Republished with permission from Common Dreams, by Abby Zimet

In awful synchronicity, on the day thousands honored 1963’s March on Washington where MLK searingly declared, “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children,” a Florida gunman killed three black people in what officials demurely called a “racially motivated” shooting. A sheriff was more frank: “He wanted to kill niggers.” Many say the racist violence was long “festering”; given Ron DeSantis‘ toxic rhetoric and record—on guns, diversity, black history and rights—the shooter was “answering a call.”

Monday marked the 60th anniversary of the seminal march of over a quarter million people, this country’s largest demonstration for civil rights; Saturday’s rally was nilled as a “continuation, not a commemoration” to stress the struggles are ongoing. Its sea of banners, t-shirts, signs reflected the hope and rage behind that reality: “Stop Hate…I Am The Dream… Let Us Vote…Put the Gun Down…Black Lives Matter…Good Trouble…We March On…” Speakers addressed the issues of King’s era—poverty, voting rights, police violence—and today’s attacks on black history, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action. Actor Sasha Baron decried rising anti-Semitism and growing fear of “the other” amplified by social media—”We’ve gone from the Klan rally to the chat room”; gun-control advocate David Hogg urged Gen Z activists to seek political office: “We are done running away from this issue.” Said MLK’s daughter-in-law Andrea Waters King, “We are here to liberate (the) soul of democracy from those forces who would have us all go backwards and perish. “We are still getting it in different ways,” said one activist. “But Black people are speaking louder…We’re tired, sick and tired, of asking for justice.” Another cited a saying of “our ancestors struggling under slavery: ‘Every shut eye ain’t sleep.'”

The original March on Washington, during the steamy dog days of the capitol 100 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in “the land of the free,” came as America was witnessing the bloody lynchings, bombings, beatings and protests of a nascent civil rights movement. The march was largely organized by activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin; seeking an integrated front, they also brought in white labor organizer Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers. Though women played a key role in the organizing, they were mostly excluded from the program, an act of sexism today’s activists call “perhaps the only flaw in the march.”

John Lewis, then the 23-year-old chair of SNCC and one of the first 13 Freedom Riders, was widely deemed the most militant organizer—he’d planned to declare, “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did”—but toned it down after pressure from King. “We must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery,” said Lewis, calling for tireless, peaceful demonstrations and “one man, one vote.” “We have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the president, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 just before he turned 28, was the day’s final speaker. When he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to deliver his thundering “I Have A Dream” speech before the diverse, joyful crowd—police were there but peaceful—historians argue his eloquent, principled, Gandhi-inspired use of non-violence as a strategy “put him on an unassailable moral plane.” King had written a formal, soaring speech: The Emancipation Proclamation was a “light of hope” to millions of slaves “seared in the flames of withering injustice” ending “the long night of their captivity”; 100 years later, “the Negro (still) not free” from “the chains of discrimination”; the “fierce urgency of now” as the time to rise from darkness until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

He was about to sit down when Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell them about your dream, Martin.” He went on to merge bits of past speeches with an improvised yet familiar refrain “deeply rooted in the American dream,” dating to Frederick Douglass and other Black abolitionists, to argue the nation had “tragically strayed from the principles of its founders,” but “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Among those attending this week’s rally were people in their 70s and 80s who’d been at the first as teens, who recalled the KKK raiding their house as they hid under beds and the informal Black codes like “reckless eyeballing” that forbade them from looking directly at white people on the street. The march, said Frank Stewart, “was a revelation, the first time I saw Black and white people together walking to do something.” Though she didn’t remember anyone carrying flags, said Mera Rubell, “It was.the essence of democracy…I felt like I witnessed the best of America.” Rubell rode to D.C. with other college students on a bus where Harry Belafonte played guitar and sang with them the whole way—a reminder the march was also “a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.”

Activist Courtland Cox, who worked with SNCC registering voters in a perilous South—”In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite”—recalled the restorative power of hearing Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers. “The music would be the wind beneath your wings,” he said. “Singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas….The music had advocacy.”

