On Wednesday 28th August 1963, nearly three hundred thousand people marched on Washington, D.C. for jobs and freedom, and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech:
Fifty years later to the day, a black man holds the office of President of the United States, and spoke from the same spot to mark the anniversary of an event which was critical in ensuring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:
Among their other grievances and demands, the people who marched wanted the simple, unalienable dignity and civil right of being able to vote – to fully participate in the American democracy. I doubt many of them would have believed it had they been told that within fifty years, not only would black people in the South be able to vote freely without let or hindrance (more or less), but that a black presidential candidate would successfully run for the highest office in the land – and then win re-election in a landslide four years later.
As President Obama rightly noted in his remarks, much work remains to be done by those who, in their own ways, continue the march today. And in many ways, the issues that drew people to the National Mall on that day in 1963 – unemployment, living wages, equal access to justice, an end to discrimination – remain as intractable now as they were then.
But by God, we’ve come a long way.
Semi-Partisan Politics 