President Barack Obama led civil rights pioneers Wednesday in a ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech roused the 250,000 people who rallied there decades ago for racial equality.
Large crowds gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where the first black U.S. president spoke just after 1900 GMT – the same time that King delivered his spellbinding speech.The first march was early in the turbulent 1960s, when the South still had separate restrooms, schools and careers for blacks and whites, and racism lingered across the country. In the two years following the march, President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to outlaw discrimination, and King received the Nobel Peace Prize.
“There were couples in love who couldn’t marry. Soldiers who fought for freedom abroad but couldn’t find any at home,” Obama said, speaking of that era. “America changed for you and rtls,” he added later.But he pointed to the nation’s economic disparities as evidence that King’s hopes remain unfulfilled.
Obama has said King is one of two people he admires “more than anybody in American history.” The other is Abraham Lincoln. Thousands of people were in attendance in wet weather.Two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, spoke movingly of King’s legacy – and of problems still to overcome.“This march, and that speech, changed America,” Clinton declared.
Carter said King’s efforts had helped not just black Americans, but “In truth, he helped to free all people.”Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker and Jamie Foxx were among the celebrities.Winfrey said King forced the nation “to wake up, look at itself and eventually change.”
International commemorations were being held at London’s Trafalgar Square, as well as in the nations of Japan, Switzerland, Nepal and Liberia. London Mayor Boris Johnson has said King’s speech resonates around the world and continues to inspire people as one of the great pieces of oratory.
Obama considers the 1963 march part of his generation’s “formative memory.” A half-century after the march, he said, is a good time to reflect on how far the country has come and how far it still has to go, particularly after the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
Race isn’t a subject Obama likes to talk about in public, but the Martin case is one time he has done so.In an interview Tuesday on Tom Joyner’s radio show, Obama said he imagines that King “would be amazed in many ways about the progress that we’ve made.” He listed advances such as equal rights before the law, an accessible judicial system, thousands of African-American elected officials, African-American CEOs and the doors that the civil rights movement opened for Latinos, women and gays.
The white minivan packed with armed Syrian fighters hurtled along the narrow winding road and passed old stone houses nestled among lush orchards of apples, pomegranates and figs clinging to dry-stone terraces stepped into the soaring pine-covered mountains and rocky ravines of Jabal al-Akrad in Syria's northwestern Latakia province.
The seven men munched on potato chips as revolutionary songs, mainly Islamist but a few secular, played through the van's speakers: "We are your soldiers, Osama. We seek martyrdom," went one.There was another soundtrack playing outside - the roar of MiG fighter jets and the soft thump-thump of helicopter rotor blades before they opened their doors to drop large improvised explosives packed into barrels. A MiG suddenly swooped directly overhead, prompting the van to screech to a halt. The men clambered out and hid under the sprawling branches of a walnut tree by the side of the road.
A rebel 23-mm anti-aircraft gun nearby chased the jet with several thunderous rounds. It was joined by several other anti-aircraft guns of various calibers. All missed their target. A chicken clucked. An old man in a red and white checkered headscarf, riding an ash-gray donkey a shade darker than the color of his whiskers, slowly continued up the steep path, seemingly oblivious to events around him.
After 10 minutes and several circular passes, the jet again dived in low and unleashed its explosive payload into an adjacent hill, creating plumes of white smoke that obscured the gentle, rounded mountaintop like a vertical cloud.
The men of the Ansar al-Din battalion got back into the van and drove toward the many other plumes of smoke rising from the hills. They were headed to one of the most important front lines in the Syrian civil war: the battle for the mountain heartlands of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, his ancestral homeland and the backbone of his regime.
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