NEW YORK — Tributes to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were held across the United States on Monday, with observers linking the federal holiday to a rallying cry in recent protests over police brutality: “Black lives matter.”

King’s 1960s dream of racial equality was being viewed through a lens focused on the deaths of unarmed Black men after confrontations with police, including Eric Garner, who died in July after being put in a chokehold in New York City, and Michael Brown, shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in August.

More than 60 people demonstrating against police brutality were arrested after blocking traffic on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, a major thoroughfare in the San Francisco Bay Area, said California Highway Patrol Officer Damian Cistaro.

Another 19 people were arrested by Seattle police after protesters blocked a major artery, causing traffic delays.

More than 1,800 people pressed into a King commemoration service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King once preached, some holding signs with his famous quote “I am a man”, others with placards reading “I can’t breathe” in Garner’s memory and “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” to honor Brown.

“We look at the yellow crime scene tape that’s wrapped around America now and we know that we have a lot of work still to do,” Gwendoyln Boyd, president of Alabama State University, told the crowd who responded with an earsplitting “Amen!”