On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people rallied on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Traveling from cities, towns, and villages around the country by bus, car, plane, train, and on foot, they convened to find strength in a shared history, future, and purpose. No one knew what to expect that day, including organizers of the event, but one thing was certain. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom would be a pivotal moment in history that would reshape our nation’s laws and notions of citizenship.

The demonstration was not organized as an isolated episode in history but was a culmination of events that led to its need and conception. Decades prior to the march, the nation experienced periods of court cases and protests for justice that were often met with reprisals of heightened discrimination, terror, and violence. In the years leading to the march, from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, to the dogs and hoses of Birmingham in 1963, the nation, as well as the lives and future of children, were at risk. Americans rallied around the guarantees of the Constitution, however, to defend its promise of equal rights and protections for every American.  

Most often remembered for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the March on Washington was organized around more than a dream or vision. As King made clear throughout his address, the movement converged on Washington with a set of legislative demands and strategies. While marking the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom also recognized that one hundred years after slavery’s abolition, African Americans still were not free. Under a system of racial apartheid, Black Americans were subject to discrimination and violence that was not being brought to justice. The march addressed such inequities with demands for civil rights laws and protections that would desegregate public accommodations and end discrimination in housing, education, employment, and voting, while enforcing the Constitutional virtue of “liberty and justice for all.”

Communities across the country came together to ensure the March on Washington’s success.  Neighborhood organizations working alongside national institutions demonstrated the power and possibilities of organizing nationwide. The idea for the March on Washington began with A. Phillip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who later became a founder and president of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC). In March 1963, Randolph telegraphed King to inform him that the NALC was planning a march for labor and employment rights for June of that year. He hoped to have King’s support. Protests in Birmingham launched in April and by May, nations around the world were stirred and stunned by images of teenaged children being attacked by police officers with dogs and men wielding firehoses.

King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), agreed to support Randolph and join plans for protests in Washington. By the end of summer, others joined, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, as well as the Commission on Race Relations of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America. 

Throughout the day, speakers and performers addressed an audience that stretched from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the end of the National Mall, and not unlike those who stood at the podium, onlookers represented the prodigious strength of the nation’s diversity. Performers like Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez, Odetta, Marian Anderson, and Bob Dylan brought the inherent solidarity of music, while civil rights veterans like Daisy Lee Bates, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the American Jewish Congress president Rabbi Joachim Prinz, and Morehouse College president Dr. Banjamin Mays inspired a nation of hearts and minds. Presenters, of course, also included representatives from organizations that helped plan the event, including A. Philip Randolph, the man who originally brought the idea to Dr. King; UAW president Walter Reuther; march organizer Bayard Rustin; NAACP president Roy Wilkins; National Urban League president Whitney Young; and a young SNCC chairman John Lewis.

Event organizers met with President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson after the march, and the results and impact of their discussions would be felt by generations. Johnson, who became President of the United States after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, signed the Civil Rights Act into law in July 1964. The most comprehensive civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination in public places illegal, offered federal protections for integrating public schools, colleges, and other facilities, and outlawed employment discrimination. Then in August 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in voting practices, such as those adopted in some states after the Civil War. Other legislation followed, such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The nation had entered a new era in American history.

While changing the course of history and our ideas of what it means to be an American, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom redefined notions of community, the power of solidarity, and new strategies and possibilities for community mobilization. Memory, however, will associate that day with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his vision of a shared future in which we are judged by the “content of our character” rather than the color of skin. He imagined a day in which the heat of oppression would be transformed into “an oasis of freedom and justice,” and every American could sing with meaning and conviction, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.... Let freedom ring.”