On a July day in 1917, in the face of a presidential administration seen as taking regressive steps on civil rights, nearly 10,000 black Americans walked down Fifth Avenue in New York. Wearing uniform clothing and carrying signs, demanding federal action over the lynchings of black men, they marched in total silence.

A century later, also clad in white, a much smaller group assembled outside Bryant Park on Friday. They were there to commemorate the occasion in a world, attendees said, that did not feel altogether changed.

“It just seems like we’ve gone in a circle,” said Sacha Dent, an educator from the city. “And it’s the same thing with not just things that are like lynchings and close to lynchings but just the hate … everywhere.”

The attendees held portraits of well-known victims of police and vigilante violence – Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice – and of people who lost their lives after traumatic encounters with the criminal justice system, such as Sandra Bland and Kalief Browder.

“I called around and I realized that no one was marking the moment,” said the march organizer, Marsha Reid, “and that seemed astonishing and a little sad to me considering the relevance of the current moment … So I did it.”

The original march was organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the famous civil rights thinker WEB DuBois, a founder of the organization. It was conceived in a direct response to a white race-mob attack in East St Louis in which more than 100 black Americans were killed and another 6,000 had their homes burned to the ground.

According to the NAACP, the 1917 march was the first protest of its kind in New York and the second instance of African Americans publicly demonstrating for civil rights.

On Friday, visitors to the US Google homepage were greeted with a “doodle” commemorating the centennial. The tech giant recently partnered with Equal Justice Initiative for a digital project on lynching.

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As the sun went down on Ypres on Sunday, the shale grey stone floor of the old Belgian town’s Menin Gate, the world’s first memorial to those who fell but who were never found during the first world war, was slowly covered by more than 54,000 blood-red poppies falling from its high arch. There was a paper flower for each name engraved upon the vast gate.

A crowd numbering in the thousands, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Theresa May and the King and Queen of Belgium, Philippe and Mathilde, watched as the poppies drifted down in the still evening air. The young voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, standing below the gate’s 14-metre-high ceiling, sang the Ypres hymn: “O valiant hearts who to your glory came, / Through dust of conflict and through battle flame; / Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved; / Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.”

Poppies are released from the Menin Gate at the end of the wreath laying ceremony during commemorations marking the centenary of Passchendale. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

More than 800,000 soldiers on both sides of the war died in the blood and mud of the Ypres salient between 1914 and 1918. Many marched on the so-called Menin road, on which the gate built in 1927 now stands, from Ypres town to the front lines. Still today, the remains of dozens of men are found every year in Flanders fields, identified initially by the colouring and markings of the boots in which they died.

Of the three major battles in Ypres, however, it is the third and final, whose centenary will pass in the early hours of Monday, that bears the greatest infamy. “I died in hell – they called it Passchendaele,” the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote of the carnage that raged from 31 July until 10 November 1917. Perhaps the first world war battle that is today most sharp in the collective British consciousness is the Somme, but at the time it was this battle, and this place, that was synonymous with the hopelessness and horror of what was playing out on foreign fields.

So it is, in this centenary period, that among the many battles and places, Passchendaele, and Ypres, have followed Gallipoli and the Somme, in being conferred by the British government with what is likely to be a last great act of remembrance, certainly in the presence of the sons and daughters, nieces and nephews of those who fought.

In his speech, Prince William echoed the words of Winston Churchill, who in 1919 said of Ypres: “A more sacred place for the British does not exist in the world.” William added: “During the first world war Britain and Belgium stood shoulder to shoulder. One hundred years on, we still stand together, gathering as so many do every night, in remembrance of that sacrifice.”

(LtoR) Queen Mathilde of Belgium, King Philippe of Belgium and West-Flanders province governor Carl Decaluw. Photograph: Nicolas Maeterlinck/AFP/Getty Images

One of the direct descendants who gathered in Ypres, Mike Copland, 70 – whose father, Bill, signed up when he was 15, fought, survived, and went on to be a commando at the age of 40 in the second world war – said he dearly hoped the names of Ypres and Passchendaele would continue to mean something to the next generation. “It is not about glorifying it,” he said, standing next to his son Chris, 43, and grandson William, 7. “But there are too many people who look blank at you when you mention these names. It should trigger something. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Copland said he feared that those lessons were being lost. “We have had 70 years without major war,” he said. “I just hope we remember that we need to work together in Europe. My father never spoke about it. He died at the age of 80 in 1979. I don’t think he ever came here, not with us, anyway. It’s important we are here.”

Sunday evening’s ceremony, attended by 19 representatives of nations that shed blood on the salient, including Australia, Canada, India and South Africa, had started with the traditional heralding of the Last Post. In a gesture repeated every evening since 1928, bar a period of occupation during the second world war, the local buglers sounded their lament to those who were lost. In a sign of today’s troubled times, snipers could be seen, however, sat on top of the gate watching down.

Following William’s words, King Philippe, addressed the crowds to reflect on the sacrifices made and the significance of Ypres – Ieper to the Belgians, and “Wipers” to the British and Commonwealth soldiers – before a reading from Benoit Mottrie, the chairman of the Last Post association, the group of volunteers keeping the ritual going.

As the Pipes and Drums of the Royal Irish Regiment, led by Pipe Major, Nicholas Colwell, played, wreaths were then laid side by side by King Philippe and William, followed by Theresa May and the Belgian defence minister, Steven Vandeput. A tribute on the prime minister’s read: “With profound gratitude and respect, we remember the service of those who served on the Ypres salient.”

Later in the evening, under clouds tinted red by the last of the sun, the British and Belgian royals joined 6,000 or more in the market square for a spectacular show broadcast live on BBC.