Actor Anthony Mackie is famously the new Captain America, and he is living up to that title in more ways than one. With two weeks of ongoing Black Lives Matter protests on the streets of North America and beyond, and people wondering what they can do to affect change, Mackie spoke to Jimmy Fallon on
The Tonight Show (weeknights at 11:35ET on CTV2) Thursday evening to talk about the moment he realized he could (and needed to) help people raise their voices and change the course of America.“I had a movie called
The Banker that came out this year, and I was able to do the premiere at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. And it really—It changed my life,” he said, pointing out that the Lorraine Motel—now the
National Civil Rights Museum—is where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. As he told a floored Jimmy about the experience of standing on the balcony in the exact spot where that tragic event occurred, he got choked up and openly wept.“And it blew my mind to think that this man worked so hard and gave his life, and here we are 55 years later, dealing with the exact same thing. And that's what hurts. Because I know my grandfather was a sharecropper. My dad was a contractor. And he had to drop out of school in eighth grade to work with his grandfather so that he could give me the opportunity to go to Julliard and be a stupid actor.”
“When I saw that,” he continued, wiping away tears, “my friends and I got together, and we said, ‘We have to do something.’ And we realized there's power in numbers. We have a great opportunity right now to change the scope of the world. And I say to these people, a sheriff is an elected position, a mayor is an elected position, our president is an elected position, your D.A. is an elected position. So we started a website called iamaman.vote. And our goal is to register one million men to vote. And we're going to do everything we can so that these people, that are jeopardizing the future for our kids... You want to hurt somebody, you get rid of their job. And you put somebody in that position who could actually help.”Explaining that
IAmAMan.Vote will help young American men register to vote, educate them, and assist with voting early to avoid long lines at the polls, the
8 Mile star also shared how he’s doing all of this for his two sons and their future.