3:54 PM

There were plenty of invocations of the words and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. His own 9-year-old granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King, was among the speakers at the rally organized by survivors of the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.

King highlighted her grandfather’s wish for people to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Another speaker, 18-year-old Alex King of Chicago, channeled King’s talent for using spirituality and scripture to enhance his message.

But it was the speech of 11-year-old Naomi Wadler that revealed another lesson from King. While it wasn’t quoted explicitly, it was clearly beating within the heart of the march and seamlessly interwoven into the program: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

In her speech, Wadler told the crowd that she helped organize a walkout at her school to protest gun violence. And she added one extra minute to the 17 minutes dedicated to the victims of the Stoneman Douglas shooting to remember Courtlin Arrington, a high school junior who was shot and killed at her school in Birmingham, Alabama, three weeks after the massacre in Parkland.

“I am here today to represent Courtlin Arrington,” Wadler said. “I am here today to represent Hadiya Pendleton. I am here to represent Taiyania Thompson, who at 16 was shot dead in her home here in Washington, D.C. I am here today to represent and acknowledge the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper. These stories don’t lead on the evening news. I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls who are full of potential. … I am here to acknowledge their stories, to say they matter, to say their names because I can and I was asked to be. For far too long, these names, these black girls and women, have been just numbers. I am here to say never again for those girls too.”

Part of what’s made the Parkland kids so effective in the weeks since the tragedy at their school — aside from their undeniable authenticity, righteous fury and acumen with Twitter — is their constant appeal to the better angels of the nation’s nature. Do your job, they tell adults: Protect us. They have pleaded with the government to help them, and that in itself revealed something powerful: the ability to take for granted that the government exists to help you, that it’s on your side, that if it’s not working properly, its servants can be voted out and replaced with better ones who will do their duty.

But those demands have been coupled with the recognition that not all Americans enjoy the same expectations of their government.

“We recognize that Parkland received more attention because of its affluence, but we share this stage today and forever with those communities who have always stared down the barrel of a gun,” Parkland survivor Jaclyn Corin said in her speech Saturday.

The decision to include the voices of Wadler, Alex King and Zion Kelly — whose twin brother, Zaire, was shot to death in a robbery — on the same program with Parkland survivors David Hogg and Emma González showed that the march organizers understood this disparity. Rather than run from those differences or worry that messages about racial inequality would somehow dilute calls for gun policy reform, the March for Our Lives embraced them and used them to strengthen their calls for change. March organizers demonstrated an understanding that you can’t be full of moral outrage at lawmakers’ dithering on making automatic and semiautomatic weapons less easily attainable while refusing to acknowledge their dithering on the gun violence that affects predominantly black and brown communities. Instead of ignoring the reasons why one type of gun violence draws attention and calls for immediate reform while another elicits shrugs or pathologizes people of color as inherently violent, March For Our Lives speakers called out that discrepancy, and then they called BS on legislative dithering as a whole. They refused to give in to sectarianism.

“They will try to separate us in demographics. They will try to separate us by religion, race, congressional district and class,” Hogg warned in his speech of those opposed to changing the nation’s gun laws. But, he said, “they will fail.”

The result was a gathering united in the goal of ending gun violence and the grip of the National Rifle Association on gun policy. But it was also an acknowledgment that, too often, black lives matter even less than others in this country. Ultimately, that didn’t weaken the #NeverAgain movement. Instead, it powerfully illustrated a simple, underappreciated dictum: that together, we’re all stronger.