“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, speaking to a crowd of approximately 250,000 on a hot day in August of 1963.

“This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning,” he said in his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

He was right, 1963 was just the beginning. In the 60 years since Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Washington Monument at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, so much has changed, and yet, so much has stayed the same. 

I remember the sweltering summer of 2020, watching people take to the streets the same way they flocked to Washington D.C. to declare that this was not the end, but yet another beginning. They crowded the streets wearing masks — because we were fighting not just the plague of injustice, but a literal plague known as COVID — many in all black, fists raised in protest. They chanted “I can’t breathe,” “Stop killing us,” “Black lives matter.” These were not just platitudes, but the rallying cries of people in crisis. 

Somehow, Black Americans found themselves in yet another summer of legitimate discontent. We were tired of the empty promises, of the platitudes that easily slipped through the lips of the white people in power who told us the same things I’m sure Brother Martin and his peers heard: “We see you, we hear you.” 

But did they really hear us? Because we had already demonstrated in this fashion six years earlier with the same rallying cry.

In the summer of 2014, I took to the street, baby strapped to my chest, to protest the killing of Eric Garner mere minutes from where we lived. We chanted “I can’t breathe” before it became the call to action it is today. Back then they were the final words of a Black man taken from this world too soon. I wiped sweat from my brow as many other Black women with babies strapped to their chests had done in the past. 

In both 2014 and 2020, I thought of that August day in 1963. Is this the future those men and women marched for? To see their children and grandchildren being choked to death in the streets in a video played on loop on the nightly news? Did they get attacked by dogs and hoses so that future generations could inherit the same fears of men in blue uniforms? Could they have ever imagined as they listened to King’s voice ring out over the Mall that their descendants would take to those same streets with bullhorns? That instead of saying “Free at last,” they’d be reminding the world that “Black lives matter.”

King said it himself during his speech: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”

The unspeakable horrors of police brutality haven’t gone anywhere in 60 years. I’d argue that they have only become more horrible as the years have gone on, happening in broad daylight in a loop on CNN. When they used to beat us with sticks, now they shoot first and ask questions later. Instead of dogs, they use tasers. Worst of all, they stole our rallying cry, bastardizing it with their own sick logic, using imaginary “blue lives” as a distraction.

King said, “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”

People ask why we still fight and write and gather in protest and community. It’s simple; the Black American has only gained freedom on paper, not in practice. 

Our neighborhoods are still ravaged by purposeful policy choices to keep us in poverty, without safe and affordable homes, and subject to crime. We still earn cents for every white man’s dollar. The white men in power still keep us away from the ballot box out of fear. Black Americans are still being systematically kept out of the nation’s narrative. Too much of white America is content to break our backs, but never allow us to put our feet up and rest.

Until the day of true equality is achieved, not the version of equality we’re sold to convince us that we’re equal, we will fight. We will strap our babies to our chests, sweat gathering on our brows, and march until our feet ache. That is a promise.