March on Washington

On 28 August 1963 somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand civil and economic rights for African Americans. Formally called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it was among the largest political rallies for human rights in the history of the United States. It is best remembered for the closing address of Martin Luther King Jr., the "I Have a Dream" speech, and it helped build the pressure that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans in the South still lived under the segregation and disenfranchisement of the Jim Crow laws. The idea of a mass march on the capital was not new. In 1941 the labour leader A. Philip Randolph, working with Bayard Rustin, threatened one to protest discrimination in wartime defence industries, and called it off when President Franklin D. Roosevelt banned such discrimination by executive order.

In May 1963 Randolph announced a new march, at first concentrating on jobs and economic inequality. The year 1963 brought violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators across the South, the murder of the Mississippi activist Medgar Evers, and, in June, President John F. Kennedy's announcement that he would seek civil rights legislation. The organisers broadened their aims to "jobs and freedom".

Six leading figures, known as the Big Six, joined forces: Randolph, King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Four white allies from labour and the churches and synagogues, including the autoworkers' leader Walter Reuther, later made it the Big Ten. Wilkins and Young had at first objected to Rustin because he was gay, a former Communist and a draft resister, but he became deputy organiser and ran the logistics.

The demands included meaningful civil rights legislation, an end to school segregation, a federal jobs programme, a ban on discrimination in hiring and a higher national minimum wage. Kennedy at first warned against the march but later endorsed it. The FBI and some politicians portrayed it as Communist-inspired, Malcolm X derided it as "a picnic" and "a circus", and organisers received bomb threats.

Marchers arrived by road, rail and air, with 450 buses leaving New York alone, where some 5,900 police officers and thousands of troops stood by. The crowd moved off from the Washington Monument towards the Lincoln Memorial before its leaders, who were meeting members of Congress, had arrived; they joined it on Constitution Avenue and linked arms at its head. The day passed peacefully.

Mahalia Jackson and other performers sang, and a tribute to women of the movement included Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates, though no woman gave one of the main speeches. Lewis, the youngest speaker, was persuaded only minutes beforehand to soften a text attacking the Kennedy administration. King spoke last. Prompted, according to accounts, by Jackson calling out "Tell them about the dream", he left his script for a partly improvised passage built on the words "I have a dream", calling for an end to legalised racism. Afterwards the leaders met Kennedy at the White House.

The march is credited with pushing the federal government into action, creating momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, after the Selma to Montgomery marches, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King's speech came to dominate its memory, and only in recent decades has Rustin's central role in organising it been widely recognised.

Our 1960 map shows the United States in the years of the civil rights movement.