Thousands gather in Washington for 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘dream’ speech

Thousands of Americans converged on Washington on Saturday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, a pivotal event in the 1960s US civil rights movement at which Martin Luther King Jnr gave his galvanising “I have a dream” speech.

The 1963 march brought more than 250,000 people to the nation’s capital to push for an end to discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Many credit the show of strength with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Organised by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and other civil rights groups, this year’s march took place at the Lincoln Memorial, the backdrop to King’s impassioned call for equality, as many speakers warned that much work was yet to be done.

Margaret Huang, the president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Centre non-profit civil rights advocacy group, told the crowd that the march 60 years ago opened doors and spurred new tools to fight racial discrimination.

But new laws throughout the country that “claw away at the right to vote” and target the LGBTQ community threaten to erase some of those gains, Huang said. “These campaigns against our ballots, our bodies, our schoolbooks, they are all connected. When our right to vote falls, all other civil and human rights can fall too, but we’re here today to say ‘not on our watch.’”

Speakers decried gun violence against black people as the crowd chanted “No Justice, No peace.”

Ashley Sharpton, an activist with National Action Network and daughter of the Reverend Al Sharpton, said in a speech that Americans need to “turn demonstration into legislation” and cannot allow the sacrifices of ancestors in the fight for equality to have been in vain.