Sixty-three years ago, roughly 250,000 Americans descended on Washington for one of the most consequential demonstrations in our nation's history.It was there that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech and articulated an extraordinary vision of an America where his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.Friday could have been a remarkable opportunity to honor that legacy, recognize just how far America has come and recommit ourselves to equal treatment under the law.Instead, much of what we got sounded like a Democratic campaign rally with the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop.House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Trump a “hater in the White House,” talked about “Jim Crow-like tactics,” and urged voters to put Democrats back in control of the House so they could “end this national nightmare.”Bernie Sanders went even further, accusing Trump and the Supreme Court justices he appointed of launching “the most significant assault on voting rights since segregation.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked Republicans over voting rights, then told the crowd that Democrats intended “to win it all.”There is just one problem with this supposed national emergency.Where was everybody?Reuters reported that only several thousand people attended. That is not nobody, but consider the machinery behind this thing. More than 90 organizations participated, some of the most recognizable Democrats in America were speaking, and dozens of buses brought people into Washington from the New York area alone.Compare that with the approximately 250,000 people who came in 1963.My conclusion is pretty simple. Americans do not appear to be buying the claim that we are living through some new era of Jim Crow voter suppression.In fact, polls repeatedly show overwhelming support for such supposedly sinister concepts as showing identification and proving citizenship before voting.If Americans truly believed their fundamental right to vote was being systematically stripped away on a scale comparable to segregation, wouldn't you expect something more than a few thousand people on the National Mall?Maybe the problem isn't that Americans aren't listening.Maybe they listened, looked at reality, and didn't buy what they were being sold.
In Album: Judy Gilford's Timeline Photos
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