The March: A View From the Crowd
Soon after graduating from college, I was privileged to be able to participate in an event that shaped and animated my life forever thereafter. Five decades ago this year, I participated in the March on Washington. In the old photos of the massive crowd around the Reflecting Pool in Washington, I’m one of the specks near the treeline, on the left of the pool when viewed from the Lincoln Memorial. In honor of the 50th anniversary in 2013, I put in writing the following recollections of that memorable day.
As I shuffled off sleepily in the predawn hours, it seemed a lonely, quixotic thing to do. My parents humored me, but it was clear they thought their 22-year-old son probably had more productive ways to spend a late summer day.
By that evening, the day’s events were already being read as an epochal moment in U.S. history.
The March on Washington today
The need to register our convictions was more potent than the expectation that anyone was listening
is so closely identified with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that they seem like synonymous phenomena, and indeed the Rev. King’s words crystallized a movement and a moment as few other speeches in history have. From my foot soldier’s perspective, that eloquent vision was the emotional high point of the day, but in the end it was The March, not Read more »