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.[video_embed id='1975482']RELATED: Jordan Peele donates $1 million to Black Lives Matter [/video_embed]“Being a father of sons, you have to open your kids' eyes to the world they live in. When I was growing up, like most boys, you want to be a fireman or a police officer. You want to be a first responder in some way. And then comes the harsh reality of the day that you have to tell your kids that, you know—you have to open their eyes to what the world is around them, to how police view them as young Black men.It's a tricky slope, because I want my boys to have those dreams. I want my boys to look at police, and, officials in the military and police in a higher esteem, but at the same time, you have to be honest with them about what happened,” he said.“Our kids are the ones, your kids, my kids, our kids look at each other as human beings,” he said to a nodding Jimmy. “They don't have the stigma and the weight of bigotry and racism on their shoulders. They can just be human beings."Watch
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon weeknights at 11:35ET on CTV2.[video_embed id='1974904']BEFORE YOU GO: Why Matthew McConaughey is having an 'uncomfortable conversation' about race in America [/video_embed]
