At the "Act Now to End Racism" march and rally in Washington, D.C., Dr. Agnes Abuom, moderator of the World Council of Churches is to address participants raising awareness of racism in American life.

The April 3-5 April event, initiated and coordinated by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCCUSA), is meant to call attention to the ongoing and often lethal issue of U.S. racism.

It takes place exactly 50 years after the assassination of Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr., the iconic American civil rights leader.

The march and rally also come at a time of heightened tensions following the March 18 police shooting of an unarmed African American man in Sacramento, California.

A total of 75 unarmed African American men have been killed by police in the United States in the last two years, says civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.

The event is sponsored by two dozen American churches and allied organizations, including the WCC, which represents more than half a billion Christians' worldwide in 348 mainly Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant churches.

It inaugurates a multiyear NCC program of marshaling the 100,000 churches in the United States to assess their own culpability in American racism.

RACISM IN AMERICAN POLICING

It also seek to get them to address the causes and symptoms of racism in American policing and jurisprudence, education and the economy.

"Christian churches, present in every town and community across the country, are both part of the problem and the solution," said Rev. Sharon Watkins, the former general minister and president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ),

"NCC and our partners are committed to addressing the systemic evil that many Christians and church institutions have yet to fully acknowledge," said Watkins who is leading the Truth and Racial Justice Initiative for the NCC.

Watkins, like Abuom is a member of the WCC's central committee, its main decision-making body between its once every seven years assemblies.

Two years ago, Abuom led an international delegation of WCC churches to the United States in an expression of ecumenical solidarity.

This was after multiple racially charged killings, including the murder of nine African American churchgoers in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and police killings of young African American men.

The  has a long history of activism in the cause of civil rights and racial justice.

It is the largest ecumenical body in the United States and includes more than 45 million members.

Since its founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA has been the leading force for shared ecumenical witness among Christians in the United States.

The NCC's 38-member communions form a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches.