‘57 yrs later we’re still fighting that same fight’

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC on Friday to denounce racism, protest against police brutality and commemorate the anniversary of the 1963 civil rights march when Martin Luther King Jr made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

In his iconic address, King lamented "the unspeakable horrors of police brutality" and envisioned a reality, a future where his children would "one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character".

Kimberly Jones, a Black woman from Illinois, was one of hundreds of marchers, lining up to enter the National Mall.

"Fifty-seven years later we are still fighting that same fight," Jones said, "the fight for equality.

"I'm angry, I'm frustrated, and I'm disappointed," she said.

The march comes at the end of a summer rocked by nationwide protests and racial unrest over police killings of Black people - sparked by the death of George Floyd, who died in late May after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network began planning for the march back in June in the wake of Floyd's death. On Friday, he delivered the keynote address in front of the cheering crowd.

"The reason we had and still have to say Black Lives Matter ... we go to jail longer for the same crime like we don't matter, we get poverty, double the unemployment like we don't matter, we're treated with disrespect like we don't matter," he said.

"So we figured we'd let you, Black Lives Matter and we won't stop until it matters to everybody."

Relatives of an ever-growing list of police killings in recent years, including Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor - also briefly took turns addressing the crowd.

The protest, called the "Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks," gained new urgency in recent days, after police shot another Black man, Jacob Blake, multiple times in the back at close range in front of his children in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake's father and sister attended the march. The father had earlier said that Blake has been paralysed from the waist down.

After the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial, participants marched to the nearby Martin Luther King memorial, led by the families of victims of police violence.