March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963)
On August 28, 1963, approximately 250,000 people — one of the largest political demonstrations in American history — gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to demand civil rights and economic justice. The march culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, one of the most celebrated addresses in American history.
The Vision of A. Philip Randolph
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was organized primarily by A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the most prominent Black labor leader in the country, and Bayard Rustin, a brilliant organizer and pacifist who had studied nonviolent resistance under Gandhi. Randolph had proposed a march on Washington in 1941, which he called off only after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 desegregating the defense industry. The 1963 march had been in planning for years. Rustin organized the logistics from a tiny Harlem office in just six weeks — scheduling trains, buses, portable toilets, food, medical stations, and 5,000 march marshals. The organizing coalition included all major civil rights organizations: the NAACP, the Urban League, CORE, SNCC, and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Kennedy met the march's leaders at the White House afterward and privately acknowledged that the turnout had exceeded everyone's expectations.
Did You Know?
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" refrain was not in his prepared text. He had used the phrase at a smaller rally months earlier. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was on the platform, called out to him during the speech: "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" King set aside his prepared remarks and spoke extemporaneously — and the rest of the speech became history.
The Day of the March
On the morning of August 28, special trains and buses poured into Washington from across the country. The crowd gathered on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Speakers and performers included John Lewis of SNCC — whose original speech was deemed too radical and was revised before delivery — as well as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mahalia Jackson, and Marian Anderson. King, who was scheduled to speak last, delivered a prepared address about the broken promises of the American founding. Then he departed from his text. "I have a dream," he said, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" He spoke for another several minutes, improvising and drawing on his years of preaching, building to a vision of freedom ringing from every mountainside across the country. The speech lasted 17 minutes and transformed the day into legend.
Legacy and Civil Rights Legislation
The March on Washington built enormous public and political pressure for civil rights legislation that Kennedy had proposed earlier that summer. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and his successor Lyndon Johnson made passing the civil rights bill the centerpiece of his domestic program, signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, 1964. The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965. Bayard Rustin, whose homosexuality had made him a target for opponents who sought to discredit the movement, was largely written out of the march's history for decades — an erasure that civil rights historians have worked to correct. The March on Washington remains the defining image of the American civil rights movement: a quarter-million people of all backgrounds standing together in the shadow of Lincoln and demanding that the country live up to its own ideals.