MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

March on Washington: “You might have killed the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream”

The half-mile march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Martin Luther King Memorial, comes amid a summer of growing racial unrest

Thousands of people took part in a march in Washington on Friday to denounce racism, on the anniversary of the march in 1963 where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr made his historic 'I Have a Dream' speech.

“You might have killed the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream,” civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton told Friday's crowd.

Activists and politicians gave speeches, including Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who appeared in a recorded video. Many referenced John Lewis, the late lawmaker, who spoke at the 1963 march.

They also referred to the importance of voting in November's election and the links between activism for Black civil rights, disability rights and LGBT rights and against gun violence, among other causes.

“In so many ways, we stand together today in the symbolic shadow of history, but we are making history together right now,” said Martin Luther King III, Martin Luther King Jr's son.

“Americans are marching together, many for the first time, and we're demanding real, lasting structural change,” King added.

The half-mile march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Martin Luther King Memorial, on a hot, humid day in the US capital, comes amid a summer of racial unrest book-ended by two high-profile incidents in which Black men were shot by police.

Protests across US began in May, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an African-American man who died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

And earlier this week, protests broke out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after police officers shot another African-American man, Jacob Blake, multiple times in front of his children. Though Blake survived the shooting, lawyers have said he has been paralyzed.

Allisa Findley, the sister of Botham Jean, an African-American man killed in Dallas by an off-duty police officer who said she mistook his apartment for her own, said: “I am tired of adding new names, adding new hashtags to an already long list of victims of police terror. We cannot allow our brothers and sisters to only be remembered for how they died.”