Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Thousands Gather For March On Washington

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

Thousands Gather For March On Washington To Demand Police Reform And Racial Equality

By Brakkton Booker, NPR

August 28, 2020

Thousands of demonstrators braved sweltering temperatures in the nation’s capital on Friday to demand an overhaul of the country’s criminal justice system and push for racial equality. 

The event, called the Commitment March, was held at the Lincoln Memorial, the same site where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called for those same reforms decades ago in his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

Like the 1963 March on Washington, organizers opened with a series of speeches before attendees began to march through the streets of the city, this time ending at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.

This event – dubbed “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” — comes at a particularly tense time as frustration over police brutality and use of force have sparked national outrage following the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

”We still struggle for justice”

A common theme throughout the march was a call to action for attendees to register and to vote in the fall elections.

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