At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, hundreds of people began to gather at the Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. By noon, the crowd had swelled to thousands. The protesters began marching through the nation’s capital to call for justice and decry racial discrimination in light of recent deaths of black men at the hands of police. The crowd rallied through the city demanding “justice for all.” The protest was a response to recent decisions by two separate grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, which declined to indict the white police officers responsible for the deaths of 18-year-old Michael Brown and 43-year-old Eric Garner. The Justice for All march was led by the families of police shooting victims, including …
At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, hundreds of people began to gather at the Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. By noon, the crowd had swelled to thousands. The protesters began marching through the nation’s capital to call for justice and decry racial discrimination in light of recent deaths of black men at the hands of police.
The crowd rallied through the city demanding “justice for all.” The protest was a response to recent decisions by two separate grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, which declined to indict the white police officers responsible for the deaths of 18-year-old Michael Brown and 43-year-old Eric Garner.
The Justice for All march was led by the families of police shooting victims, including relatives of Garner, Brown, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley and John Crawford.
The march was organized by the National Action Network, a civil rights organization led by Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton joined the families as they marched through Washington Saturday.
“Do not be silent. Do not be complacent. Do not continue to live with police misconduct and violence as somehow acceptable,” Sharpton urged earlier this week in a piece he wrote for The Huffington Post.
“We are not anti-police; we are anti-police-brutality,” Sharpton told protesters on Saturday. “And today we challenge Congress to follow in the president’s footsteps and take legislative action to protect us, the citizens.”
The mothers of Rice, Garner, Brown and Trayvon Martin appeared together in public for the first time Friday night. In a joint interview on CNN, the women spoke out against racial discrimination and argued that their sons might not have died if they had been white.
“If Eric Garner was a white man in Suffolk County doing the same thing that he was doing — even if he would have been caught selling cigarettes that day — they would have given him a summons and he wouldn’t have lost his life that day … I believe that 100 percent,” Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
The deaths of these black men have become part of a narrative that many believe is all too common in the United States. In response, protesters around the country have participated in demonstrations to decry racial injustice and police brutality. Many of their signs and chants contain the slogan that has become synonymous with the movement: Black lives matter.
That same message was echoed by protesters who participated in Justice For All march in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. Here are some powerful images:
The slideshow below will be updated with images throughout the day.
Continue reading here:
March In Washington Draws Thousands Of Protesters Demanding Justice For All
