Rally organizer Glenn Beck, who speaks to a faithful audience nightly on conservative Fox News television and daily on talk radio, insists it's just a coincidence that his "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is overlapping with the 47th anniversary of King's speech.

Two months before nationwide Congressional elections, which could cost President Barack Obama's Democrats their majority in the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate as well, Beck's rally becomes only the latest symptom of rampant political partisanship that is splitting the country and drowning out voices of moderation.

Beck is known for his extreme views and statements. He has described Obama, the first black US president, as a racist.

Beck, pacing back and forth on the marble steps, said he was humbled by the size of the crowd, which stretched along the Washington Mall's long reflecting pool nearly all the way to the Washington Monument.

"Something beyond imagination is happening," he said.

"America today begins to turn back to God." "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness," said Beck, who was joined by Sarah Palin, a conservative favorite and potential 2012 presidential candidate.

Neither Beck nor Palin made overtly political comments.

Palin, greeted by chants of "USA, USA, USA" from many in the crowd, told the gathering, "It is so humbling to get to be here with you today, patriots. You who are motivated and engaged ... and knowing never to retreat." Palin likened the rally participants to the civil rights activists who came to the National Mall to hear King's historic speech, which came at a crucial moment in the civil rights struggle. She said the same spirit that helped civil rights activists overcome oppression, discrimination and violence would help this group as well.

"We are worried about what we face. Sometimes, our challenges seem insurmountable," Palin said. "Look around you. You're not alone." The crowd — organizers had a permit for 300,000 — was vast, with people standing shoulder to shoulder across large expanses of the Mall. The National Park Service stopped doing crowd counts in 1997 after the agency was accused of underestimating numbers for the 1995 Million Man March.

Civil rights leaders protested the event and scheduled a 3-mile (5-kilometer) plus march from a high school to the site of a planned King memorial near the Tidal Basin and not far from Beck's gathering.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington's delegate to Congress, said she remembers being at King's march on Washington, which she said prompted change and ended segregation in public places. "Glenn Beck's march will change nothing.

But you can't blame Glenn Beck for his March-on-Washington envy," she said.

Beck has said he did not intend to choose the King anniversary for his rally but had since decided it was "divine providence." Beck and other organizers say the aim is to pay tribute to America's military personnel and others "who embody our nation's founding principles of integrity, truth and honor." In a taped presentation mixed in with his live remarks, Beck invoked King's message and said "the fight for freedom was not easy." He repeatedly injected religion into the event and urged rally participants to rely on faith to help the US recover from an economic recession that has given the country stubbornly high unemployment.

"Faith is in short supply," Beck said. "To restore America, we must restore ourselves." The Rev. Al Sharpton called the demonstration an anti-government rally advocating states' rights. And Sharpton said that goes against the message in King's speech, in which the civil rights leader appealed to the federal government to ensure equality.

"The structural breakdown of a strong national government, which is what they're calling for, is something that does not serve the interests of the nation and it's something that Dr. King and others fought against," Sharpton said Saturday on C-SPAN.

"It is ironic to me that they come on the day of a speech where Dr. King appealed for a strong government to protect civil rights and they're going to the site of Abraham Lincoln who saved the union against the state rebellion," he said.

Beck has given voice to those angry and frustrated with Obama and other Democrats this election year, especially members of the tea party movement — a loose knit coalition of conservative and libertarian activists who oppose taxes and what they perceive as government intrusion in their lives.