Sixty years ago, on August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people stood in the summer sun to hear a pastor from Georgia tell the world about his dream for the future of his country.
It was the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Various civil rights leaders spoke during the day with labor leader A. Philip Randolph speaking first.
“We here today are only the first wave,” he said in part. “When we leave, it will be to carry the civil rights revolution home with us into every nook and cranny of the land, and we shall return again and again to Washington in ever-growing numbers until total freedom is ours.”
Several people went on to offer speeches that day, including John Lewis, then president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who went on to serve for decades in the U.S. House.
The last speaker, King, was set to give a four-minute speech to address economic and employment inequalities. Instead, he delivered one of the most quoted speeches the world would ever hear, defining the goals of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and ‘60s and framing his dream of a future where “all God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
Here is that speech.
