Scenes from the March on Washington as thousands gather to call for racial equality
As thousands gather in Washington, D.C., 57 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the families of Black Americans killed by police will speak in the same spot.
Around 50,000 people are expected to attend the event, called “Get Your Knees Off Our Necks” March on Washington, which includes speeches at the Lincoln Memorial and a march to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Washington Post reported. Co-sponsored by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, the NAACP, the Lawyers’ Commerce for Civil Rights, and the National Urban League, the event calls for legislation on police reform and other policies toward racial equality.
“We’ve got to create a different consciousness and a different climate in our nation,” co-convener of the march Martin Luther King III, son of the late civil rights activist, told The Associated Press.
Sharpton also organized for the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Jacob Blake, among others, to speak at the event, according to the publication.
The march comes in the wake of police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooting Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, as he attempted to get into his SUV Sunday afternoon, video shows. His father said his son is paralyzed from the waist down. The shooting set off protests in Kenosha, a city of about 100,000, and has reignited the civil unrest that followed the death of Floyd in police custody three months ago.
Sharpton first announced the march on June 4 during a eulogy for Floyd, a Black man who died on May 25 after now-fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for about eight minutes, as three other officers didn’t intervene. Sharpton said families who “know the pain” would lead the march, CNN reported.
Activists are also calling for lawmakers to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which would end qualified immunity for police, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases at the federal level, and create a national registry for police misconduct, according to CNN.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris recorded a speech for the march. Harris said in a video that if civil rights activists of the 1960s were here today, they “would share in our anger and frustration as we continue to see Black men and women slain in our streets and left behind by an economy and justice system that have too often denied Black folks our dignity and rights.”
This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 12:10 PM with the headline "Scenes from the March on Washington as thousands gather to call for racial equality."