The Rev. Al Sharpton led a march and rally in Washington, DC over the weekend to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic 1963 March on Washington. Themed “Relclaim the Dream” to counter conservative TV host Glenn Beck’s rally that took place the same day at the actual site where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech the march swelled into many tens of thousands as it left Dunbar High School and ended at the proposed site of the MLK memorial.

Check out the video and photos below.

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VIA THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:

A collection of student, labor and community activists rallied for immigration reform near the White House Saturday in the wake of a controversial immigration enforcement law passed in Arizona.

Immigrant advocates have used May 1 to lobby for reform for the past several years. This year, community, student and labor leaders were calling on President Barack Obama to halt deportations until comprehensive immigration reform was passed. Protests in dozens of cities across the country had been planned.

One group of students marched 1,500 miles from Florida to D.C. to attend the rally. Another group marched from New York. One group at the rally in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, engaged in a chant of “Education, not deportation!”

Activists were also out to protest a recently-passed immigration enforcement law in Arizona.

“People say because we are a different color…they say we are different,” said Maria Vazquez of Gaithersburg, who was wearing a yellow shirt donned by many at the rally that said “We are all Arizona.”

The state’s law originally authorized police to check the residency status of a person if they had “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country illegally. To mollify concerns about racial profiling, it was amended to state that police had to be investigating another crime if they wanted to check someone’s immigration status.

Still, at the Lafayette gathering, Arazelia Hernandez, from Kansas City, toted a sign that said “Does this outfit make me look illegal?,” which she said was in response to Arizona’s law.

“Arizona proves that nativists are forcefully taking over the political space created by a vacuum of presidential and congressional leadership,” said Gustavo Torres from CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy group. “The time for aggressive action is now.”

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VIA THE WASHINGTON POST:

Amid a sea of brightly colored T-shirts and wave after wave of protest signs, Regina Holliday’s homemade banner still stuck out as she marched Tuesday in support of health-care reform.

Clad in a painter’s smock, Holliday, whose uninsured husband died of cancer in the summer of 2009, waved an image of him and her two sons.

“We want a foot in the door. That’s what this bill is,” Holliday, 37, said about the current health-care reform legislation.

Holliday was one of thousands of protesters who marched through downtown Washington on Tuesday to criticize the health insurance industry and attempt to draw support for the Democratic proposal to overhaul the system.

Organizers with Health Care for America Now, a coalition of labor and other liberal groups, targeted insurance company leaders attending a policy conference held by industry advocates at the Ritz-Carlton hotel at 22nd and M streets NW. Reinforcing the Obama administration’s recent criticism of increasing health premiums, the demonstrators marched to the hotel to make a mock “citizen’s arrest” of insurance executives, who were demonized on demonstration posters and over the loudspeaker.

“We’re declaring this a crime scene!” bellowed Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, to the roar of the crowd. AFL-CIO is a federation of about 60 labor unions.

Organizers of the protest said they brought about 5,000 people from across the United States to downtown Washington. They began their march in Dupont Circle, where they heard speeches from politicians and activists.

Former Vermont governor and physician Howard Dean cheered on demonstrators earlier in the morning. “We deserve a vote. . . . This is a vote about one thing — are you for the insurance companies or for the American people?”

Other marchers joined the main group as it reached the hotel. Police had set up barriers blocking access to the entrance. As protesters chanted and beat on drums, men and women in business suits took photos on their cellphones from behind the barricades.

The protest comes as President Obama makes a final push for passage of the health-care reform package, which critics say would not control health-care costs, among other failings.

“We will continue to send the message to Congress that they need to listen to us, not the health insurance companies, and that they needed to get reform done now,” said David Elliot, communications director for USAction, a nonprofit that helped co-found the Health Care for America campaign in 2008.

Insurers say they are being vilified.

“All health plans are in the same situation in trying to deal with the steadily increasing medical costs in the delivery system, which are not sustainable,” a spokesman for Anthem Blue Cross of California said last month when the firm agreed to a request by California regulators to postpone a premium increase of 39 percent for people who buy individual policies.

Like other insurers, Anthem also said rates are going up for individual insurance policies because, in the poor economy, healthy people are dropping coverage, leaving a pool of customers who are sicker and more expensive to cover.

The administration contends that the rate increases reflect excessive profits; insurance lobbyists counter that their rates mirror underlying increases in prices charged by doctors, hospitals and drug firms.

No one was arrested during Tuesday’s demonstration, Elliot said. But there was a minor skirmish between police and protesters when some tried to gain access to a parking tunnel next to the hotel. After a small group was allowed to deliver “citizen’s arrest warrants” to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lobbying group hosting the conference, the crowd began to disperse.

The lobby plans to spend more than $1 million on a nationwide advertising campaign this week to, as one official with the group said, “set the record straight about rising health-care costs.”

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