San Diegans will mark the final stop of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's 860-mile "Journey for Justice" campaign with a march and rally downtown Wednesday.
The national march is re-creating the Selma to Washington D.C march of 1965. But the message is not one of nostalgia.
Organizers said their message is timely and urgent, after a series of widely publicized deaths of unarmed black men by law enforcement and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, a law that prohibits racial discrimination when voting.
The march's motto is: “Our lives, our votes, our schools, our jobs, matter.”
"We want to get the attention of the local elected officials," Andre Branch, president of the San Diego chapter of the NAACP, told KPBS Midday Edition on Tuesday. "They need to author or support legislation that would enhance the Voting Rights Act."
Branch said some people may say "Well, of course, black lives matter," but other racial groups aren't dying at the same rate as black people.
"We want to make it clear that our lives matter," Branch said. "We want to advocate and we do advocate for African-American people. But we do not want to limit that right to only African-American people. It is for all people."
Todd Cardiff, an attorney who helped organize Wednesday's event, said he got involved after seeing the video of Sandra Bland being arrested. Bland was an African-American woman who was found dead in her jail cell in Texas in July. She was arrested after being pulled over for a traffic violation.
"As an attorney, it infuriated me," Cardiff said. "But I also learned something else: when white people have their rights violated, we get angry (but) black people should be terrified because they die at a much higher rate."
The San Diego march starts at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the City Hall Concourse on C Street.
