Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) accused Black Lives Matters movement of approaching race relations in a negative way during an interview with CNN on Tuesday.
"I understand that people had great passions, but I also understand that the way you begin to resolve them is you do it by loving people and treating people with dignity and respect," Huckabee told host Wolf Blitzer. "You don't do it by magnifying the problems, you do it by really magnifying the solutions."
The Republican presidential candidate's remarks came in response to footage of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's meeting with members of the movement last week.
Protesters affiliated with the movement have also disrupted appearances by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Huckabee's fellow GOP candidate, ex-Florida governor Jeb Bush.
Huckabee told Blitzer that he considered racism "more of a sin problem than a skin problem," and said that he faced death threats while pushing to integrate an all-white church 35 years ago. According to reports, he was the pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas around that time.
"When I hear people scream 'black lives matter,' I’m thinking, of course they do," he said on Tuesday. "But all lives matter. It is not that any life matters more than another. That's the whole message that Dr. [Martin Luther] King tried to present, and I think he'd be appalled by the notion that we're elevating some lives above others."
Members of the movement have criticized the use of the phrase "all lives matter" as a response to their movement, arguing that it is a way for people to downplay police use of excessive force against black communities.
Watch footage from the interview, as aired on Tuesday, below.
