President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family to mark Monday’s 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
All of King’s children have been invited, White House officials have said.
The Democratic president was taking a page out of history by opening the Oval Office to King’s family. On Aug. 28, 1963, the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, President John F. Kennedy welcomed King and other key march organizers to the Oval for a meeting.
The White House did not include the meeting on Biden’s public schedule for Monday.
Biden also was hosting a reception Monday evening to mark the 60th anniversary of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal organization that was established at Kennedy’s request to help advocate for racial justice.
The 1963 march is still considered one of the greatest and most consequential racial justice demonstrations in U.S. history.
The nonviolent protest attracted as many as 250,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial and provided momentum for Congress to pass landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation in the years that followed. King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
On Saturday, thousands converged on the National Mall to commemorate the march, with speakers and others saying a country still riven by racial inequality has yet to fulfill King’s dream of a colorblind society in which his four children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The event was convened by the King family’s Drum Major Institute and the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
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