On August 28, 1963, more than a quarter of a million people came to the National Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
They gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial to demand civil rights, an end to segregation, fair wages and good jobs, and the protection of the right to vote. It was the largest demonstration the nation had ever seen.
The march was envisioned by the labor leader A. Philip Randolph and organized by the strategist Bayard Rustin, and it brought together the major civil rights organizations of the day under one banner. From the steps of the memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address the world would come to know as I Have a Dream, calling the nation to make good on its founding promise.
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What happened that day helped move a reluctant country toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two of the most important laws in American history. The work was not finished, but the ground had shifted.
Sixty three years later, we return to the same ground. Not to remember history, but to defend what that generation won, and to carry it forward.
Photograph: U.S. National Archives · Public Domain