Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network are going to Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28 to pay homage to venerated civil rights leaders, particularly Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who played key roles in the March on Washington. According to Sharpton, the ground breaking and historic occasion is also a prime opportunity to lay out the current day’s legislative agenda.
Aug. 28 also marks the 47th anniversary of King’s national delivery of his immortalized “I Have a Dream” speech, which is considered one of the greatest oratorical performances in American history.
“[There] is a two-part reason to go,” Sharpton said at the National Action Network headquarters office on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem on Saturday. “One, we celebrate where we’ve gone in the 47 years. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Height, James Farmer — when they went, they went to help change the legislative landscape of this country. And they did. The 1963 march helped to galvanize and energize the 1964 Civil Rights bill passing, the 1965 Voting Rights passage. We now have a black president and black attorney general, so we won that fight. You can check into any hotel, eat in any restaurant, ride anywhere you want on public transportation. They won that fight,” extolled Rev. Sharpton
Sharpton, who will be joined by Urban League President Marc Morial and Dr. King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, intends to outline what needs to be done during these economically perilous times.
“One part is to celebrate — the other part is to lay out the legislative agenda for now. We can check into any hotel, the question is; can you check out? We can eat in any restaurant, the question is; can you pay for the meal?” Sharpton said. “We’re doubly unemployed. The wealth gap between the races is the same today as it was in 1963. So, we need to deal with how we deal with economic parity. We need to deal with educational parity. When you look at New York alone, when they look at the test scores of 2010, there was over a 20 percent gap in reading between blacks and white — there was a 22 percent gap in mathematics. … If our children aren’t being educated — that might not bother you, but it bothers me. If we can’t get jobs, it might not bother you, but it bothers me. That’s what we’re going to Washington for.”
Other reasons to attend, Sharpton implied, include finding solutions to black-on-black crime and to eradicate inequities within the criminal justice system.
“When we tell the kids to stop shooting and [get off of the streets], and they say, ‘What do we do?’ and [the government has] defunded neighborhood youth corp … defunded manpower … closed down after school programs — we want to fight to bring the children in — but you’ve got to give the children something to do,” Sharpton declared. “Criminal justice system … The Department of Justice report says that we’re arrested more, prosecuted more, given more time for the same crime and the same criminal background. We need a legislative answer for that.”
