Fifty-seven years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, a new generation of leaders in the racial justice movement spoke at the same spot on Friday and committed themselves anew to pursuing King’s vision.
“Less than a year before he was assassinated, my grandfather predicted this very moment,” Yolanda Renee King, the daughter of King’s oldest son, Martin Luther King III, said in leading the speakers’ portion of the day. “We have only just begun to fight.”
The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march — organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network — comes at a time of nationwide unrest and ongoing protests over Black people being slain or severely injured by the police. (Sharpton is also a host on MSNBC.)
Speakers at Friday’s march included the father of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday and left paralyzed from the waist down.
“I’m tired of looking at cameras and looking and seeing Black and brown people suffer,” Jacob Blake Sr. said. “We’re not taking it anymore. I ask everyone to stand up.”
Other speakers included the mother of Breonna Taylor, an EMT who was killed by police in her own home in Louisville in March, and the brother of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after pleading for help as a white police officer kneed him in the neck in May.
Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, urged people at the march to “stand together” and vote in November.
