Tributes to Martin Luther King Jr merged with protests against police violence across the US on Monday, as political leaders, community activists and demonstrators marked a federal holiday by commemorating the civil rights leader.

Thousands took to streets in New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, Oakland and elsewhere for #reclaimMLK marches. The gatherings ranged from relatively small – Reuters estimated 40 in Oakland, California – to record breaking, in Colorado, where the Denver Post estimated 30,000 people turned out.

The Rev Al Sharpton led vigils at sites in New York City where police officers and unarmed black men have been killed in recent months. He was joined at an event in Harlem by the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, where both addressed the tensions between police and the wider community.

“We are children, we are grandchildren, of the King generation,” de Blasio said, to a standing ovation at the National Action Network in Harlem.

In Delaware, US vice-president Joe Biden spoke at a breakfast honouring King, and made a call for unity, following the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson.



“Men often hate each other because they fear each other,” Biden said, quoting King, according to the Associated Press. “They fear each other because they do not know each other. They do not know each other because they cannot communicate, and they cannot communicate because they are separated.”



“We have to bridge that separation … particularly today between police and the community that exists in some places.”



Biden, who spoke at the Organization of Minority Women’s annual Martin Luther King breakfast, said: “There’s no reason on earth we cannot repair this breach.”

Sharpton was joined on Monday by Garner’s widow and mother, as well as the partner of Akai Gurley, who was shot dead in November by a policeman patrolling a public housing block. The group will hold a candelight vigil at the site where Garner died after being put in a chokehold by a white police officer on Staten Island last summer.



Garner’s final words – “I can’t breathe” – became a rallying cry for protests against police violence after a grand jury declined to indict the officer.

Sharpton was to visit the Pink Houses in Brooklyn, where Gurley, described by the police commissioner, Bill Bratton, as “totally innocent”, was unarmed when two officers conducting a patrol appeared to have accidentally fired on a darkened stairwell.



But their first stop on Monday afternoon was to say a prayer at the Brooklyn street corner where the NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were killed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had posted anti-police statements on social media before travelling to Brooklyn from Baltimore.

As they arrived just after 4pm, the crowd quietly sang “can’t turn around now, we’ve come this far.”

In the front row, Virginia Robinson called out “come together, stop turning backs and come together!”

Robinson told the Guardian that the day meant “for all that Martin fought for, and for all going on right now – coming together for change”.

In front of the crowd, Sharpton laid a wreath at the makeshift shrine of pink roses that marked the spot where the officers were killed. He said the wreath represented “that we are against the spilling of innocent blood”, before calling a moment’s silence in memory of the fallen officers.

The officers’ deaths inflamed a dispute between the police department and de Blasio, with hundreds of police turning their backs on the mayor as he spoke at funerals for the patrolmen who were killed.

A woman holds a sign which asks the question “Am I Next” in a crowd of protesters in Washington, DC, on Monday. Photograph: Cory Clark/Demotix/Corbis

In Harlem, Sharpton hit back at the police unions, especially the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and its president, Patrick Lynch, who said there was “blood on the steps of city hall” in the wake of the killing of two police officers in Brooklyn in December.

“Mature people know they can disagree without being disagreeable,” Sharpton said. “Engage in civil discourse without being uncivil.”



“We are not anti-police,” he said. “Our quest has always been about police reform, not police deform.”

Sharpton condemned the “name-calling and ugliness” of recent weeks, and specifically singled out the “venomous and unfair” criticism of the mayor. “Let’s start talking like adults,” he said.

De Blasio struck a more conciliatory tone than Sharpton. “It is up to all of us to say to those who purport to want change: if you’re saying something vicious and vile to a police officer, you’re not bringing change,” he said.

“We want to protect those who protect us.”



He said his office was “retraining our police to get them closer to the community”, saying that less violence protected police and communities both.



De Blasio closed by quoting Dr King: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King events nationwide

At New York’s Union Square, a few hundred protesters sang in memory of Rice, Gurley, Brown, Garner and others. Nearly all wore insignia with the names of other victims, far less known, to police violence across the country.



As a massive of NYPD officers waited nearby, some in riot gear, song turned to silence. Protesters staged a die-in for four and a half minutes, in reference to Brown, whose body was reportedly left unattended on a street in Ferguson, Missouri, for four and a half hours after he was shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson in August 2014.

“We believe that we should create 1,000 Dr Kings,” said Samumba Sobukwe, founder of Occu-Evolve, one of the last working groups of Occupy Wall Street and an organizer of Monday’s march, as he watched the crowd nearby.

“I can’t breathe,” yelled 21-year old Devante Tate of East New York, in reference to Garner’s final words. Tate lived only a few blocks away from Gurley, and said the shooting mobilized his community into action.

“It could have been anyone in our community,” said Tate. “The irony is painful for us. Dr King and so many others marched so we wouldn’t have to but now we’re out here doing the same thing.”

The march remained loud and peaceful throughout as it made it way along the nearly two-mile route to Foley Square in lower Manhattan. There, Hertencia Petersen, the aunt of Akai Gurley, and Erica Garner, 24, the eldest daughter of Eric Garner, addressed the crowd.

“Not only are we talking about Martin Luther King, but we’re talking about my father,” said Garner. “I feel proud to have my father added on to history.”



In California, Reuters reported about 40 people converged on the home of Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf before dawn on Monday, calling for harsher punishment of police who use violence against civilians. They chalked outlines of bodies on the tree-lined street, played recordings of King’s speeches and projected an image of the slain civil rights leader with the words “black lives matter,” on the mayor’s garage door.



In Cleveland, dozens gathered to memorialize Tamir Rice, 12, who was shot dead by a police officer in November.

“We need to see real changes to this system,” Lashonda Edwards told the Washington Post.

At a King memorial event at his Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, Bernice King invoked the deaths of Brown, Garner and Rice.



“I cannot help but remember many women and men who have been gunned down, not by a bad police force but by some bad actors in a police force,” she said.

David Oyelowo, the actor who plays King in the movie Selma, became emotional as he talked about putting himself in King’s place.

David Oyelowo at the Ebenezer Baptist church. Photograph: David Goldman/AP

“I felt his pain. I felt his burden. I felt the love he had for his family. I felt the love he still has for you Dr Bernice King,” he said, addressing King’s daughter.

“I only stepped into his shoes for a moment, but I asked myself, ‘How did he do it?’” Oyelowo said. He explained that he, like King, has four children and said he cannot imagine walking through life knowing there are people who wanted to take their lives or that of his wife.

US congressman John Lewis, who told the crowd he was just 17 when King sent him a bus ticket to come to Montgomery to join the civil rights movement, recalled the man he called his hero and his leader, a man who is “still a guiding light in my life”.

“The memory of such a great man can never, ever fade,” Lewis said. “I still think about him almost every day.”

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.