One Man.
One March.
One Speech.
One Dream
© Dan Budnik
Fifty years ago 250,000 people converged on the National Mall for a March on Washington. It became not just the largest political demonstration to date in American history, but also the beginning of a new era, defined by the phrase “I have a dream.”
Harry BelafonteSinger, activistMarco Grob for TIME
“At the end of the Second World War, those of us who had participated in that conflict were under the impression that if we were triumphant over fascism and the Nazis, that the men and women who returned from that conflict would be celebrated and honored by our nation. Many of us went off to that war and didn’t have the right to vote. Many of us went off to that war and didn’t have the right to participate in the American Dream. We didn’t really think about this thing as a dream until Dr. King articulated it.
As a kid, there was not much I could aspire to, because the achievement of black people in spaces of power and rule and governance was not that evident, and therefore we were diminished in the way we thought we could access power and be part of the American fabric. So we who came back from this war having expectations and finding that there were none to be harvested were put upon to make a decision. We could accept the status quo as it was beginning to reveal itself with these oppressive laws still in place. Or, as had begun to appear on the horizon, stimulated by something Mahatma Gandhi of India had done, we could start this quest for social change by confronting the state a little differently. Let’s do it nonviolently, let’s use passive thinking applied to aggressive ideas, and perhaps we could overthrow the oppression by making it morally unacceptable.”
Indignity Every Day
"Separate, but equal" drinking fountains in North Carolina, photographed by Elliott Erwitt in 1950.
Elliott Erwitt—Magnum
Photo Galleries: The Fight for Equality
381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
On the first day of December 1955, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress (and secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., chapter of the NAACP) named Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined $10. The bus boycott that grew from Parks' simple, resounding no lasted 381 days, from Dec. 5, 1955, to Dec. 26, 1956; thrust 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of the civil rights movement; and put an end to segregation on Montgomery's public buses.
The Murder of Emmett Till
In the summer of 1955, two white men abducted a 14-year-old African-American boy named Emmett Till from his great-uncle's house in Money, Miss. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam beat Till almost to death, gouged out one of his eyes, shot him in the head and then dumped his body—weighted by a cotton-gin fan tied with barbed wire—in the Tallahatchie River. Their motive: Till, visiting from his native Chicago, had reportedly spoken "disrespectfully" to Bryant's wife a few days before. When an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of kidnapping and murder in September, the verdict shocked the nation and the world. And when, mere months later, the men admitted to Look magazine that they had, in fact, murdered Till, the outcry was so intense that it helped ignite the modern civil rights movement.
Gathering Storm: The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957
Organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin—the two men who six years later would successfully helm the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—the May 17, 1957, Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the largest civil rights demonstration the U.S. had ever witnessed. In front of 25,000 people, activists and performers including Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Mahalia Jackson spoke and sang from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for three hours. In his speech that day—afterward known as the "Give Us the Ballot" speech—King urged President Eisenhower and Congress to protect the most basic rights of democracy for all citizens. "The civil rights issue is not an ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo," King said. "It is rather an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation. The hour is late."
The Little Rock Nine, 1957
In the landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. But it wasn’t until three years later that nine black teenagers made history at Little Rock Central High School. On Sept. 4, 1957—the first day of school—15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, the first of the nine to arrive, was waved off school grounds by armed Arkansas National Guardsmen sent by Governor Orval Faubus under the pretense of preventing bloodshed. Interrupting his vacation, President Dwight Eisenhower met with Faubus, and shortly afterward the Arkansas National Guard was removed from the school grounds. Eisenhower ordered paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students in—the first steps on the long road toward integration.
Anatomy of a Protest: Virginia, 1960
Few civil-disobedience tactics of the late 1950s and early '60s were as simple and effective as the sit-ins that took place in towns from Texas and Oklahoma to North Carolina and Tennessee. The pictures in this gallery, documenting protests in Petersburg, Va., in May 1960, provide a view of the sit-in phenomenon, as well as some of the unusual training methods devised to help protesters prepare for the challenge of keeping their seats. LIFE told its readers in 1960 that "the key to the sit-in is non-violence, but it takes a tough inner fiber neither to flinch nor retaliate when, occasionally, hooligans pick on the sitters-in ... The high school and college students of Petersburg studied at a unique but punishing extracurricular school before they attempted sitting-in [where they were] subjected to a full repertory of humiliation and minor abuse. These include smoke-blowing, hair-pulling, chair-jostling, coffee-spilling, hitting with wadded newspaper, along with such epithets as 'dirty nigger' and 'black bitch.' Anyone who gets mad flunks."
