March on Washington and the 'I Have a Dream' Speech
Some 250,000 people came to Washington on 28 August 1963 for jobs and freedom, and it was the largest political demonstration the country had seen. The idea was A. Philip Randolph's and was twenty-two years old. He had threatened a march in 1941 to force the desegregation of defence industries and had called it off when Roosevelt issued the order, and he revived it in 1963 with Bayard Rustin organising, who put the whole thing together in eight weeks — buses, trains, marshals, toilets, 80,000 packed lunches, and a sound system rebuilt overnight after sabotage. The Kennedy administration tried to talk them out of it and then helped, on the view that a riot would kill the civil rights bill. The demands were specific and are usually forgotten: a fair employment act, a federal minimum wage of two dollars, desegregation of schools, an end to police brutality, and voting rights enforcement. John Lewis, then twenty-three, had to soften a speech that the organisers and the Catholic archbishop found too critical of the administration. King spoke last, and departed from his prepared text about halfway through when Mahalia Jackson called out to him to tell them about the dream. No arrests were made and no violence occurred. Three weeks later four girls were killed by a bomb at a Birmingham church. The Civil Rights Act passed in July 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. The speech has since been quarried for a single passage and used to argue against the very policies the march was demanding, which is a fate its author anticipated. The version of King that gets quoted every January is largely the last four minutes of one afternoon.
- Year: 1963 CE
- Category: Political
