Monica Villamizar
in Americas
al Jazeera Blogs
8/29/2010
It was all there in plain sight. Martin Luther King Jr’s vision for the future gone wrong. The two rallies – one commemorating the civil rights leader’s speech in 1963, the other promising to “restore honor” and pick-up the mantle of equal rights – ran into each other at 3pm in downtown Washington.
The events had been scheduled in a way that the “reliving the dream” crowd of around 3000, would not collide with the much larger crowd (around 100 000) invited by conservative Fox news presenter Glenn Beck. Some African American leaders had rejected the fact that a right-wing figure like Glenn Beck could bank on a legendary human rights activist, especially when he has been known to spread messages that sound intolerant and are inflammatory.
There were policemen on horses and patrol cars, but there were no clashes or acts of aggression from one group to the other. There were just stares and a few confrontational verbal exchanges. Another kind of aggression or violence perhaps; a feeling that some described to me as “uncomfortable”, mentioning that both rallies (one mostly white, and the other mostly African American) were worlds apart…
…The Al Sharpton rally finished with a prayer at the site of the future Martin Luther King JR memorial. I pushed my way to the RISER to ask Martin Luther King’s son, Martin Luther King III, his opinion on all these issues. He said, “One can not highjack a message, and actually Glenn Beck paid an incredible tribute my dad…My father was concerned about poverty… Things have improved dramatically in America, we have a African American president but that doesn’t mean that racism is gone… We still have work to do around race and economic issues”…
Read the complete article and watch the video at al Jazeera.
