Sixty years ago, Dr Martin Luther King led the historic March on Washington; three years ago tens of thousands carried forward the banner of freedom and equality in the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks March. Today we celebrate our legacy of Resistance to fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror as a glorious heritage of all humankind, and a sacred duty to stand in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Of this I say; who remains unconquered in resistance is free.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As I wrote in my post of June 28 2021 on Stonewall; I believe resistance confers freedom, that to be free of force and control means to remain unconquered within ourselves as autonomous individuals, that to defy tyranny and fascism is an act of liberation and affirmation of our humanity which cannot be stolen, and a victorious moment of self creation which exalts us beyond the limits of threat of force. And that each of us who remains unconquered becomes a seed of liberty and transformation, able to free others.
This is how we realize the ideals of democracy, of freedom and equality, and redeem the promise of America as a free society of equals whose citizens are co-owners of our government, an America which is a guarantor of our universal human rights and a refuge for the wretched of the earth, and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us stand united in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Here I wish to amplify the mission statement for the Black National Convention which says, “We are in defense of ALL Black lives. When we say “Black lives,” that means everybody. We want all Black people to thrive. Black people of every gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion are included. Everyone in, nobody out.”
This bold and necessary declaration of principles of inclusion and diversity by a marginalized, dispossessed, and vulnerable community I would amend by expansion to general conditions of which white supremacist terror and racism in America are examples of universal systems of oppression; Let us defend all lives. When we say all lives, that means everybody. We want all human beings to thrive. Peoples of every race and nation, language, gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion included.
I dream of a United Humankind and a global free society of equals, wherein our universal human rights are paramount and we are guarantors of each other’s rights, and in which we have abandoned the social use of force. Everyone in, nobody out.
As written by Rachel Jones in 2020 in National Geographic, in retrospect of the historic March on Washington, in an article entitled A fractured and traumatized nation’ marches on, 57 years later: ”Like many other African-American parents, Tasha Johnson made the ten-hour drive to Washington, D.C., from Brunswick, Georgia, on Friday to represent her two sons, 27-year-old Rafeal and 26-year-old Akeem. But she was also attending the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on behalf of one of her sons’ best friends, who couldn’t be there.
Tragically, Ahmaud Arbery’s name was mentioned multiple times from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Friday’s Commitment March on Washington, a peaceful demonstration attended by thousands of people for a very powerful reason. A continuous cycle of police-related shootings and killings have stoked a national outcry. The organizers of Friday’s march, titled “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” to highlight the need for police and criminal justice reform, say the protest provided sorely needed evidence that Americans are ready to confront racial injustice. Not even the risk of COVID-19 could keep them away.
The last full Friday of August felt like the culmination of a long, restless summer bookended by George Floyd’s May 25 brutal demise in Minneapolis to the August 23 shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seven times as he walked away from a police officer during an arrest. America’s seeming unwillingness to acknowledge the toll these events have taken was put on full blast during the protest, and few could sum up the relevance of the day better than Johnson.
“It was devastating to hear my son sobbing from the pain that he was in on the day Ahmaud was murdered,” Johnson says of her son, Akeem. Arbery, 25, was jogging through a Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood on February 23 when he was pursued and fatally shot by two white men who claimed they thought he was a burglar.
“He is still going through it,” Johnson said Friday. “He speaks of having visions of Ahmaud coming to him in dreams and talking to him. Where we are in this nation, we’re doing incredible damage to the minds and the lives of our Black youth, and it has to stop. I came because I want the world to know I am willing to be part of the solution.”
While some observers expected the threat of COVID-19 to restrict the numbers of participants, tens of thousands patiently queued in a line that wrapped around the perimeter of the National Mall, awaiting their turn to have their temperature taken as a precautionary measure. Then they were given a neon green wristband and a ticket to enter the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool area near the World War II Memorial.
March participants from across the United States descended on Washington to advocate for police reform, voting rights, and for more just, equitable lives for their children as the United States heads to a contentious presidential election clouded by claims of blatant voter suppression and interference during the 2016 campaign.
Like Tasha Johnson, many invoked the country’s long history of racial violence and economic injustice as their motivating factors.
Renee Jones of Riverside, California, says she was marching in honor of a cousin who was killed by a Las Vegas police officer. She wants better for her son, her nieces and nephews.
“I’m out here to give them a fighting chance and pay it forward, just like the generation before me did for us,” Jones says.
Another marcher, Keir Witherspoon, says she carries the spirit of two of her grandparents who had attended the 1963 march. (See rare color images from the first March on Washington.)
