What was the March on Washington?

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a peaceful demonstration of about 250,000 people in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech. The march was the largest political rally for human rights in American history up to that point, and it pressed Congress to pass strong civil rights legislation.

Organizers had been planning the event for years. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph had threatened a similar march in 1941, which had pushed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in defense industries. Twenty-two years later, Randolph and his protege Bayard Rustin worked with the leaders of the so-called Big Six civil rights organizations to organize the 1963 march. Those leaders were Randolph, Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

President John F. Kennedy initially worried that a march would jeopardize his civil rights bill in Congress, but he eventually endorsed the event. Buses, trains, and chartered planes brought participants from all over the country. The crowd assembled at the Washington Monument, then walked to the Lincoln Memorial, where speeches lasted about three hours under the August sun.

Speakers and performers included Lewis, who delivered a sharply worded speech after edits to soften criticism of the Kennedy administration, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and many others. The final speech of the day was King's. He prepared remarks about how a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation Black Americans still were not free. About two-thirds of the way through, Mahalia Jackson called out, tell them about the dream, Martin. King set aside his prepared text and improvised the famous passage, declaring he had a dream that one day his four little children would live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The speech is widely regarded as one of the greatest in American history.

The march helped build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.