Shirley Lee traveled nearly 1,500 miles from Houston to the nation’s capital. Wearing a cowboy hat emblazoned with an American flag, she said that she wasn’t going to miss this year’s March on Washington.

“It’s my 70th birthday on Sunday, so [being here] is my birthday present to me,” Lee told Capital B.

She brought her grandchildren to the 50th anniversary march, and knew that she needed to return for the 63rd anniversary on Friday.

“I feel like we have to be here,” she said, her voice brimming with excitement as she stood next to her friend. “And this is a brand new day, but we’re dealing with the same problems all over again. So this is where we stand and tell them that we are American.”

The gathering came at a fraught moment for Black voting power.

Friday marked four months since the U.S. Supreme Court further eroded the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the Civil Rights Movement’s chief triumphs. Since then, Republican lawmakers in the South have redrawn maps in ways that dilute Black voters’ ability to elect their preferred candidates, and the Trump administration has sought to restrict mail voting.

The Rev. Al Sharpton saw this year’s march as a beginning, not an end.

Carrying signs declaring “No Kings” and “We Want Equality,” thousands braved the heat to gather at the Lincoln Memorial to “Defend the Vote.” Sharpton, one of the event’s organizers, told protesters that he wanted them to walk away with more than the memory of a demonstration. He wanted them to channel their anger over the state of voting rights into a sustained campaign.

“If we fight, we can win. If we don’t fight, we’re guaranteed to lose,” Sharpton told Capital B.

Sharpton said that march organizers plan to assign volunteers to safeguard voting sites, including by documenting potential interference, and that he intends to tour the South to train what he calls “civil rights voter brigades” ahead of the November elections. The longer-term goal, he said, is to elect a Congress that can pass new federal voting rights protections after the Supreme Court “shot a bullet in the heart of voting rights.”

Read the full article about defending Black voting power by Brandon Tensley at Capital B News.