Despite widespread coverage of the march, most paid little attention to King’s iconic speech. Two exceptions were The New York Times James Reston—King “sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile”—and WaPo’s Carl Bernstein: “I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime. The ‘some day’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.” He was (mostly, sadly) wrong. The March helped prod Kennedy to propose a civil rights act—”This nation, for all its hopes (and) boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free…Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise”—and Johnson to sign 1964’s Civil Rights Act and 1965’s Voting Rights Act.

But the ensuing years, from the 1980s up to 2020, have seen an endless, ugly whittling away of those rights by Republicans clinging to their power while whining and lying about “illegitimate,” mostly minority voters. Since 2013, 29 states have added 94 restrictions on the right to vote; today’s GOP has proposed a spurious “American Confidence in Elections” Act to limit mail-in ballots and drop boxes, ban giving food or water to voters in line, and allow yet more dark money while overwhelmingly voting down every Democratic effort to protect the right to vote.

As the GOP veers ever further right, racist and fascist—and with the possible exception of Mississippi, where six former cops of a self-described “Goon Squad” face 13 felony charges carrying prison sentences of up to 120 years for the heinous torture of two innocent black men—Ron DeSantis’ Florida may be the most regressive, repressive, demeaning and dangerous place in America today for black people, or any minority, to live.

DeSantis’ racism has deep roots, from his fog-horn of a dog-whistle to voters in his 2018 gubernatorial campaign against (black) Democrat Andrew Gillum to not “monkey this up” to his non-history book “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” a dumb dig at our only president of color, wherein he uses cherry-picked quotes from Madison, Hamilton et al as “permission slips to skip the yucky parts” of U.S. history—like slavery, which he dismisses as a “personal flaw” of the Founders, like being late to dinner, and “a fact of life throughout human history.”

Little wonder that while segregation, a step up from slavery, was the law of the land in America until the mid-1960s, DeSantis has fashioned an insensate realm that vehemently rejects the notion of systemic racism and white privilege as a twisted “apartheid.” Nobly, blindly, doggedly, he doesn’t see color.

He does, however, punish it. Since coming to power, DeSantis has done everything he can to devalue Black lives, erase Black history, erode Black power and debase, mislead, indoctrinate and marginalize Black kids, and other “others.” Seeking to minimize Black voters, he’s tried to suppress their votes so often a judge noted “Florida seems to have a problem governing within the bounds” of the Constitutition. He barged into a fight to redraw Congressional maps so he could carve up a District long represented by a Black Democrat into four GOP-ish districts, an act so brazenly in defiance of a law protecting minority voters even his GOP legislature opposed it; voters and advocates have sued.

He also removed, with help from a political hatchet man, two duly-elected Dem prosecutors, one a Black woman, for doing their jobs: Orlando-area State Attorney Monique Worrell, who was about to crack down on “their cops, the ones who used to do things and get away with them”—she’s called DeSantis “a weak dictator”—and State Attorney Andrew Warren, for “neglect of duty,” aka refusing to prosecute those seeking or providing abortions or gender transition care. Warren sued; though his own appointed judges found DeSantis violated the state’s constitution, Warren lost on a technicality.

Aptly for a fascist bot ever hungry for power, he’s declined to criticize flourishing Nazi groups bearing swastikas, hateful projections and florid “DeSantis Country” signage. He has tried to portray the Nazi rallies as part of a Democratic smear campaign—”Those are not true supporters of mine—that’s an operation to try to link me to something”—and he fired an aide who posted a bonkers video in which the state flag morphs into an actual Nazi emblem with DeSantis’ head. Too much, too soon. Still, not much is.

He created an election police force to terrorize African Americans, often former cons, who are told they can vote and are then arrested for it. He signed a law that designates a gathering of three or more “a riot” and awarded civil immunity to anyone who drives a car into protesters. He recruited and gave out hefty bonuses to out-of-state cops frustrated with limits on their abuses, including documented racist attacks. He ended diversity and inclusion initiatives in state colleges, which he called “scams” by “the woke mob,” vetoed mental health funding for survivors of the Pulse nightclub shooting after promising to support the LGBTQ+ community, and vowed that members of Mexican drug cartels would be “shot stone cold dead,” never mind due process.