‘Racism is still with us’: celebration of King’s 1963 speech shadowed by racist attack
On the eve of the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s legendary I Have a Dream speech, his son and granddaughter have decried continuing racial violence and hatred in the US, lamenting that the civil rights leader’s call for equality and justice has yet to be fulfilled.
Speaking a day after a vast crowd gathered in the nation’s capital in an echo of the 28 August 1963 march on Washington at which King made his famous remarks, his eldest son, Martin Luther King III, warned of a resurgence of hate crimes. Violence against minorities was “unconscionable” and “unacceptable”, he said.
He added that his daughter, Yolanda Renee King, had fewer rights today than when she was born. “The Voting Rights Act was struck down in 2013, women’s reproductive rights were struck down in 2022, affirmative action was struck down in 2023 – so she has fewer rights,” he told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
Yolanda Renee King, 15, is the only grandchild of the civil rights leader, who was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Addressing Saturday’s march, she said that if she could talk to her grandfather today, she would apologise.
“I would say I’m sorry we still have to be here to rededicate ourselves to finishing your work and ultimately realizing your dream. Today, racism is still with us. Poverty is still with us. And now, gun violence has come for places of worship, our schools and our shopping centers.”
King’s family appeared on CNN a day before the actual 60th anniversary of the first march of Washington. The event, held on 28 August 1963 in front of a massive crowd of some 250,000 people at the Lincoln memorial, was one of the crowning glories of the civil rights movement and helped propel vital voting rights legislation.
To mark the anniversary, Joe Biden has invited all of King’s children as well as surviving organisers of the original march to a commemorative reception in the Oval Office on Monday.
Some of those original organisers spoke at Saturday’s five-hour event, which was put together by King’s group, the Drum Major Institute, and the National Action Network, led by the Rev Al Sharpton. Andrew Young, a member of King’s inner circle who helped convene the original march and went on to become a UN ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, was among dozens of speakers.
Young talked about the fight to secure access to the ballot box amid a renewed wave of voter suppression measures, saying: “The vote is the passport to freedom and opportunity. That is hard work, but it’s good work. Don’t get mad, get smart. Don’t look at all the things that are wrong, look back on where we were 60 years ago when we had the first march on Washington.”
While many gathered on Saturday to pay homage to King and the first march on Washington, an echo of 1963 of a bitter and tragic kind was unfolding in Florida. A white man fatally shot three Black people in Jacksonville in a conscious racist attack, the city’s sheriff said.
Arndrea Waters King, the wife of Martin Luther King III, drew a parallel between Saturday’s atrocity in Florida and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. That attack took place two weeks after the first march on Washington, killing four African American girls.
She told CNN: “Yesterday we saw the hate. It unfortunately demonstrated where we are compared with 1963, and the answer is – not far at all.”
Waters King estimated that 200,000 people attended Saturday’s demonstration in Washington.