The March on Washington, August Twenty-Eighth, Nineteen Sixty-Three

The trains began arriving the night before. By dawn on August twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three, the Union Station platforms were backed up for blocks, special sections added to regular routes from New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Chartered buses came from as far away as Mississippi and Texas. The official estimate at the time was two hundred fifty thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. Some historians have placed the figure higher.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had been organized over months by A. Philip Randolph, the labor leader who had first proposed a march on Washington in nineteen forty-one to protest segregation in the defense industries. Franklin Roosevelt had forestalled that march by signing an executive order banning discrimination in federal defense contracts. Randolph had put the march away and waited twenty-two years.

By nineteen sixty-three, the movement had a different architecture. Bayard Rustin, a brilliant strategist who had been kept out of visible leadership roles in part because he was gay, organized the logistics of August twenty-eighth in roughly six weeks, coordinating transportation, security, portable toilets, first aid stations, and a program that would run precisely on time. The march went precisely on time.

John Lewis, twenty-three years old, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, delivered a speech that had been revised under pressure from older movement leaders who found the original text too confrontational. The version he delivered was still the sharpest speech of the afternoon.

Martin Luther King Junior spoke last. The speech he had prepared ran to roughly sixteen minutes. Near the end, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, called out: tell them about the dream, Martin. What followed was not in the prepared text.

The Civil Rights Act passed the following year. The Voting Rights Act passed in nineteen sixty-five.