“They would feel proud of me for exercising my right to protest…and disheartened that I am fighting for the same thing they were,” says Witherspoon.
Lathan Strong attended the march set an example for youth.
“As an educator, it is important that we show our young people the importance of being out here and what it means to vote,” Strong says.
Friday’s march, which featured presentations by high-profile pastors, activists, labor leaders, and politicians, had glimpses of the original gathering 57 years ago. The 1963 event was a masterstroke of careful, deliberate staging and preparation. The official program reads like a social justice roll call of the ages. Envision a stage big enough for A. Phillip Randolph, the celebrated union leader who founded of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Myrlie Evers, recently widowed after her husband, Mississippi NAACP secretary Medgar Evers, was assassinated in his driveway. The Archbishop of Washington Patrick O’Boyle spoke, as did NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. Congressman John Lewis was a significant presence at the 1963 March. His death last month left a gaping hole in the fabric of American civil rights activism. (Lewis spent his life bridging America’s racial and political divides.)
And, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was anointed as the “Moses of his people” at the original march—and at several points during Friday’s rally. Back in 1963, speeches were punctuated by performances from opera legend Marian Anderson and the Queen of Gospel Music, Mahalia Jackson.
Organizing the 1963 march required an enormous amount of strategizing and planning by some of the nation’s leading civil rights activists, says Kenneth Janken, professor of African-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“It was the result of years and perhaps even decades of work to establish a solid working-class movement,” Janken says. “Not only was there a focus on the event itself, but it was in some ways a culmination of efforts that had been underway for a long time to increase the unionization of black workers, to raise pay and to demand legal and policy protections that white Americans took for granted.”
Randolph and Wilkins conceived the idea for the 1963 march to amplify the systemic barriers to employment and economic progress for Black Americans, who still faced enormous threats and limitations decades after slavery. The system of state and local laws enacted after the end of the Civil War, known as Jim Crow, effectively choked off all attempts by Black families to gain meaningful employment, economic stability, and the freedom to live peacefully. March on Washington architects seized an opportunity to highlight their demands in full view of the nation’s policy command center. Dr. King’s eloquent, passionate “I Have a Dream” speech is often listed among the best orations of the 20th century.
“That large rally was a manifestation of everyday work that happened in small towns, in rural communities, and in large cities,” Janken says. “It happened through the regular day-to-day, work of groups like SNCC, going into a community and finding out what their local grievances were, and equipping them with the skills to carry out campaigns of their own.”
Contrast this broad-based, longer-term event plan with Friday’s march. The “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” march was conceived after George Floyd died as a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The Reverend Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, says the idea for the Commitment March came to him on the day of Floyd’s memorial service, which gave organizers just about two months to plan.
The urgency of the moment was palpable.
The list of featured speakers read in part like a registry of mourners. The event, co-organized by Sharpton’s National Action Network, Martin Luther King III, and a long list of partner organizations, featured relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician fatally shot on March 13 by Louisville police officers executing a drug warrant on the wrong apartment, New Yorker Eric Garner, and other Black and brown Americans whose deaths came at the hands of police officers.
Speakers also included U. S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the state of Massachusetts, former Secretary of Labor and head of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez, and top representatives of labor unions, religious leaders, and community activists. Martin Luther King III gave up part of his speaking time to someone he called “the future of our nation,” the only granddaughter of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, his daughter Yolanda Renee King.
In a piping, exhilarating tone, Ms. King charmed the crowd with a passionate assessment of her generation’s power. “Some of you may remember that two years ago at the March for our Lives, I said, ‘Spread the word, have YOU heard, all across the nation, we are going to be a great generation! That was in 2018. I didn’t know what would hit us in 2020, and shut our schools and put our young lives on hold. But great challenges produce great leaders!”
She added, “We have mastered the selfie and TikTok, and now we must master ourselves.”
For some people, the march was an opportunity for reflection, a teachable moment, or motivation to take a stand. Many who couldn’t attend the march found ways to contribute to the groundswell of energy to challenge racial injustice in the United States.
Shortly after George Floyd’s death, J.C. Sager, from Flourtown, Pennsylvania, co-organized the “Shade for Change” Go Fund Me campaign, which provided 2,000 black umbrellas that were distributed at Friday’s march to help shield participants from the August sun. Sager, a father of three boys under the age of five, says watching the video of George Floyd’s murder was a defining moment.
