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"Why do we still have to do this?" Thousands march on Washington to reclaim the unfulfilled dream of Martin Luther King Jr.

2020-08-28T18:43:13.375Z


57 years have passed since a speech that changed American history… but not enough. We explain what has happened and what is still claimed to happen.


Thousands of people are participating this Friday in a large march in Washington DC to demand racial justice and civil rights, which comes in a year that has been especially violent and marked by the deaths of black people at the hands of the police, including George Floyd.

The massive gathering is also held on a very symbolic date, on August 28, 57 years since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech 'I have a dream' ( I have a dream ) from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the capital of the United States.

It is not a coincidence. This day was chosen to realize an idea that the civil rights leader, the Reverend Al Sharpton, launched last June as the country was shaken by the death of Floyd suffocated by a policeman on the ground of Minneapolis and thousands were leaving. to the streets to demonstrate against police brutality.

"The history of George Floyd is the history of black people, because for 401 years ago we have not been able to be what we wanted to be and what we dreamed of being, it is because we have had a knee in the neck," he said at his ceremony funeral.

"We need to go back to Washington and stand (black, white, Latino, Arab) in the shadow of Lincoln and tell them: this is the time to stop this," Sharpton said. "It is time to get up and say 'take the knee off our neck,'" was his call.

["Get your knees off our necks": George Floyd mourns and fired in Minneapolis]

And that is precisely the name of the great march this Friday, "Take your knees from our necks . " Although many things have changed since 1963 and this year is especially different because of the coronavirus pandemic, equal rights and an end to racism called for by Luther King remain unresolved problems in the United States.

An origin that took 20 years

The historic first march in Washington DC in 1963 was a collaborative effort between many civic organizations that rallied around a common struggle demanding jobs and freedom.

But the original idea had been forged over the previous 20 years. In 1941, union leader Asa Philip Randolph thought of a grand march to protest racial discrimination against African Americans in the job programs created during World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

However, that idea never materialized after negotiations between Roosevelt and Randolph to create programs that would prevent discrimination in some industries, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, in English) on its website.

Five years later, those efforts failed. At the same time, in the United States the figure of Martin Luther King was rising, as a defender of civil rights. By 1950, the focus of a national march in Washington had shifted to the fight for freedom.

A series of marches were canceled before the march's first antecedent, a pilgrimage held in 1957, where Martin Luther King also gave a speech demanding the right of African Americans to vote in elections.

Six years later and 100 years after the signing of Abraham Lincoln's executive order to end slavery in the United States , the NACCP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Luther King, joined forces. to make the first march in Washinton.

More than 200,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand freedom and labor justice for African Americans. A speech originally planned for 4 minutes, it was quadrupled and left Luther King installed as the great figure in the fight for civil rights .

"I have a dream that that day in the red lands of Georgia, children of former slaves and children of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the brotherhood table. I have a dream that one day the state of Mississippi will still be, a state burning with the heat of justice, burning with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice, "said Luther King before the crowd.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their characters," he also said.

[I Have a Dream for Martin Luther King. His full speech in Spanish]

Half a century of dreams

The 1963 march succeeded in pushing the approval in Congress of the Civil Rights Act that prohibited racial discrimination and racial segregation, introduced at the beginning of that year by President John F. Kennedy, but finally approved in 1964 with the signing of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Despite the law, the black population continued to suffer due to poverty and lack of opportunities, so in 1968 the march was repeated.

More than half a century later, the dreams of Luther King are still the dreams of millions of black people in America .

In February 2020, in the same Georgia that MLK dreamed of, young Ahmaud Arbery was assassinated at the hands of two white men, one of them a former police officer. In May, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old paramedic, was shot to death by police officers who broke into her home. Later that month, George Floyd was suffocated to death by police officers now facing murder charges. They were all black people.

The protests in several cities of the country that followed those deaths, and which also triggered acts of looting and violence on some occasions, were extolled just in the week before the march on Friday, after another black person, Jacob Blake, He was shot seven times in the back by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and is now paralyzed from the waist down.

The march in Washington that takes place this Friday is very different from the one that took place in 1963, because it takes place in the middle of a pandemic and has a smaller number of people. But the fight against racial injustice remains the same , now adding a rejection of police brutality and a strong call to participate in the next elections

"Enough is enough," Martin Luther King III, son of Martin Luther King Jr., said this afternoon.

The coronavirus pandemic has also deepened the feeling of fear and injustice, especially after studies showed that black people along with Latinos are the most affected, with a greater population at risk of contagion and death, due to being more exposed as essential or front-line workers. 

But the coronavirus has also exposed an old problem of social inequality, as blacks and Latinos suffered from unequal and excessively aggressive surveillance by the authorities in relation to social distancing restrictions. In New York, more than 80% of police citations for this issue have been issued to African-American or Latino residents, according to data from the department itself.

[Latinos and blacks suffer greater police aggressiveness due to measures against the coronavirus]

Luther King III affirmed that his father would be proud of this new march but at the same time sad that, 57 years later, it is still necessary. According to CNN journalist Suzanne Malveaux, Luther King III recalled how his 12-year-old daughter asked him "why do we still have to do this? I thought my grandfather had solved it."

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2020-08-28

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