March on Washington (1963): Jobs, Freedom and 'I Have a Dream'

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on 28 August 1963, brought about 250,000 people to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand civil rights and economic justice for Black Americans. It was one of the largest political demonstrations in American history up to that time, and it ended at the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The peaceful, televised gathering helped build the national support that carried the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress.

Background: an idea from 1941

The idea of a mass march on the capital was more than two decades old. In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the leading Black trade union, threatened to bring tens of thousands of Black workers to Washington to protest against discrimination in the booming defence industries. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by issuing Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, which banned racial discrimination in defence work, and Randolph called the march off.

By 1963 the civil rights movement had won important victories, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Freedom Rides, but segregation remained legal across much of the South and Black unemployment was roughly twice the rate for white workers. In the spring of that year the Birmingham campaign in Alabama, with its televised images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on young demonstrators, shocked the nation. On 11 June 1963 President John F. Kennedy went on television to call civil rights a moral issue and announced that he would send a major civil rights bill to Congress.

Randolph and his long-time associate Bayard Rustin had been planning a march focused on jobs. After Birmingham, the major civil rights organisations agreed to join them, and the focus widened to include support for Kennedy’s bill.

Organisation and demands

The march was sponsored by the leaders who became known as the “Big Six”: Randolph; Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young of the National Urban League; James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis, the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They were later joined by four white leaders: the trade unionist Walter Reuther, the Protestant leader Eugene Carson Blake, the Catholic activist Mathew Ahmann and Rabbi Joachim Prinz.

Randolph was named director and Rustin, a skilled organiser and pacifist, his deputy. Some leaders feared that Rustin’s past ties to the Communist movement and the fact that he was gay would be used against the march, so he worked largely behind the scenes. In about eight weeks his small staff in New York arranged transport, food, water, first aid, toilets and a sound system for a crowd of unknown size. Volunteer marshals were trained to keep order, and organisers produced detailed instructions for marchers.

The official demands went well beyond a single law. They included passage of a comprehensive civil rights bill, the immediate desegregation of all public schools, protection against police brutality, a federal public-works programme to create jobs, a law banning discrimination in hiring, and a national minimum wage of $2 an hour, at a time when the federal minimum was $1.25.

The Kennedy administration was initially uneasy, fearing that disorder could harm the bill’s chances in Congress. Once the march was certain to go ahead, officials cooperated closely with the organisers. Washington banned the sale of alcohol for the day, many government workers stayed home, and thousands of police, National Guard members and troops were on standby.

The day of the march

On the morning of Wednesday 28 August, marchers arrived by special trains, by chartered buses numbering in the thousands, by car and on foot. Some had travelled for days; one man was widely reported to have roller-skated from Chicago. The crowd gathered around the Washington Monument, where folk and gospel performers, including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and Peter, Paul and Mary, entertained them.

Shortly before noon the crowd began to move along Constitution and Independence Avenues to the Lincoln Memorial, before the leaders had formally set off; they hurried to join the front. The afternoon programme at the memorial, broadcast live by the major television networks, included speeches, prayers and music. The opera singer Marian Anderson and the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performed.

Roy Wilkins announced to the crowd that the scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois had died in Ghana the previous day. James Farmer was in jail in Louisiana after a protest, and his speech was read for him. Women had been active in organising the march but were given little place on the programme; Daisy Bates of Little Rock spoke only briefly in a short tribute to “Negro women fighters for freedom”.

John Lewis’s speech

The most controversial speech came from John Lewis. His draft criticised Kennedy’s bill as “too little and too late” and used militant language, including a passage comparing a march through the South to General Sherman’s march through Georgia. Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, who was to give the invocation, objected, and other leaders pressed Lewis to soften the text.

Behind the Lincoln Memorial, Randolph appealed to Lewis and his SNCC colleagues, and they agreed to changes shortly before he spoke. Even the revised speech was among the sharpest of the day, warning that the movement would not be patient forever. Lewis later became a long-serving member of Congress and the last surviving speaker of the march when he died in 2020.

“I Have a Dream”

King was the last of the main speakers. He began with a prepared text that described the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a “promissory note” that America had defaulted on for its Black citizens. Towards the end he set the text aside. Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, is widely reported to have urged him to tell the crowd about the dream.

King then spoke about his dream of an America in which his four children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, and in which the children of former slaves and former slave owners could sit together at the table of brotherhood. He closed with a call to “let freedom ring” from every part of the country. The speech lasted about 17 minutes.

The dream passages were not entirely new. King had used similar language in speeches in 1962 and earlier in 1963, including at a large march in Detroit in June. But their delivery to a vast crowd and a national television audience made the speech the most famous of the civil rights era. Afterwards Rustin read out the march’s demands and Randolph led the crowd in a pledge to keep working for them.

Reactions and aftermath

The march passed off peacefully, which surprised many observers who had predicted violence. The leaders met Kennedy at the White House that evening. Press coverage at home and abroad was largely favourable, and the event gave the civil rights movement a new level of national visibility. Time magazine named King its Man of the Year for 1963, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Not everyone was impressed. Malcolm X, then a minister of the Nation of Islam, dismissed the event as a “Farce on Washington” controlled by white liberals, and some SNCC activists felt its message had been diluted. The FBI, already monitoring King, intensified its surveillance of him after the speech.

Optimism was soon tested. On 15 September 1963 a Ku Klux Klan bomb killed four girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and on 22 November Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, made the civil rights bill a priority, and after a long Senate filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law on 2 July 1964. The Voting Rights Act followed in August 1965.

Myths and facts

Myth: the march was only about King’s speech. It was a broad coalition event with a long list of demands, many of them economic. The “jobs” in its official title reflected Randolph’s and Rustin’s belief that civil rights and economic justice could not be separated.

Myth: King made up the whole speech on the spot. He worked from a prepared text and improvised only the closing section, drawing on images he had developed in earlier sermons and speeches.

Myth: the crowd was entirely Black. Most marchers were Black Americans, but large numbers of white supporters, especially from churches, synagogues and trade unions, also took part.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1941, June: Randolph’s threatened march leads Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defence industries.
• 1963, April–May: The Birmingham campaign draws national attention to segregation in Alabama.
• 1963, 11 June: Kennedy announces a civil rights bill in a televised address.
• 1963, 2 July: Leaders of the main civil rights groups meet in New York and agree to hold the march, with Rustin as chief organiser.
• 1963, 28 August: About 250,000 people march to the Lincoln Memorial; King delivers “I Have a Dream”.
• 1963, 15 September: The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing kills four girls in Birmingham.
• 1964, 2 July: Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• 1965, 6 August: Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act.

Why it matters

The March on Washington showed that a huge, disciplined and peaceful protest could put civil rights at the centre of national politics. It helped secure the landmark laws of 1964 and 1965, made King’s words part of American national memory, and became the model for later mass demonstrations in Washington. Its unmet demands for jobs and fair wages remain part of its legacy too.