Plans for 50th Anniversary of MLK's March on Washington Revamped After Zimmerman Acquittal

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Mesut Dogan

Plans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of  Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech are being redrawn in the wake of an angry reaction over the decision to acquit  George Zimmerman over the shooting of  Trayvon Martin, and a recent decision by the supreme court to strike down key sections of a law that protects black voters.

Senior figures in the civil rights movement have told the Guardian that fast-escalating resentment over the treatment of black Americans will result in larger-than-expected crowds descending on Washington next month for the commemorations off King's famous address.

Zimmerman's acquittal and the supreme court ruling on the Voting Rights Act have fuelled a renewed debate over race relations in the US and reinvigorated the civil rights movement. In Washington on Friday, Barack Obama delivered a surprisingly bold speech about the issue.

On Saturday, vigils organise by the veteran civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton will be held across the US to protest against the acquittal of Zimmerman, who shot 17-year-old Martin as he returned home armed with nothing more than a bag of Skittles and a drink from a convenience store.

But the King commemorations in August are likely to be even more pointed. Many believe the Zimmerman case, as well as the recent supreme court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, have demonstrated in stark terms how far America is from realising the dream articulated by King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

According to a CNN/ORC poll conducted earlier this year, roughly half of Americans still did not believe the vision King set out in 1963 has been fulfilled. Survey data indicates that view has remained unchanged throughout the duration of Obama's presidency.

Obama is understood to have been invited to play a central role in the King commemorations, which are likely to be a global spectacle, but has not yet publicly committed himself.

Until Friday, the president had not said much about the Zimmerman verdict and was coming under growing pressure to take a lead on the issue. Some African American leaders were saying privately that the president was failing to grasp the intensity of feeling over the case and at Thursday's White House press briefing, Obama's spokesman, Jay Carney, was repeatedly pressed on why the president had failed to take a more public stance.

But in an unexpected move on Friday, Obama appeared at the White House press briefing to address the issue head on. "You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son," he said. "Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.

"And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognise that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that – that doesn't go away."

The president added that "both the outcome and the aftermath" of the case might have been different if Martin had been a white teenager. Drawing from personal experience, he added: "There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of being followed in a department store. That includes me."

In a remarks borrowed from King's 1963 speech, the president told reporters said Americans should now ask themselves: "Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character?"