2023 March on Washington features generations fighting for change

WASHINGTON — For many families, Saturday's 2023 March on Washington was a generational experience.

Among the crowd expected to exceed 75,000 were elders who attended the original 1963 march mingling with grand and great-grandchildren.

Others were people paying tribute to their parents’ struggles for civil rights and vowing to carry on.

"It was wall-to-wall people like sardines in a can," recalled 79-year-old Evelyn Whitaker of Washington who attended the 1963 rally.

“I was here looking up at Martin Luther King right over there," Whitaker said pointing to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Whitaker said racism has not been defeated in her lifetime.

“There's an ugliness that comes out," she said. "We got a long way to go."

Whitaker called Saturday's event "wonderful" but she said she wishes the crowd had been ten times larger.

Lingering in the shade of a tree near the reflecting pool 65-year-old Garnell Whitfield, of Buffalo, New York, stood with a sign honoring his mother, who would have been 87 years old. Ruth Whitfield was the oldest person to die in the mass shooting attack on the Topps Friendly Market in Buffalo in May of 2022.

The shooting that killed 10 is an example of the horrors of racism that exist for the current generation, according to Garnell Whitfield.

“If she were alive she would be here," Garnell Whitfield said. "She died at the hands of a white supremacist."

Whitfield reflected on the history that has unfolded since the 1963 March on Washington.

“Some of those gains that were made are being taken from us. And so here were are 60 years later fighting for some of the same things that they were asking for back then."

Near the Lincoln Memorial three generations of the family of LaTanya Thomas from Jacksonville, Florida, watched speeches under a tent.

"It's important for children to see what is being done,” Thomas said, standing between her mother, and her son.

Thomas’ 12-year-old son Tyler Gibson attends school in Florida and says he is experiencing the heated controversy over teaching in that state that slavery had some benefits.

“They are not telling me the truth in school,” he said.

"It's still important for us to be active, and not just passive about it," LaTanya Thomas said.