“I was raised a privileged white boy in suburban Philadelphia, and even though I have a good friend from childhood who’s Black, I wasn’t prepared for how hard that video hit me,” he says. “I was horrified. I saw my three sons under that officer’s knee, and that did something to me, to my heart, and it will never sit right. I don’t understand why more white people can’t consider their own son that way, or their daughter, like in Breonna Taylor’s case.”
During George Floyd’s memorial in June, Sager says he idea to raise funds for umbrellas came to him.
“I remembered reading about how umbrellas were used as social-distancing tools in protests in other countries,” Sager says. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see these black umbrellas during a rally where “Black Lives Matter” was being emphasized?’
Sager reached out to his cousin Allison McGill-Higgins to help plan the fundraiser. McGill Higgins, who is African American and immunocompromised, couldn’t attend the march due to the risk of COVID-19. Sager says he’s proud to say he’s from a bi-racial family, and says “Black Lives Matter” reminds him of the need to get to know people from different backgrounds.
“It’s extremely important, to grow as a person, to know people who don’t look like you … opens up so many horizons and helps you to look at life through a different lens.”
His work on the “Shade for Change” project also guides Sager’s efforts to raise his boys. “I can’t look them in the eye and know that I did nothing to try and send some positivity out there in the world and to support Black voices and to use my privilege for good. “
When more than 250,000 people converged on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., 57 years ago, there was no social media footprint, no cell phone cameras, no viral organizing or rideshare apps to facilitate the gathering.
Veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch covered the 1963 March as a 19-year-old journalism intern at Monmouth College. She had talked her way into the assignment at a local newspaper, the Perth Amboy Evening News, and onto a bus reserved for the journey by the local chapter of the NAACP. The trip resulted in her first front-page story and led to a stellar career as a courts reporter, covering trials that included some of the most racially volatile in America’s history: Angela Davis, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Jackson, to name a few.
Deutsch, who retired in 2014, spent part of the last week in August talking with friends in Kenosha, Wisconsin, about Jacob Blake, the Kenosha man who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer during an arrest. She thinks the hope and enthusiasm that guided marchers 57 years ago seems in short supply today.
“I wish I could be more optimistic, but it’s such a difficult time,” she says. “I haven’t felt this way since after the Rodney King verdict. I knew that this not guilty verdict in this white, suburban bedroom community would lead to unrest, and one of my colleagues turned to me after it was read and said, Well, I guess we have to go cover the riots now.”
But many speakers and participants at the “Get Your Knee off Our Necks” gathering said they’re counting on the same results for their effort that attendees of the 1963 march experienced. That activism yielded an epic shift in the American Civil Rights movement, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 2020, march speakers highlighted the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a reform measure passed by the House of Representatives but awaiting a vote in the Senate. They also called for a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act 2020, which seeks to restore some of the voter protections that were stripped from the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Yet, in a fractured and traumatized nation, many people believe there’s still a chance to move toward Dr. King’s vision of a just and equitable America—despite the challenges. They are willing to work for it. (Hear from those who marched for racial justice after the death of George Floyd.)
“I don’t want my grandson to have to march for the same thing my grandfather marched for,” says Frank “Nitty” Sensabaugh, who led a group of marchers who walked 750 miles from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Washington, D.C.
The 24-day journey was not without trial. Supporters cooked food and provided monetary donations to offset hotel costs. But after a few days of peaceful walking, the group was met with resistance in Ohio and Indiana. Indiana State Police arrested Sensabaugh and co-organizer Tory Lowe because, according to police, they were blocking traffic. The group also faced racial slurs and even gunfire as they progressed toward Washington, D.C. The mixed reaction to the journey was exactly what organizers of the walk had hoped to illuminate, Sensabaugh says, a tale of two Americas, needing to unite as one.
For many, the 2020 Commitment March was an affirmation of Black lives.
“One of the main things we want to gain is the full representation of how many people are here,” said Ma’isah Malsuf, who traveled to D.C. from Chicago. “If you can have so many people come in one space during a time that’s so uncertain and risky, it solidifies that people are concerned about the direction of the country.”
As written by Joan E Greve Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tens of thousands join Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march in Washington DC; “Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC on Friday, demanding criminal justice reform and voting rights following a summer of protests against systemic racism and against police treatment of Black people.
The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march, announced in early June following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, also marks the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I have a dream” speech urging racial equality.
Thousands gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, many wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, as speakers demanded racial equality and an end to police brutality in the US.
“We get less healthcare, like we don’t matter,” said the civil rights leader the Rev Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network organization was one of the event organizers.
