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Bernie Sanders and AOC will join Rev. Al Sharpton and the King Family for March on Washington 2026: Defend the Vote on August 28 in D.C.
Sixty-three years after the original March on Washington, the movement is returning to the nation’s capital. National Action Network Founder and President Reverend Al Sharpton, alongside Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King, and the Drum Major Institute, announced today that Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will join them for “March on Washington 2026: Defend the Vote,” taking place in Washington, D.C. on Friday, August 28, the 63rd anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The march is being organized around a clear set of demands: protecting voting rights, advancing economic dignity, and confronting the affordability crisis bearing down on working families across the country. The addition of Sanders and AOC brings prominent progressive voices in Congress into a mobilization led by Black civil rights leadership and supported by labor, faith, Latino, voting rights, and community organizations nationwide.
“Voting rights have always been strongest when people across movements understand that this fight belongs to all of us,” Reverend Sharpton said in a statement. “The participation of Senator Sanders and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez sends an important message that progressive leaders are standing shoulder to shoulder with Black civil rights leadership, labor, faith leaders and communities across this country to defend the right to vote. We may come from different movements and traditions, but when democracy and civil rights are under attack, collaboration is not optional — it is essential.”
“Protecting civil rights requires all of us to stand together and make clear that the right to vote is not negotiable,” Martin Luther King III said. “The presence of progressive leaders alongside Black civil rights organizations and people from across the country reflects the kind of partnership this moment demands.”
The participation of Sanders and AOC is designed to make an explicit connection between two causes that organizers argue have always been inseparable: civil rights and economic justice.
Their presence links long-running fights over wages, health care, housing costs, and economic inequality directly to the defense of voting rights, making the case that who has political power and who can exercise it are not separate questions from whether democratic institutions actually respond to the material needs of the people they serve.
The march takes place on August 28 in Washington, D.C. Those who want to attend can register now at nationalactionnetwork.net.
