One by one, 50 speakers called attention to contemporary issues like policing tactics and voter disenfranchisement to argue that in so many ways the country continues to struggle, as civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton put it, with “issues that have stood in the way” of fulfilling King’s dream.
Sharpton, the co-organizer of the march along with Martin Luther King III, the son of the slain civil rights leader, said that the Supreme Court’s decision in June to strike down a key anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was an example that the nation is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to civil rights.
