March on Washington 2020: protesters hope to rekindle spirit of 1963

Hours after President Donald Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House to rail against what he called agitators bent on destroying “the American way of life,” thousands of Americans streamed to the Lincoln Memorial, not a mile away, on Friday to deliver what frequently seemed to be a direct reply.

The march was devised in part to build on the passion for racial justice that Martin Luther King Jr summoned when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” address on that same spot 57 years ago. From the podium at the base of the memorial, civil rights advocates and Black ministers often cast Trump as the prime obstacle to their goal — and voting to remove him as the first step toward a solution.

The Rev. Al Sharpton invoked Jacob Blake, who was shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday, and the Black shooting victims before him to demand a new national reckoning with hate and bigotry.

“We didn’t come to start trouble,” he said, in an implicit rebuke to critics of the summer’s racial protests. “We came to stop trouble. You act like it’s no trouble to shoot us in the back. You act like it’s no trouble to put a chokehold on us while we scream, ‘I can’t breathe,’ 11 times.”

The event’s goals included increasing voter registration and participation in the 2020 census and enacting a new version of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The protest also sought to rally support for enacting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, backed by House Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus. The bill would overhaul law enforcement training and conduct rules to try to limit police misconduct and racial bias.

The national upheaval triggered by Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May loomed large over the march, as did the sense among civil rights leaders that action this year could set the course of American race relations for years, if not decades.

“We can’t ignore the moment that we’re in,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of several groups that sponsored the protest. “This is a march that is very much needed right now, given the fires that are raging as we deal with police violence, racial violence and voter suppression. It’s created almost a perfect storm.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company