Black Civil Rights leaders are furious that they will not be able to organize a march to commemorate the 47th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s famed “I Have A Dream” speech at the location where it happened this year because infamous right wing Fox News personality and radio host Glenn Beck already booked the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28th to hold his own rally.
“We’re going to get together because we are not going to let Glenn Beck own the symbolism of Aug. 28th, 2010,” National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial said during a National Newspaper Publishers Association breakfast at NNPA’s 70th Anniversary Celebration at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers on Friday. “Someone said to me, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t challenge him. Maybe we should just let him have it. “I was like,’ Brother, where have you been? Where is your courage? Where is your sense of outrage?” We need to collaborate and bring together all people of good will, not just Black people, on Aug. 28 to send a message that Glenn Beck’s vision of America is not our vision of America.
As both a solution and response to what the leaders perceive as an attack on the legacy of King, NAACP President Ben Jealous announced at the conference that a national march for jobs and justice will be held on October 2 instead.
“A group of White males wealthier than their peers called the Tea Party has risen up in the land,” said Jealous. “They say that they want to take the country back. And take it back they surely will. They will take it back to 1963 if we let them.”
Last week, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions, announced that they were going to endorse a march for jobs that Jealous will be co-leading in Washington on Oct. 2. Other national civil rights leaders and organizations are also endorsing the Oct. jobs march as a follow up to an Aug. 28 protest of Beck. “We will be fighting Glenn Beck on Aug. 28th and we will be using that to leverage the second march,” Jealous said. “That march has to happen. Our people are dying right now, literally, from lack of access to jobs.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, who also spoke at the NNPA Conference, said Beck will distort King’s Legacy and his message.
“On the anniversary of the March on Washington, Glenn Beck is going to talk about the dream of Martin Luther King and how he was with them – not us. So, we’ve been traveling all over this country because there is no way in the world that I am going to allow him to have more people there than us. I hope every Black person in the country will help us to challenge this.
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