By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief,  Cleveland Urban News. Com and The Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Blog.Com, Ohio's No 1 and No 2 online Black newspapers (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com) and (www.clevelandurbannews.com). Reach us by phone at 216-659-0473 and by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman is a former biology teacher and a 20-year investigative Black journalist who trained for some 15 years at the Call and Post Newspaper.

Pictured are President Barack Obama, Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge (D-11) of Ohio, who is also chair of the Congressional Black Caucus of Blacks in Congress, and former President Bill Clinton

By Johnette Jernigan, staff reporter, and Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief,   Cleveland Urban News. Com and The Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Blog.Com, Ohio's No 1 and No 2 online Black newspapers (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com) and (www.clevelandurbannews.com). Reach us by phone at 216-659-0473 and by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman is a former biology teacher and a 20-year investigative Black journalist who trained for some 15 years at the Call and Post Newspaper.

WASHINGTON, D.C.-"We ain't gonna let nobody turn us around," said Martin Luther King III , the eldest son of the four children of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (pictured) and Coretta Scott King  before a crowd of tens of thousands of people who rallied  in Washington D.C.  Saturday morning to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the August 28, 1963 March on Washington and King's historic "I Have A Dream" speech.

Dozens of buses left Cleveland, OH. Friday night for the overnight trip, some sponsored by greater Cleveland NAN, the AFL-CIO North Shore Federation of Labor,  and the Cleveland NAACP.

"I'm  going with the AFL-CIO," said Cleveland community activist Amy Hurd, hours before leaving for D.C. Friday night at 11:30 pm for the $45-a-person , round-trip bus ride.   Other greater Cleveland community activists that took the trip include Dionne Thomas Carmichael, William Clarence Marshall and Betty Mahone, owner and operator of the Chateau in East Cleveland, OH.

Saturday's event was organized by Civil Rights icon the Rev Al Sharpton, and his National Action Network in cooperation with his local chapter groups of NAN  and a host of other Civil Rights and labor organizations from across the country. MLK III  was among dozens of speakers that drove home the elder King's message  on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Saturday morning. That is where the younger King's famous father stood and spoke 50 years  ago, and five years before he was slain on a Tennessee balcony in 1968, there for a working rights boycott.

Sharpton was a keynote speaker at the rally and called for Congress to address state legislators and state secretaries of state changing state voting laws with the intent to suppress the Black vote, and he preached that African-Americans are overwhelmed with poverty while the federal government "bails out the banks.

"U.S. Rep John Lewis (D-5) of Georgia was the only original speaker left from the 1963 March on Washington.

"I'm not going to let them take the right to vote from us," said Lewis, referencing the U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year in Shelby County vs. Holder that eliminated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that required 15 states, excluding Ohio, to get permission  to change voting laws, a ruling also  that in other respects impacts all 50 states, including Ohio.

"You've got to stand up, speak up and get in the way," said Lewis, 73.

This time women were empowered as speakers, which the 1963 event precluded. And the women speakers on Saturday were influential women of power including Nancy Pelosi (D-12) of California, who is the powerful minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives,  National Council of Negro Women Chair Ingrid Saunders Jones,  National Planned Parent Hood President Cecile Richards, and U.S. Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-11) of Ohio, also chair of the Congressional Black Caucus of Blacks in Congress.  Other Ohio women leaders,  including state Rep. Alicia Reece (D-33) of Cincinnati, who chairs the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, and Margo Copeland, a top Black executive at Key Bank in the Cleveland area and national president of the prestigious Links Inc.,  spoke too.

Reece gave a fierce speech on voting rights, and both she and Pelosi spoke on women's rights. Pelosi praised President Obama, and Rep. Fudge.

"Today we have an African American president and the first family so beautifully leading our country," said Pelosi."

Fifty years ago, Pelosi said, there were only five African-Americans in Congress and now there are 43, and she said that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), under the leadership of Fudge, is the "conscience of Congress."

Fudge leads the majority Black 11th congressional district. It includes the majority Black east side of Cleveland and some of its eastern suburbs, parts of Summit County, and a Black pocket of Akron, a Summit County city 30 miles south of Cleveland. She is a former Warrensville  Heights, OH mayor, and a past national president of Delta Sigma Theta Inc.

"We've come this far by faith, we cannot turn back now or lose faith," said Fudge. "The efforts we've seen to roll back the clock must fire up the Civil Rights movement of today."

The theme of the  rally and march, which had a Democratic thrust, was as it was five decades ago,  jobs, justice, freedom,  and equal protection under the law for Black and other Americans. Highlights were  foreclosures, voting  rights, women's rights, the gay movement, education, jobs, immigration reform and the legal system.