"March For Our Lives" Was Powerful Because It Was Inclusive

(Photo of participants in the "March For Our Lives" is from NBC News.)

The students who started the "March For Our Lives" movement were from a predominantly White high school in a fairly upscale community. If they had just limited their movement to calling for an end to school violence, they could have drawn a few thousand participants, and their movement would have fizzled out as many anti-gun movements in the past have done. But they were smarter than that and more caring -- and they understood that gun violence is a larger issue that affects all Americans (especially urban areas).

They reached out to communities that have far too long been ignored by our media and our politicians, and they invited those communities to participate. And that made their movement special and far more powerful than it could have been otherwise.

America didn't just see a few White students in that march. They saw the full range of diversity in this country -- and that was true not only of those who spoke from the stage, but also the millions who marched. They showed us the real America -- a nation of diversity. And they showed us the America that could exist if we lived up to our ideals -- a diverse nation loving and caring for each other.

We heard speeches from the students in Parkland and the students in Newtown. But we also heard from young people who live with the threat of violence every day (both in their schools and outside of them). We were shown a picture of how gun violence affects people across this nation -- and that made the experience much more powerful.

I admire these young people of all races and ethnicities -- both those who spoke and those who participated in the marches across this country. And I think they are going to remain a formidable force to be reckoned with in the future. They just got a taste of the power their generation has, and no one is going to be able to put that genie back in the bottle.

Let me say this to those remarkable young people. Activism is necessary to change the country, but it is not easy. There will be times when the goal will seem unreachable, but you must not give up or give in. What you are trying to achieve is too important. Remember the words of Gandhi, who understood the difficulty of social activism and the need for it.