Obama to Speak at March on Washington Anniversary

WASHINGTON â€" President Obama will speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to observe the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28 â€" 50 years to the day after one of the march’s organizers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream’’ speech.

The White House said Mr. Obama would speak at the Let Freedom Ring ceremony organized by the King Center in Atlanta, but offered no other details. The event, billed as a commemoration of Dr. King’s speech and a “nationwide and global day of unity,” will begin with an interfaith religious service and include a bell-ringing ceremony at 3 p.m.

Separately, the National Action Network, a civil rights group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton, is organizing an anniversary march on Aug. 24. That march is expected to be more like the original, focusing on issues including economic justice and racial profiling, a contentious topic in the wake of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Florida teenager.

As the nation’s first black president, Mr. Obama has often shied away from talking about race relations, though that has been changing lately. He used his platform last month to give voice to the anger and pain that many African-Americans felt after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida neighborhood watch volunteer who killed Mr. Martin.

Mr. Obama also linked racial tensions to economic inequality during a recent interview with The New York Times, noting that the original march was a call for action on jobs as well as civil rights and predicting that if economic inequities persist, “racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse.”

“It’s part of my generation’s formative memory, and it’s a good time for us to do some reflection,” he said of the anniversary. “Obviously, after the Trayvon Martin case, a lot of people have been thinking about race, but I always remind people â€" and, in fact, I have a copy of the original program in my office, framed â€" that that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that.”