Freedom Riders: Unstoppable Force
The protesters known as freedom riders traveled by bus throughout the South during the early 1960s, facing threats of arrest, mob beatings and even firebombings. Riding primarily to challenge the noncompliance in many Southern states with Supreme Court decisions that ruled segregated public buses unconstitutional, these mostly young men and women — black and white — became the face of the civil rights movement at its most bracing moment.
In May 1961, LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer, who had covered the landmark Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington four years earlier, traveled with a group of freedom riders as they made their way from Alabama to Mississippi. Schutzer's photographs show the emotional extremes of the movement’s participants — exhilarated and exhausted, thrilled and terrified — during those heady, uncertain days.
Civil Rights: The TIME Archive
Equal Justice Under the LawDec. 21, 1953As the Supreme Court prepared to hear oral arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, TIME profiled Chief Justice Earl Warren and documented the debate over segregation. Warren is described as a friendly and effective administrator who was admired by his colleagues and ahead of his time on matters of racial tolerance. Despite uncertainty about the outcome of the case, the direction of history was clear to the TIME authors. The article closes by reminding the reader, “There is no doubt that the color line in the U.S. is fading … [the negro’s] rise will not stop, whether he wins or loses this case.” (In 1954, the Justices, led by Warren, decided unanimously in favor of desegregation.) Join TIME to read the full story
Attack on the ConscienceFeb. 18, 1957Martin Luther King Jr. earned his first appearance on the cover of TIME after successfully orchestrating the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. Relatively new to the national stage, King is described as “a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister … who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.” The story offers details on the boycott, famously inspired by Rosa Parks, and highlights King’s nonviolent, religion-based strategy. King is described as having “outflanked” Southern legislatures that sought to ban racial integration by striking “where an attack was least expected and where it hurt most: at the South’s Christian conscience.” Join TIME to read the full story
School Integration: A Report CardSept. 23, 1957Six years before Governor George Wallace made headlines blocking black students from entering the University of Alabama, Orval Faubus drew global outrage for using the National Guard to stop school integration in Little Rock, Ark. Described by TIME as an insecure, attention-starved, "slightly-sophisticated hillbilly," Faubus perfectly fit the picture of a Southern segregationist. The story documents his rise from humble beginnings in a candle-lit cabin to the rank of governor, as well as his embrace of segregation as a way to further his political career. But Faubus' efforts to hold back integration provoked ire from both Northern whites (who stopped a Broadway show to boo at one character's Little Rock heritage) and communist countries eager to seize upon American hypocrisy over human rights. The article correctly predicts that the governor overreached. A day after publication, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and forced the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Join TIME to read the full story
Lead Man HollerMarch 2, 1959In 1959, Harry Belafonte was both a musical sensation and an outspoken advocate for civil rights, and this cover story addresses both aspects of his life. In addition to his artistic achievements—he sold out theaters from Las Vegas to New York City—Belafonte’s long history as a fighter for racial equality is traced back to his youth in Harlem. “In 1944, with three other Negro sailors and our dates, I was refused a table at the Copacabana. Nine years later I was back there as the headliner,” Belafonte said. “How do you bridge that gap emotionally?” Join TIME to read the full story
Birmingham and Beyond: The Negro's Push for EqualityMay 17, 1963An author, playwright and essayist, James Baldwin was one of the U.S.’s most eloquent social critics, especially on the subject of civil rights. Yet as this TIME cover story states, he was not, “by any stretch of the imagination, a Negro leader.” Instead of leading marches, the politically uninvolved Baldwin left his mark with vivid descriptions of racism and insightful analysis on the root cause of white prejudice. The article describes Baldwin’s theory that “the white man … is guilt-ridden and sex-ridden, and he has managed over the years to delude himself by transferring his own failures onto the Negro.” As a result, Baldwin’s solution to racial tension is not legal but moral. The white man must come to terms with himself, and should he do so, said Baldwin, “the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” Join TIME to read the full story
