On August 28, 1963, approximately 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC — the largest political demonstration in American history to that point. They had come from every state in the country, by bus and train and car and foot, organized by a coalition of civil rights organizations that included the NAACP, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality. The official name was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — and that full name matters, because it is almost always shortened to the March on Washington, dropping the economic demand that was central to its purpose. The march was not only about legal rights. It was about economic justice. The distinction would become significant in the years that followed.
The march had been conceived by A. Philip Randolph, the veteran labor organizer and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who had threatened a similar march in 1941 and forced President Roosevelt to sign an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries. The 1963 march was organized primarily by Bayard Rustin — a brilliant strategist, a pacifist, and a gay Black man whose identity was used to marginalize him within the movement even as his organizational genius made the march possible. Rustin coordinated 2,000 buses, 21 special trains, 10 chartered airlines, and thousands of private vehicles. He organized sanitation, medical services, food distribution, security, and the program. The march ran on time, on budget, and without incident. It was one of the most complex logistical achievements in American political history. Bayard Rustin’s name is not on the Lincoln Memorial.
Ten speakers addressed the crowd before Dr. King. John Lewis — then 23 years old and chairman of SNCC — delivered a speech that the march’s organizers had asked him to soften because of its militancy. The original version declared that the movement would march through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman marched through Georgia. Lewis agreed to revisions but kept the speech’s essential argument: that the political establishment had abandoned Black Americans, that patience had run out, and that the movement would not wait. What the nation remembers is what came last — Dr. King’s prepared remarks, which he set aside two-thirds of the way through when gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, called out to him to tell them about the dream. What followed was largely improvised, drawn from speeches he had given before, building on itself in the cadence of the Black church sermon tradition until it reached its conclusion. It became the most famous speech in American history. The prepared text delivered before it — about the bank of justice, the promissory note, the insufficient funds — was equally precise and is less remembered.
Three weeks after the march, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed and four girls were killed. The bombing did not stop the movement — it accelerated it. The march had demonstrated the breadth and discipline of the coalition demanding civil rights legislation. The bombing demonstrated what was at stake if Congress continued to delay. President Kennedy, who had watched the march from the White House and met with its leaders afterward, was assassinated three months later. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, used the moral weight of Kennedy’s death and the political pressure of the march to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The march had not produced those laws by itself. It had made them politically unavoidable by demonstrating, in front of the Lincoln Memorial and on every television screen in the country, the size and seriousness of the movement demanding them.
The economic demands of the march were not met. The march called for a federal jobs program, a minimum wage increase, and enforcement of fair employment practices. These demands received less legislative attention than the civil rights and voting rights legislation. The wealth gap between Black and white Americans that existed in 1963 has not been closed. The unemployment rate for Black Americans has consistently remained approximately twice the rate for white Americans for the six decades since the march. Bayard Rustin spent the rest of his life arguing that the movement had won political rights but lost the economic argument — that legal equality without economic equality was insufficient, and that the work was unfinished. He was right. The march was a triumph. It was also a beginning that the nation has not yet completed.