OGDEN, Utah — The Ogden branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Utah organized a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally against racial injustice on Monday.
Roughly 25 cars congregated with social distance in the Utah city to say that the problems that resulted in the civil rights movement King died for remain entrenched in American society today.
“We just can’t pretend racism doesn’t exist,” said Betty Sawyer, the president of the Ogden NAACP. “It does.”
The gathering Monday came about seven months after widespread demonstrations occurred in Utah and nationwide over the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in Minneapolis when a white police officer pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes after he said he could not breathe.
“We just want to be treated like everybody else,” protester Schqueta Morning said. “Nothing extra, just equality.”
Natalie Anderton brought her son and several nieces and nephews to the gathering with her car windows decorated with messages reading “Antiracist on Board,” “Make American Not Hate Again” and more.
“I’m trying to teach my kids what it means to be an anti-racist,” Anderton said. That, she told The Standard-Examiner, means trying to empathize with what it might be like to face systemic racism and recognizing “my white privilege.”
Doug Stephens, a member of the Ogden City Council, was present at the rally. “(King) advocated for unity and working together and I think that’s very important in this day and age,” Stephens said.
As part of the day’s activities, a group of young African-Americans — most of them college students — held a roundtable discussion regarding the future of the civil rights movement.
This story has been corrected to say an article about the rally was published in the Standard-Examiner newspaper in Ogden, not the Spectrum newspaper in St. George.