Remembering the March

TIME for Kids looks back at the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

On August 28, 1963, people from all over the country poured into Washington, D.C. Many held signs: “We March for Integrated Schools Now!” and “We Demand Jobs for All Now!”

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew about 250,000 people. They were calling on the United States government to pass laws regarding equal labor, housing, and voting rights protection for all Americans. At the Lincoln Memorial, they heard Martin Luther King Jr. give one of the most important speeches in our nation’s history.

ON THE HORIZON The 1963 March on Washington was one of the largest civil rights gatherings in U.S. history.

The Life of a Leader

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. He studied to become a minister and moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s. At the time, segregation was still a fact of life in many parts of the country, especially in the South. King preached often about social justice.

In 1955, an African-American teenager named Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. She had refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. Rosa Parks was arrested soon after for a similar act of protest. This led to a yearlong boycott of public buses in Montgomery. It also led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that banned segregated seating on buses.

In April 1963, King was arrested at a protest and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. But it only motivated him. Just a few months later, he joined other civil rights leaders for the March on Washington. It was organized by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. Many leaders spoke before King, whose speech lasted 18 minutes.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’” King famously said toward the end. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“He was preaching from his heart,” says John Lewis. Lewis, who was a speaker at the March and a civil rights activist, later became a U.S. congressman in Georgia.

VOICE OF FREEDOM Martin Luther King Jr. gives the “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington.

The Dream Lives On

The March on Washington showed Americans the power of peaceful protest. Many more protests followed. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, banning discrimination. Maxine Allen Johnson Wood had just graduated from college when she took part in the March on Washington. She says King’s dream is as important today as it was then. “The image that he gave was [of] a future. And it wasn’t beyond our reality to think that [it] could happen.”

King’s words continue to inspire people around the world. “Of all the gifts [he gave us], the greatest has been the belief in society’s ability to change and the power each of us has to effect that change,” Lewis says.