Fifty-Seven years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in Washington DC, racial equality remains elusive for millions of people living in the U.S.
Friday, speakers were back on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, railing against the scourge of police and vigilante violence against black Americans.
Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now President of the National Urban League told the crowd the fight for racial justice is not negotiable.
“We are here today to say that transforming our criminal justice system and purging it of mass incarceration and systemic racism is not negotiable,” Morial said. “Dislodging structural racism that infects every institution in American life is not negotiable. To end the violence against our black men is not negotiable. Hands up! I can’t breathe! Hands up! Don’t shoot!” Morial told WWL-TV racism appears to be on the rise.
“The challenges with policing and the criminal justice system are as bad as they’ve been in 50 years,” Morial said. “Racial violence, the killing of unarmed black men seems to just go unabated.”
David Robinson-Morris, the Founding Director of The Center for Equity, Justice and Human Spirit at Xavier University in New Orleans said Friday’s march on Washington was just as significant as it was 57 years ago.
“The fight for equity and justice has never stopped,” Robinson-Morris said. “Police brutality has never stopped. Now, it’s being televised and publicized in a different way.”
The event comes amid a growing number of black men killed or wounded by white police officers including the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last Sunday.
“It is engrained in the white psyche to see black folks in a certain way, to see Hispanics folks in a certain way, to see anything that is other in a different, negative and dangerous way,” Robinson-Morris said. “It’s definitely societal thing.”
The march was also a call to action for people to go out and vote.
"We’ve got to be determined not to be deterred by this effort to make mail in voting more difficult, in-person voting more difficult, no, we have to take a stand for American democracy,” Morial said. “While they disproportionately impact black Americans every American of every race, creed, color or religion should want the system of democracy to be open, to be unfettered and for access to the ballot to be easy.”
Voting rights, racial justice and police reform are hot-button issues as the fall presidential election draws near.
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