At We Marched With Martin this past weekend in Washington, D.C. these buttons, replicas of the one Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wore as he spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, were handed out. You can get one of your own by sending us a note here.

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Here is the unedited video of “We Marched With Martin,” a discussion featuring Drum Major Institute Chairman and Why Tuesday? founder William Wachtel, Ambassador Andrew Young, Congressman John Dingell and Senator Harris Wofford, veterans of the civil rights movement. The event was hosted by our friends and colleagues at The Drum Major Institute.

Following the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Senator Wofford and Representative Dingell joined Ambassador Young for what can only be described as an incredible conversation about their work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Occupy Wall Street protests today.

See photos of the event here.

UPDATE: Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press has written a column about the event. Here’s a bit:

After Sunday’s dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., two old lions appeared at the nearby Newseum to talk of old times and important moments they experienced during the civil rights movement.

U.S. Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, the dean of Congress, and Andrew Young, who rose from the movement to become mayor of Atlanta and America’s ambassador to the United Nations, sat alongside former Pennsylvania Sen. Harris Wofford, a civil rights adviser to President John F. Kennedy, in a conversation called “We Marched With Martin,” sponsored by the Drum Major Institute.

Their words reminded that the movement was not spectacle. It was a way of life, one that must continue today.

[snip]

The movement was a revolution that made connected soldiers of strangers. Decades later, Young pushed Dingell for analysis. And Dingell said that all that’s missing now is the spark.

“Very frankly, if you look, you’ll find significant backsliding with regard to what we call civil rights,” he said. “It’s getting harder for some folks to vote, getting harder for some people to move ahead in many important ways. … What we need today is the spark that we saw when Dr. King and others were willing to march and the spark when some of my more conservative friends all of a sudden moved more toward civil rights. They saw dogs turned loose on folks. They saw spraying water cans and fire hoses … they saw them using clubs. If you’ll remember Bull Connor saying, ‘Let those puppies loose,’ and people just said, ‘You know, that’s not right.’”

For the complete column, click here.

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Take a look at some photos from today’s very special event in Washington.

Photos of: Drum Major Institute Chairman and Why Tuesday? co-founder William Wachtel, Senator Harris Wofford, Ambassador Andrew Young and his wife Carolyn, Congressman John Dingell, Why Tuesday? Executive Director Jacob Soboroff, and unsung Civil Rights hero Meshulam Riklis with his wife Tally.

If you have trouble viewing the slide show, check out the photos on Flickr. We’ll be uploading video of the event soon.

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UPDATE: If you can’t join us in person watch LIVE by clicking here Sunday 10/16 at 12:30ET.

This Sunday, October 16th, our colleagues at The Drum Major Institute, Why Tuesday? co-founders Ambassador Andrew Young and William Wachtel, and Why Tuesday? advisory board member Martin King III invite you to join a special celebration of all of the veterans of the Civil Rights movement, as we contemplate the legacy of Dr. King and what it means to us all today.

Immediately following the Commemoration Ceremony of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial at 12:30PM this luncheon gathering will take place in the Newseum’s Knight Conference Center located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.

Please see the attached invitation for more information. We very much hope you will be there and request that you RSVP by e-mailing We.Marched-at-gmail-dot-com.

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I’d like to extend a warm welcome to columnist, blogger and author Meghan McCain, the newest member of the Why Tuesday? Advisory Board. As we dive into the 2012 election season our entire team is happy to have Meghan by our side as we fight the war against low voter turnout. Here’s a little bit more on Meghan, from her bio over at The Daily Beast:

Meghan McCain is a columnist for The Daily Beast. Originally from Phoenix, she graduated from Columbia University in 2007. She is a New York Times bestselling children’s author, previously wrote for Newsweek, and created the website mccainblogette.com. Her most recent book, Dirty Sexy Politics, was published in August 2010.

We’re very much looking forward to working with her!

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As if voting on Tuesday wasn’t bad enough, Michael Cooper at the New York Times reports this morning on a study from our friends at New York University’s Brennan Center which reveals fourteen states have passed or are working to change the rules to making voting harder for those eligible.

These restrictions will affect everyone — from students to first-time voters to seniors. One of the restrictive changes is occurring in five states that are rolling back opportunities for voters to cast ballots before Election Day. In other words, making voting Tuesday-or-bust.

Ohio passed a law eliminating early voting on Sundays, and Florida eliminated it on the Sunday before Election Day — days when some African-American churches organized “souls to the polls” drives for members of their congregations. Maine voted to stop allowing people to register to vote on Election Day — a practice that had been credited with enrolling some 60,000 new voters in 2008. Voters in Maine and Ohio are now seeking to overturn the new laws with referendums.

The long-running argument about enacting restrictive voting laws to stop voter fraud at the polls has also surfaced yet again. It’s an argument our board member Norm Ornstein has countered is misguided. I also learned firsthand on Election Day 2008 in North Dakota that voter fraud, even in the only state in the union without voter registration, doesn’t happen with any regularity or measurable impact. Even so, these laws keep coming.

Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, and question why photo identification should be routinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discourage, or even block, eligible voters — especially poor voters, young voters and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.

The Justice Department must review the new laws in several states to make sure that they do not run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law in 2008, saying that while it found no evidence of the fraud the law was intended to combat, it also found no evidence that the new requirements were a burden on voters.

“This year there’s been a significant wave of new laws in states across the country that have the effect of cracking down on voting rights,” said Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center, who noted that five million votes would have made a difference in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. “It is the most significant rollback in voting rights in decades.”

As Norm has also pointed out, requiring voters to carry an approved ID is a major issue, as well.

The biggest impact, the Brennan Center said, will be from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote. This year, 34 states introduced legislation to require it — a flurry of activity that Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, called “pretty unusual.” Before this year, only two states, Indiana and Georgia, had “strict” photo identification requirements for voters, according to the conference. This year, five more states — Wisconsin, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — passed laws to join their ranks.

South Carolina and Texas estimate that between them they have more than 800,000 registered voters who may not have acceptable forms of photo identification. While both states will offer free identification cards that would be acceptable at the polls, critics of the new laws worry that the added barrier to voting could discourage people from going to the polls. South Carolina estimates that 8 percent of its voters — 216,596 people — do not currently have the proper identification.

For the complete article, click here. You can bet we’ll be staying on top of this over the course of the next year.

Photo of guy jumping hurdle via bigvalleystrider on Flickr.

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