The Reverend Al Sharpton indicated at a Washington rally yesterday that conservative forces would face a fight in the upcoming elections.
“We’re coming out to fight and we’re not going to let you turn back the clock,” he said.
Sharpton was the organiser of a rally to commemorate the 47th anniversary of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have A Dream speech.
Across town at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered that seminal address, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck was hosting a rally called Restoring Honour.
The speakers at Sharpton’s Reclaim The Dream rally included Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater.
“I am delighted to know that Mr Glenn Beck and his colleagues discovered the I Have A Dream speech,” Franklin said. But, he added, Beck needed to travel to Morehouse to learn what King studied, citing, for example, the works of religious thinkers who influenced the late civil rights leader.
A couple of speakers noted the passing of Dorothy Height earlier this year. Height, a civil rights pioneer, had been chair and president emeritus of the National Council of Negro Women and was on the podium with King during the 1963 speech.
NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] president Benjamin Todd Jealous castigated the message of the Beck rally.
“For a year and a half we’ve been subjected to small hearts and small minds on our small screens,” he said, referring to conservative ideas on television. (CNN)