“We go to jail longer for the same crime like we don’t matter. We get poverty, unemployment, double the others, like we don’t matter.
“We’re treated with disrespect by policemen that we pay their salaries like we don’t matter. So we figured we’d let you know, whether we tall or short, fat or skinny, light skinned or dark skinned, black lives matter.
“And we won’t stop until it matters to everybody.”
King’s son, Martin Luther King III, was among those to speak, telling the crowd they must “defend the freedoms that earlier generations worked so hard to win”.
Friday’s event comes ahead of a November election expected to see a record number of mail-in ballots, and with a Republican party seemingly opposed to making it easier to vote.
Donald Trump has admitted he is blocking money sought by Democrats for the postal service so he could stop people voting by mail.
“Our voting rights are under attack,” King said.
“We must vigorously defend our right to vote because those rights were paid for with the blood of those lynched for seeking to exercise their constitutional rights.”
The Democrat-controlled house of representatives has passed legislation making voting more accessible in 2019, and recently renamed the bill the John R Lewis voting rights act. The Republican controlled Senate has refused to act on the legislation.
Organized by the civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League, the speakers at Friday’s rally also highlighted police brutality and the need for reform.
The Washington march comes days after Jacob Blake became the latest in a series of Black people to suffer brutal treatment at the hands of police.
Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday, and remains in hospital. His family said on Tuesday that Blake had been paralyzed from the waist down.
Speaking on Friday, Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr, said: “There are two systems of justice in the United States. There is a Black system and a white system and the Black system isn’t doing so well. I’m tired of looking at cameras and seeing these young black and brown people suffer.”
Blake’s sister, Letetra Widman, said Black people were done “catering to your delusions”.
“America, your reality is not real,” Widman said. “We will not pretend. We will not be your docile slave. We will not be a footstool to oppression.”
Widman also called on protesters to continue to march peacefully. “You must fight, but not with violence and chaos – with self-love,” Widman said. She called out loudly: “Black men, stand up. Stand up, Black men, and educate yourselves.”
Among those expected to participate in Washington are the families of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, all Black people killed by police or by individuals on the extremist fringes who regarded themselves as vigilantes.
The march was organized amid protests over the killing of Floyd.
The 46-year-old died after a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, including the final two minutes when Floyd was unconscious.
“The reason why George Floyd laying there with that knee on his neck resonated with so many African-Americans is because we have all had a knee on our neck,” Sharpton told USA Today.
The march was set to be the largest political gathering in Washington since the coronavirus outbreak began to escalate in March.
The thousands of participants streaming in for the march on Friday morning stood in lines that stretched for several blocks, the Associated Press reported, as organizers insisted on taking temperatures as part of coronavirus protocols.
Organizers reminded attendees to practice social distancing and wear masks throughout the program.
The march will be matched by demonstrations in states which have a high Covid risk, NAN said, including in Montgomery, Alabama and Las Vegas, Nevada.
The NAACP is hosting a “virtual march” throughout the day.
Speakers will include the New Jersey senator Cory Booker, congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, from Michigan, and Stacey Abrams.
A group of protesters are due at the march who have walked all the way from Milwaukee to the nation’s capital for the event.”
As written by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian, in an article entitled March on Washington: the day MLK – and Dylan and Baez – made hope and history rhyme; “One hundred years after the civil war, the treatment of African Americans persisted as a gaping wound in the purported land of the free. Then, suddenly in the 1960s, the bleeding from lynchings, bombings, beatings and shootings finally had a seismic effect. It galvanized the noble group who made the 60s so electric: the nimble, passionate and utterly fearless Black and white citizens who banded together to rescue America’s soul.
By 1963, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr had become the leader of the first generation since the abolitionists who truly believed they had the power to heal the nation. Since founding his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King had worked tirelessly to fulfill its mission: “To save the soul of America.”
King turned 28 the week after he founded the SCLC. More successfully than anyone since Abraham Lincoln, this Baptist preacher united millions of Black and white Americans in a cause of moral righteousness. They were drawn to his brain, to his soul, to his deep baritone and to his bearing. The novelist Jose Yglesias noted that “King laughed with his whole body, like a man who trusts his feelings”.
His Gandhi-inspired choice of weapons put him on an unassailable moral plane. In a nation drenched in violence, he ordered his foot soldiers to fight with nothing but courage, intelligence and decency. In spring 1963, the world recoiled at the cost of that bravery, when the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than 1,000 non-violent protesters.
