A new March on Washington was announced Thursday from the Minneapolis sanctuary where George Floyd was eulogized.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said the date for the mass gathering will be Aug. 28, the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" that further energized the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Sharpton made the announcement before King's eldest son, Martin Luther King III, and others assembled at the downtown campus of North Central University for the first of three services memorializing Floyd, the black man who was pinned under the knee of a white police officer on May 25 and died that night.
"We're going back to Washington, Martin," Sharpton said during his eulogy for Floyd. "That's where your father stood in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial and said 'I have a dream.'"
The civil rights leader from New York said it's time "to restore and recommit that dream to stand up, because just like at one era we had to fight slavery, another era we had to fight Jim Crow, another era we dealt with voting rights. This is the era to deal with policing and criminal justice.
"We need to go back to Washington and stand up — black, white, Latino, Arab — in the shadows of Lincoln and tell them this is the time to stop this."
