Another King Calls for End to Police Brutality, Profiling

Standing before the Lincoln Memorial on the spot where his father inspired a nation 37 years ago, Martin Luther King III on Saturday told a crowd that America has not yet fulfilled his father’s dream of a new day when racial justice would flow like a mighty river.

Speaking at the “Redeem the Dream” rally organized to protest police brutality and racial profiling, King said he still is awaiting the day “when we can raise our children to respect police first, and fear them last.”

Saturday’s rally, organized by King and New York political activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, drew several thousand people to the Mall, although it appeared to have fallen short of the 100,000 that organizers had hoped for. The rally comes after a string of smaller, mostly local protests of police shootings, such as that of Amadou Diallo, who died in a hail of 41 police bullets Feb. 4, 1999, in New York City.

The day before the rally, Sharpton and King met with Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and top aides to President Clinton to demand that the federal government withhold funds from any police department that practices racial profiling or shows a pattern of brutality. Reno, according to Sharpton, said the matter is being studied.

The rally drew many of the nation’s top civil rights leaders. Those who came to listen and cheer were overwhelmingly African American.

Young men in dreadlocks joined fraternity brothers in chinos and polo shirts. Elderly women rode into town on church buses; suburban families arrived in minivans. Old men in straw hats, young women with Kinte cloth head wraps, and men dressed in the distinctive bow ties of the Nation of Islam.

Thomas Wallace, 75, held a yellow sign with red letters reading: “We Demand an End to Police Brutality Now.” It is the same sign he held in 1963 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The sign was originally white and red, but has yellowed with age,” said Wallace, a retired teacher. “The AFL-CIO put out truckloads of these that day in 1963, and I held it then as now.

“Other things have changed, but on this issue, nothing has changed,” Wallace continued. “The fight is still the same.”