Martin Luther King III, along along with his wife, Arndrea Waters King, and their 15-year-old daughter, Yolanda, have developed a set of traditions for this time of the 12 months.
Each August, they rewatch the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rapturous address to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Even when the civil rights icon’s legacy is closer to the Kings than it’s for many other families, they see march anniversaries as a teaching moment.
“We’re like every other family, within the sense that we wish to show our daughter about this moment in history,” Arndrea said. “After which we also try to attach it with movements or those that are doing things in the current.”
This 12 months, the Kings will join an expected crowd of tens of hundreds of individuals, who’re gathering Saturday on the Lincoln Memorial within the nation’s capital to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the late reverend’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
The event is convened by the Kings’ Drum Major Institute and the National Motion Network. A bunch of Black civil rights leaders and a multiracial, interfaith coalition of allies will rally attendees on the identical spot where as many as 250,000 gathered in 1963 for what remains to be considered one in every of the best and most consequential racial justice and equality demonstrations in U.S. history.
On Friday, Martin Luther King III, who’s the late civil rights icon’s eldest son, and his sister, Bernice King, each visited their father’s monument in Washington.
“I see a person still standing in authority and saying, ‘We have still got to get this this right,'” Bernice said as she looked up on the granite statue.
The unique march, which featured their father as a centerpiece, helped till the bottom for passage of federal civil rights and voting rights laws within the Sixties.
Organizers of this 12 months’s commemoration hope to recapture the energy of the unique March on Washington – especially within the face of eroded voting rights nationwide, after the recent striking down of affirmative motion in college admissions and abortion rights by the Supreme Court, and amid growing threats of political violence and hatred against people of color, Jews and the LGBTQ community.
“What we all know is when people get up, the difference may be made,” Martin Luther King III told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of Saturday. “This will not be a standard commemoration. This really is a rededication.”
The event kicks off with pre-program speeches and performances at 8:00 a.m. ET. The essential program begins at 11 a.m. ET., followed by a march procession that can begin through the streets of Washington toward the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.
Featured speakers include Ambassador Andrew Young, the close King adviser who helped organize the unique march and who went on to function a congressman, U.N. ambassador and mayor of Atlanta. Leaders from the NAACP and the National Urban League are also expected to provide remarks.
Several leaders from groups organizing the march met Friday with Attorney General Merrick Garland and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the civil rights division, to debate a spread of issues, including voting rights, policing and redlining.
The gathering Saturday is a precursor to the actual anniversary of the Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will observe the march anniversary on Monday by meeting with organizers of the 1963 gathering. All of King’s children have been invited to satisfy with Biden, White House officials said.
For the Rev. Al Sharpton, founding father of the National Motion Network, continuing to watch March on Washington anniversaries fulfills a promise he made to the late King family matriarch Coretta Scott King. Twenty three years ago, she introduced Sharpton and Martin Luther King III at a thirty seventh anniversary march and urged them to hold on the legacy.
“I never thought that 23 years later, Martin and I, with Arndrea, could be doing a march and we would have less (civil rights protections) than we had in 2000,” Sharpton said.
“We’re fulfilling the project Mrs. King gave us,” he said. “We’re having to march, saying we won’t go backwards, and we have got to go forward.”
Coming out of the march on Saturday, Sharpton says he’ll lead a voting rights tour in the autumn in states which can be attempting to erect barriers ahead of the 2024 presidential election. He also plans to satisfy with major Black entrepreneurs to create a fund to finance the fight against conservative attacks on diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Bernice King, said she sympathized with those that have grown weary over the continued fight to preserve civil rights. But they need to recollect her mother’s words, along with her father’s famous speech, she said.
“Mother said, struggle is a never ending process,” said Bernice, who’s CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center For Nonviolent Social Change, which was founded by her mom after the civil rights icon’s assassination in 1968.
“Freedom isn’t really won – you earn it and win it in every generation. Vigilance is the reply,” she said. “We now have to all the time remember, it’s difficult and dark at once, but a dawn is coming.”
Her father’s March on Washington remarks have resounded through many years of push and pull toward progress in civil and human rights. But dark moments followed his speech, too.
Two weeks later in 1963, 4 Black girls were killed within the sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, followed by the kidnapping and murder of three civil rights staff in Neshoba County, Mississippi the next 12 months. The tragedies spurred passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And the voting rights marches from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama, during which marchers were brutally beaten while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became often known as “Bloody Sunday,” forced Congress to adopt the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Unfortunately, we’re living in a time when there is a younger generation who believes that my daddy’s generation, and people of us who got here after, didn’t get enough done,” Bernice King said. “And I would like them to grasp, you might be benefiting and that is the way in which you are benefiting.”
She added: “We won’t surrender, because there is a moment in time when change comes. We now have to have a good time the small victories. Should you’re not grateful, you’ll undermine your progress, too.”