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WASHINGTON DC: Over 20,000 people from all over the United States turned out at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the 63rd anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his seminal "I have a dream speech" while the Trump administration doubled down on its push to use the U.S. Post Office to control who can vote by mail.
WBAI Pacifica Radio provided LIVE coverage starting at 6 AM with wall to wall reporting from noon until 3 PM.
Speakers representing a diverse coalition of faith, labor and social justice groups took their turn recounting the civil and voting rights gains made for the generations since the 1963 March on Washington that a GOP controlled Congress, U.S. Supreme Court and Trump administration are rushing to dismantle.
The high energy midday gathering was organized by Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, the King Family and the Major Drum Institute as well as scores of grassroots organizations in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as well the Trump regime's attack on labor rights and its reckless war of choice with Iran.
The generational milestone came as the Trump administration was also accelerating its violent mass deportation anti-immigrant campaign with close to 50,000 individuals, a majority of who had no criminal record, being abducted last month alone, according to the Guardian newspaper. The ongoing racially targeted roundups which include the detention of young children, comes several months after the broad daylight murder by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti amidst ICE agents' siege of Minneapolis which ignited broad based nonviolent community protests that quickly went national.
Although the crowd for the 2026 commemoration was a fraction of the massive turnout of the 1963 mobilization, it represented a generational inflection point just two months before the most consequential federal election since the Civil War. In 1971, when the Congressional Black Caucus was first established it had 17 members. Today that number is 67. Thanks to President Trump's inspired race-based gerrymandering in states like North Carolina and Texas, ABC News estimates the caucus would lose a third of its roster.
While Friday's speakers included 84-year-old Sen. Benie Sanders (I-VT), it also featured 18-year-old Yolanda B. King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr.
"My grandfather was 34-years-old when he stood at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and told America about his dream. I never met him. I never met my grandmother Coretta Scott King but I know something they both understood, a dream without work is just a wish," Yolanda King told the crowd. "The March on Washington was not just one speech. It wasn't just one man and it certainly wasn't jev. ust a day. It was thousands of people deciding to do something extraordinary together."
Just five years after his "I have a dream" speech, Dr. King, 39, was assassinated in Memphis where he had gone to support a bitter strike by that city's sanitation workers after two of their union brothers had been crushed to death by their faulty trash garbage truck.
Yolanda King continued. "Today I attest we will be the generation that fights poverty, not poor people. We will be the generation that chooses the planet over profit. We will be the generation that understands that democracy does not solely belong to Democrats or Republicans but democracy belongs to the people. And we will be the generation that choses democracy over division--truth over propaganda--community over chaos and love over hate."
Throughout the close to three hour program the central role played in organizing the 1963 march by A. Philip Randolph, the iconic civil rights and labor leader was recounted as well as unions like 1199 SEIU, AFSCME, the UAW and the AFT.
Dr. Everett Kelley is the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 federal civil servants across dozens of agencies including healthcare workers at the Veterans Administration and TSA officers securing America's passenger airline sector.
"Last year this administration tried to steip away union rights from nearly a million of them with the stroke of a pen, not because they did something wrong, but because AFGE sued them because we said no to Elon Musk and his chainsaw. They have not won that fight. We are still in court. We aren't going anywhere," Kelly told the crowd. "They can't win a fair fight. This is what they always try. They change the rules. They rig the system. They try to make it harder to fight back. Strip the unions....gut the Voting Rights Act."
"A lot of people don’t think their vote will change anything. They don’t see democracy working for them,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers that represents 1.8 million members in the education and healthcare sectors. “Imagine if our forefathers and foremothers said nothing was going to change. Imagine if they didn’t fight Jim Crow. Imagine if they didn’t fight slavery. Imagine if they didn’t fight for a better life.”
Weingarten continued. “We are not powerless. We have to get out the vote, and we have to protect the vote, and we have to vote in such massive, overwhelming numbers that the results are clear and convincing, and no one can steal it from us.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez (D-NY) reminded the crowd that A. Phillip Randolph "put it plainly, freedom is never granted---it is won. Justice is never given---it is exacted."
Speaking of those activists who answered the call to join the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, Ocassio-Cortez told the crowd "their vision went further than their victories because America may have agreed to open the lunch counter but it never committed to us affording the meal and that is our work today as we defend the foundation that our foremothers and forefathers built."
AOC continued. "America is wealthier today than it has ever been and yet millions of Americans work everyday to struggle to afford the basics. This is not just an economic failure, it is a moral and structural one and we must refuse to accept it."
