http://nypost.com/2014/12/13/sharpton-struggles-to-find-marchers-for-dc-protest/Sharpton struggles to find marchers for DC protest
By Aaron Short and Laura Italiano
December 13, 2014 | 1:55am
The Rev. Al Sharpton is keeping expectations low for Saturday’s National March Against Police Violence — predicting that only “several thousand” protesters will gather along Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue.
“We have over 100 buses coming from New York alone, but I’m not giving out numbers,” Sharpton told The Post Friday night.
The permit is for just 5,000 protesters, a National Parks Service spokesperson said Friday.
That’s modest by DC protest standards.
Martin Luther King Jr. amassed a crowd of 250,000 for his 1963 civil-rights march; the 1995 Million Man March drew 400,000 to the nation’s capital.
“We only had eight days to plan,” explained Sharpton, who was still drumming up marchers on his syndicated radio show Friday night.
The city teachers union and Local 1199, the huge social-services union, are sending just a few hundred members each, reps said.
Sharpton joked of Saturday’s Manhattan SantaCon gathering, expected to have 30,000 participants: “They have all year to plan; I had just over a week.”
