MLK Jr.'s granddaughter tells protesters: 'I have a dream...'

ByMORGAN WINSOR ABCNews logo
Sunday, March 25, 2018

A 9-year-old girl was a surprise guest at the March for Our Lives event in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. She appeared on stage before hundreds of thousands of people to tell them about a dream her grandfather had, and that she, too, has a dream.

"My name is Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King and Loretta Scott King," she told the massive crowd. "My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun free world, period."

Yolanda, the eldest granddaughter of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., stood alongside Jaclyn Corin, a 17-year-old student who survived the Valentine's Day shooting at her Florida high school. The pair held hands and grinned from ear-to-ear as the sea of people before them erupted in a roar of applause and cheers.

Yolanda then beckoned the crowd to join in on an uplifting chant: "Spread the word, have you heard, all across the nation, we are going to be a great generation!"

"Now I'd like you to say it like you really, really mean it and the whole world can hear you," she yelled to the crowd with a big smile, before repeating the chant once more.

The March for Our Lives rallies were anchored by the main event in the U.S. capital, where students, teachers, parents and other members of the public marched for gun control and school-safety measures on Saturday, in the wake of last month's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. There were more than 800 so-called "sibling marches" planned worldwide for this weekend in solidarity of the main event.

The marchers across the country and around the globe called on American lawmakers to make schools safer and pass stricter gun control laws, such as by prohibiting the sale of high-capacity magazines and banning the high-powered, highly-lethal assault-style weapons often used in mass shootings.

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