s death shows how “blacks are under attack” and “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.”

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, killed Martin, a 17-year-old black man who was unarmed at the time of his death, last month. Zimmerman has claimed to have shot Martin in self-defense and has not been charged with a crime.

But Bryant, who explores the topic of black-on-black crime in his new film “Runaway Slave,” said people like Jackson and Sharpton are being misleading to suggest there is an epidemic of “white men killing black young men.”

“The epidemic is truly black on black crime,” Bryant said. “The greatest danger to the lives of young black men are young black men.”

To read more from the Daily Caller, click here.

Tuesday the Daily Caller's Matthew Boyle offers an interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece also criticizing the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson for politicizing the Trayvon Martin shooting and leveraging racial tensions to rile up Americans.

Dr. Alveda King, now the director of African-American outreach at Priests for Life and the founder of King For America, said she hopes Sharpton and Jackson stop “stirring up the people without positive solutions” in Sanford, Fla., and elsewhere in the U.S.

“I would believe that, by stirring up all of the emotions and reactions, I wanted to encourage them to remember the man that they say that they followed, to remember that his message was nonviolence and very loving,” King told The Daily Caller, referencing her late uncle. She added that she wanted to encourage Jackson and Sharpton “to talk about nonviolence and not to incite people with that race card that they are very good at playing.”

“Nonviolence was a very important part of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,” she added. “So, we want to encourage people to be nonviolent in their responses, to be thorough in their research and that justice must be done…We want justice to come, but we want nonviolent responses to this really tragic and terrible incident.”

King hasn’t made up her mind about the facts of this case and who is responsible for what, but believes there should be a full investigation. She told The DC that she agrees with former Republican presidential candidate and businessman Herman Cain, however, who has asked for a full investigation instead of “swirling rhetoric.”

To read more from the Daily Caller interview by Matthew Boyle, click here.