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EWashington PostValerie Green-Thomas sees them every day in her classes at the Bronx middle school where she is a special education teacher. Kids hungry, anxious, living in the dark because the electricity in their homes has been turned off.
“I really wanted to come to this country, but I am so disappointed,” she said in her Jamaican accent. “To realize that the dream is not the dream.”
Green-Thomas was one of several thousand who rallied and marched Saturday as a prelude to Sunday’s belated dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. The message of the “Jobs and Justice” event, organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network along with labor and civil rights groups, was that today’s poor, unemployed and homeless embody King’s unfinished business.
Before the march to the King memorial on a radiant fall afternoon, they packed the lawn at the foot of the Washington Monument, near the Sylvan Theater, carrying signs that read “I AM A MAN” and “The rich must pay their fair share.” They demanded passage of President Obama’s $447 billion American Jobs Act. The legislation was blocked in the Senate last week.
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