Thousands of people emulate in Washington the Great March of Martin Luther King against racism

"We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro is a victim of the inexplicable horrors of the police, we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing to vote for."

Martin Luther King spoke these words on August 28, 1963 from the Lincoln Memorial in the momentous march for civil rights in Washington, the day of the iconic “I have a dream” speech, which would be a watershed in anti-discrimination history. racist. Police violence, access to vote, disaffection. As if that more than half a century had not passed, union leaders, activists and black reverends went to the lectern at the top of that same staircase on August 28, 2020 to denounce the same blights.

Thousands of protesters gathered in the pandemic capital of the United States trying to emulate the crucial day of 57 years ago. The call was far from that quarter of a million people who took the city in 63, but everything that happens at the foot of the imposing statue of Lincoln, the venerated president who ended slavery, in front of the long reflecting pool acquires a special packaging. The moment is as decisive as then. Today, the world's leading power is going through three crises (economic, health and social) and is experiencing the largest wave of protests against racism since the murder of King.

A group of entities called the march in the heat of protests over the death of African American George Floyd in a brutal detention on May 25 in Minneapolis and the episodes of recent days in Kenosha (Wisconsin) further spurred the mobilization despite the risks of infections due to the pandemic. It has been another week of fire. The police shooting from behind Jacob Blake, a black man they tried to arrest last Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sparked protests and serious riots. In the midst of them, on Tuesday night, a 17-year-old white teenager shot and killed two protesters with a rifle.

"57 years ago Martin Luther King was here telling what his dream was, but I don't think everyone knows that we are here because we have the power to make it come true," said Bridget Floyd, sister of the one who suddenly became an icon. global against racism. Blake's sister, who is injured in a Kenosha hospital, used thick words and emphasized that she did not intend to "disguise this genocide and call it police brutality."

This is not one more mobilization against racism. The tone of the protest reflects the tough political pulse that the United States is facing, with the presidential elections just around the corner. The night before, very near there, President Donald Trump had broken the principle of neutrality of the spaces of the White House and delivered his speech accepting the nomination for re-election from the gardens of the official residence, between billboards electoral. He did not address the problems of racism in the police and instead accused the Democrats of collusion with the violent spin-off of the protests.

Trump has added gasoline to the fire during his administration. He has always referred to cases of police brutality as isolated episodes, without admitting a problem of structural racism, and he has come to show understanding towards ultra and neo-Nazi groups. In 2017, in the wake of the Chalottesville riots, which confronted anti-racist protesters with a march of far-right groups (including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan), in which a woman was killed by an extremist, he stated: “There were bad people on one side and also very violent on the other ”, he insisted. Along the same lines, he assured that "there were very good people on both sides."

The march of '63 was considered key in the final approval of the Civil Rights Act the following year. This time, activists are calling for police reforms to stop racist abuses with more transparency and accountability; changes in the criminal justice system, which improve the rehabilitation work of the system and avoid the spiral of exclusion of minor crimes, and a new law changes the voting requirements that end up hindering access for minorities.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a veteran and controversial New York civil rights activist, organized the convocation alongside Martin Luther King III, son of the historic leader. “If my father were with us today (...) he would want us to be leaders for justice, the promoters of his ideals of social justice, equality and peace; He would urge us to live not in the past but in what he called 'the fierce urgency of the now'. If you are looking for a savior, get up and see yourself in the mirror, we have to be the heroes of the story we are building. And 'we' means everyone, ”King III said. Who got loud applause was Yolanda from Renee King, King's granddaughter, who at just 10 years old gave an energetic speech: “Great challenges produce great generations. We have already become experts in Tiktok and the selfie ... Now we have to be ourselves! ”, He exclaimed.

If King's march had the motto "Jobs and freedom" this is called Get your knee off our necks (Take our knee off our necks , in reference to the policeman's knee stuck in Floyd's neck). At the foot of the Lincoln Memorial steps an older African-American woman yelled, "I'm not going back to the parcels!" The woman's spontaneous scream was followed by applause from everyone around her as part of the march. The phrase recalled the time of slavery in which the black population was dedicated to work in the fields. The woman was rather an exception: the majority of those attending the protest were young people and families, almost all of them wore a sign, mask or t-shirt with the legends that defend the Black Lives Matters movement.

T-shirts with Floyd's last phrase before he died below that knee were sold in the gardens of the reflecting pool: "I can't breathe." There were also quotes from Congressman John Lewis, who died last month, the last icon of the King era, who was precisely at that march in 1963. After the speeches, the march headed towards the Martin Luther King monument, very close to Lincoln, where the day ended.

Emmett Till, the lynched boy who marked the date

The organizers of the 1963 march did not choose that August 28 at random. It was the date on which eight earlier, in 55, a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till was abducted and tortured to death by a group of white men in Money, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman in a store. This time, it was an agony of almost nine minutes recorded on video that unleashed stupor in half the world. George Floyd's family wore T-shirts with the numbers 8 and 46, the eight minutes and 46 seconds that the 46-year-old man spent immobilized by the neck, under the knee a white policeman, while he cried out that he could not breathe and was delirious, reaching ask your dead mother for help.

With the crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic, the organizers asked people to follow the speeches from home through television or streaming , however, thousands of people came to the monument with little social distance with them, although it was a requirement to carry mask all the time. In some entrances to the gardens that surround the monument, the organizers took the temperature and handed out a bracelet to those who did not have a high result. Even so, since it was an open space, the attendees managed to gather around the reflecting pool without major obstacles and even without having gone through the temperature controls.

Ebony Walton, 29, had driven four hours with her boyfriend from Virginia Beach to participate in the protest. She said that her generation has to follow the work of the pioneers in the fight for civil rights, that the fight against racism is still far from over. "When Obama came [to the presidency] we thought that racism was over and this president [Trump] just came and turned it on again."