When the white establishment of Birmingham gave in and agreed to remove “whites only” signs on restrooms and drinking fountains and to desegregate lunch counters, white terrorists bombed the hotel room where King and his aides had been staying and the house of his brother, Alfred. Miraculously, none were injured.
A few weeks later, civil rights leaders were meeting John Kennedy at the White House when he said, “Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else.” At first they were shocked. Then they thought it was joke. Then they realized it was true. Nearly universal revulsion to Connor’s tactics was a big factor in finally pushing Kennedy go on television, in June, to propose a civil rights act, and to deliver probably the greatest speech of his life.
Echoing King, Kennedy declared: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free … Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.”
King was exhilarated. He told the president he had given “one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any president”. And yet even after that speech, Kennedy was so nervous that Congress would respond the wrong way to a massive demonstration in the capital, it took another five weeks before he publicly endorsed the March on Washington, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate today.
Courtland Cox, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key organizer of the March, recalled a day now remembered almost exclusively for the soaring words of King’s “I have a dream” speech but also a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.
A month before, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter registration rally.
“It wasn’t just a concert,” said Cox. “It was a community event.”
Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers just a few weeks earlier. That was also one of the songs Dylan sang before 250,000 people in Washington. When Lena Horne was introduced, she uttered a single word: “Freedom.”
Seeger had performed the most important musical pollination of all, when in 1957 King visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training camp for civil rights workers. When Seeger sang We Shall Overcome, it was the first time King heard it. He fell in love with it. In Washington, it was sung by the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel – and nearly everyone in the audience.
Cox had spent years registering voters in places where “if we got caught we would be shot. Alabama was the most dangerous. In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite. I thought your chances were better with a bullet than dynamite.
“I’m not sure how you can really express it. During the most stressful things the music would be the wind beneath your wings. It’s one thing singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas. It’s sung in a way that maintains your determination. The music had advocacy.”
Peter Goldman wrote all the most important Newsweek stories about civil rights. So he traveled to Washington for the march.
He said: “During the mid day break between the mostly entertainment morning sessions and the afternoon speechifying session, some of the musicians were hanging out in the rotunda of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing there and Joan Baez walks up behind Bob Dylan and pats him on the butt. ‘Let’s sing, Bobby,’ she said. So the two of them start on a Dylan song. They were joined by Peter and Mary – Paul was elsewhere. They went on for about an hour. Folk songs, freedom songs. Dylan songs.”
How big was the audience?
“Me. It was one of my luckier days.”
In his superb memoir, Chasing History, the great reporter Carl Bernstein writes that the Washington Star deployed more than 60 reporters, installed 10 special telephones up and down the mall, and even commandeered a helicopter to fly film to the newsroom. And yet, somehow, the lead stories in both the Star and the Washington Post failed to mention the main event: King’s extraordinary speech.
James Reston, the celebrated New York Times Washington bureau chief, did not make the same mistake. In a front-page analysis, he wrote that King “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else.
“He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”
Bernstein felt the same way.
“For me, listening to Dr King’s speech, with its emotive power, and witnessing the sheer numbers of Black and white people marching together, I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime – the ‘someday’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.”
I have a dream – Martin Luther King and the 1963 March on Washington
The March On Washington: The Spirit Of The Day/ Time
How Martin Luther King Went Off Script in ‘I Have a Dream’, by Clarence B. Jones, MLK’s speechwriter and advisor/ Wall Street Journal
Al Sharpton on 60 years since the civil rights march on Washington
Presented by Jonathan Freedland, with Al Sharpton, produced by Danielle Stephens, and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj
This week, Jonathan Freedland sits down with Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life
‘A fractured and traumatized nation’ marches on, 57 years later/ National Geographic
March on Washington: the day MLK – and Dylan and Baez – made hope and history rhyme
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,
Thomas E. Ricks
The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, William P. Jones
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, Martin Luther King Jr., James Melvin Washington (Editor)
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, Clayborne Carson ed
King: A Life, Jonathan Eig
Get Your Knee Off Our Necks March 2020 speeches
https://www.facebook.com/HuffPost/videos/3354866161241845
Tens of thousands join Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march in Washington DC
Join the Movement for Black Lives here: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)
Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America, Curtis Bunn, Michael H. Cottman, Patrice Gaines, Nick Charles, Keith Harriston
How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40265832-how-to-be-an-antiracist
https://time.com/5882308/march-on-washington-police-brutality/
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/jacob-blake-shooting-march-on-washington/index.html
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