PHILADELPHIA—Fifty years after the historic 1963 March on Washington, civil rights leaders converged on the City of Brotherly Love for the National Urban League Conference last week to push for education reform, the creation of more jobs and to safeguard voting rights.
They also sought to drum up public support for the upcoming commemorative March on Washington, scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., on August 24, 2013.
“They would say, ‘That’s the way it is. Don’t get in trouble.’ But one day, I was inspired to get in the way and get in trouble,” said Rep. John Lewis, who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”
Lewis, who was beaten in Selma in 1965 by Alabama State troopers as he tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, received the National Urban League’s Civil Rights Champion Award.
“For more than 50 years I have been getting into what I call good trouble, necessary trouble,” Lewis said.
This year’s Urban League Conference came amid the recent jury acquittal of George Zimmerman on all criminal accounts in the slaying of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The conference speakers included Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and her lawyer Benjamin Crump, who urged the audience of thousands to actively protest “Stand Your Ground” laws.
“If Trayvon would have been of legal age, and Trayvon would have had a permit to carry a gun and he would have defended himself against this strange man who followed him, would the ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws have vindicated Trayvon Martin?” Crump asked. “I know I’m preaching to the choir this morning, but this conversation has to get to the George Zimmermans of the world that our children are not criminals. Our children are not thugs. Our children have the right to walk from the 7-Eleven.”
