MARCH ON WASHINGTON REMEMBERED!

THE PEOPLES ORGANIZATION FOR PROGRESS PO BOX 22505 NEWARK, NJ 07101 973 801 0001 www.njpop.org CONTACT: LAWRENCE HAMM August 24, 2012   FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   MARCH ON WASHINGTON REMEMBERED!   On Tuesday, August 28th, the People's Organization for Progress (P.O.P.) will observe the 49th anniversary of the epic March On Washington of 1963 with a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, located at Springfield Avenue and Market St., Newark.           Participants will assemble at 4:30pm. On August 28, 1963, according to official figures, 250, 000 people assembled at the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC to demand civil rights legislation. It was the largest mobilization that the nation's capital had seen up until that time. It was there the immortal Martin Luther King Jr. Delivered his historic 'I Have A Dream' address that marched his ascension into history as both an all-time great orator and mobilizer.           The date was chosen based on the day that Emmitt Till, a 13 year old from Chicago, was savagely lynched in Mississippi on that day in 1955. That lynching and the bold decision of Till's mother to have her son funeralized with the casket open so that the savagery visited upon him could be revealed to the world produced a collective outrage that provided the moral undergirding for the epic Montgomery Bus Boycott launched later that same year in Montgomery, Alabama and for the larger emergence of a new movement based in the American south that ultimately became known as 'the Civil Rights Movement.'           Tragically, although basic civil rights protections now legally are still in place, the host of issues driving the March On Washington are still issues today, including police brutality, jobs, the right to vote, workers rights and resource draining, unpopular wars abroad to name a few.           The Peoples Organization for Progress did a 381 daily protest campaign just this past year at Newark's Lincoln Monument dramatizing the current economic crisis being dangerously driven by these very same issues.           "We rally not just to honor Dr. King and those who made that great day happen, we rally because our voting rights are under attack right now with new Voter ID requirements and because we are in real crisis right now behind the same issues that drove the March on Washington back then," said Lawrence Hamm, the founding chairman for the People's Organization for Progress emphatically.           For more information, please call 973 801 0001…