Children's March, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Teressa Raiford and Don't Shoot Portland organized a march that attracted about 700 to 1000 people, and it was led by children, many of them carrying posters, banners, and signs they created during the weeks building up to the march. The part of the USA where I live is furious. As the racist, hateful, and violent policies of the government become more daily more appalling, people cannot remain silent, cannot sit at home doing nothing, saying nothing. 

I was moved by the strength, energy, and perseverance of the many parents who carried their children, pushed them in strollers, and encouraged them to keep going during the four-mile march as a lesson in justice, a lesson in hope. I was also moved by the gravity of the issues depicted in the children's posters (see Extras).

From Rev. King:

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men I have told them that molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems and bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government." --"Beyond Vietnam," April 4, 1967.

Every day for the past week has been tightly packed with events, some so tightly packed that I could not finish processing one day's photographs before I had another couple of hundred. My apologies for the lack of comments and responses to your generous dispensing of stars, hearts, and comments.