Thousands of people marched on Saturday to mark the 58th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and voice their support for expanding and protecting access to the ballot.
The crowd cheered, sang and danced in the streets on the way to the National Mall while calling on Congress to pass an extensive voting rights measure and eliminate the filibuster if necessary to do so. The marchers, though fewer than in years past, also demanded D.C. statehood and an end to police brutality.
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“If we keep going down this road, we’re going to be back like Jim Crow,” said Craig Browne, 74, who traveled to the nation’s capital from Wyncote, Pa.
Browne, who lived in Alabama when segregation was still in place, said he had wanted to join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and other Civil Rights leaders in the historic 1963 march but his mother didn’t want him to miss school. So he wasn’t missing this one.
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As he gathered with others in McPherson Square, he wore a shirt with the face of Lewis, who went on to become a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and carried a sign with a quote of his that read, “The vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have.” Others also held signs invoking Lewis’s name and his words encouraging, “Good Trouble.”
“I remember segregation,” Browne said. “I remember separate, and it wasn’t equal.”
Organizers had arranged buses to bring people in from across the country to rally on the National Mall. The demonstrators urged Congress to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping elections and ethics bill that would impose national standards for voting and override state-level restrictions, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which aims to restore voting rights protections that have been weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Civil and labor leaders have coalesced around the cause, saying this is a continuation of the same battles King fought when he inspired tens of thousands of people to show up to the seminal 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
As the crowd passed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, one protester yelled into a megaphone: “You can’t stop the revolution!”
Another group started chanting: “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”
Shirley Thompson, 66, of Petworth, held the hands of her great granddaughters, Harley, 7, and Laloni, 8, as she marched past the Washington Monument.
“Pass the John Lewis Act Now! Let’s get into some good trouble!,” she chanted.
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“We want statehood for DC!” she chanted into the crowd. “We want you to know we are serious!”
Organizers said the march was also intended to voice support for other civil rights and social justice issues, too, including reparations for slavery, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, canceling student debt, reforming immigration, and ending gun violence and mass incarceration.
The families of King and Lewis and relatives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, are all scheduled to speak to the thousands of people expected to converge on the National Mall.
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“What the George Floyd movement showed was that we could be intergenerational and interracial, and I think that has now energized the voting rights movement,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said earlier this month, referring to the diverse groups rallying today. “This is not something we are commemorating from ’63. This is something we’re saying right now needs to be passed.”
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Protesters have said that because it’s unlikely enough Republicans will join Democrats in the Senate in passing voting rights legislation, they are taking aim at the filibuster — the 60-vote threshold which allows a united minority of 41 senators to block legislation from becoming law — arguing it must be eliminated.
2021 March on Washington: What you need to know about the voting rights rallies in D.C.
Throughout this summer, the Rev. William J. Barber II, a North Carolina preacher who is the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, has organized protests for voting rights and a $15 federal minimum. This Poor People’s Campaign is a resurgence of a movement created by King before his death in 1968. Barber is also scheduled to speak today
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“This is not Jim Crow, this is James Crow, Esquire,” Barber has said throughout the summer about the battle for voting rights and a higher federal minimum wage. “It’s a certain sadness that we have to fight over the American people having access to the ballot. We have to fight to get the American people a living wage.”
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Civil rights leaders point to the influence King’s original March on Washington, and his words, had on the civil rights movement. It created the momentum, they said, for the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act two months later.
“We are at a critical, critical juncture in our nation. If we don’t have victories, which I believe that we will have, the impact will be felt for generations. This is that critical of an issue and a time,” Arndrea Waters King, the wife of Martin Luther King III, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eldest son, said in an interview earlier this month.
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Waters King is one of the organizers of the March On for Washington and Voting Rights event that will begin at McPherson Square before heading to the National Mall.
The Make Good Trouble rally at the Lincoln Memorial, is also rooted in history, named in honor of Lewis, who was brutally beaten by a state trooper as he led hundreds of protesters over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
“If you have always, growing up, wondered if you would’ve marched with Martin Luther King Jr.,” Waters King said in an interview earlier this month, “my question now is: Are you marching now?”
Nicole Asbury and Jasmine Hilton contributed to this story.