The Negro Revolution to DateAug. 30, 1963This cover story focuses on the history of blacks in the U.S., from the first black pilgrims to the NAACP, then headed by Roy Wilkins. The article summarizes “five fundamental areas of Negro discontent”—jobs, education, housing, voting and access to public accommodations—and mentions the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on Aug. 28. In the story’s closing, Wilkins predicts the future of American blacks: “There’s going to be beer, and doubleheaders with the Yankees, and ice cream and mortgages and taxes and all the other things that whites have in their world, and tedium too. It’s not going to be heaven.” Join TIME to read the full story
Alabama: Civil Rights BattlefieldSept. 27, 1963In a cover story on the governor of Alabama, then (and still) one of the poorest states in the U.S., TIME calls George Wallace a “smart, capable lawyer who has in many ways been a first-rate governor.” Before entering office, Wallace lost his first run for governor after being “out-segged”—in his words—by his opponent’s hard-line pro-segregation stance. Wallace learned from this and chose to become a fiercely committed segregationist out of self-interest. The story characterizes Wallace’s infamous attempt to personally block the integration of the University of Alabama as one of his many moments of cynical pandering to local racists. The article also suggests Wallace was partially responsible for the 1963 Birmingham bombing—in which four young girls were killed at a church—after his tactics further inflamed racial tension. Join TIME to read the full story
Man of the YearJan. 3, 1964Martin Luther King Jr. returned to the cover of TIME as the magazine’s 36th Man of the Year, for 1963. The article paints a startlingly raw and human portrait of King, revealing that he attempted suicide twice before he turned 13 and initially rejected religion because he was embarrassed by “the shouting and the stamping.” After reading Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” in college, King changed his mind and embraced ministry as the best strategy for social change. The article chronicles King’s triumphs, from the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott to the March on Washington. Join TIME to read the full story
The Central PointsMarch 19, 1965Martin Luther King Jr.’s third appearance on the cover of TIME accompanies a story about the protest in Selma, Ala., that became known as Bloody Sunday. King sought to protest Selma’s racist voting laws by organizing marches throughout the city. The protests infuriated local authorities, and police violently attacked demonstrators, killing one with a bullet to the stomach and fracturing the skull of civil rights leader (and future Congressman) John Lewis. The article describes how police reprisals spurred the civil rights movement forward and forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to intervene. After meeting with George Wallace, Johnson publicly excoriated the governor, promising federal intervention in any state where local authorities are “unable to function.” Join TIME to read the full story
Cover Story
One Dream
To mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, TIME presents a special commemorative issue—featuring Jon Meacham on King as a Founding Father of the 21st century; Richard Norton Smith on how King's words changed the nature of presidential persuasion; Michele Norris on the state of the dream today; plus Maya Angelou, Malala Yousafzai, Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, Shonda Rhimes, Marco Rubio, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and more on what "I have a dream" means to them. Join TIME.com to read the full issue
© Bob Adelman
Mourning Medgar Evers
June 15, 1963
In June 1963, a Klan member named Byron De La Beckwith shot civil rights activist Medgar Evers in the back as the 37-year-old Evers stood in the driveway of his Jackson, Miss., home. Three days after the murder, on June 15, John Loengard made this photograph—one of the most moving pictures of the civil rights era—showing a deeply grieving Myrlie Evers comforting her weeping son Darrell Kenyatta at Medgar’s funeral. The photograph appeared on the cover of an issue of LIFE in which Myrlie paid tribute to her husband: "We all knew the danger was increasing," she wrote. "Threats came daily ... against us and the children. But we had lived with this hatred for years, and we did not let it corrode us." Myrlie fought for justice for her husband for more than 30 years, and when, in 1994, eight black and four white jurors found the 74-year-old De La Beckwith guilty of first-degree murder, her words upon hearing the verdict were, “Yes, Medgar!”
John Loengard—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The Battle for Birmingham
When Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a series of nonviolent actions in Birmingham in 1963, the brutal response—especially the attack-dog and fire-hose tactics of Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's commissioner of public safety—galvanized the civil rights movement. LIFE's May 17, 1963, issue, featuring Charles Moore's photos of those chaotic, frightening days, showed the world the violence of anti-integration forces in the South.
