Twenty years later, thousands march in Washington for a medley of causes
For many Americans, it remains one of the incandescent moments in living memory. Facing a throng of 250,000 on the capital Mall, with the Washington Monument soaring before him and the white marble figure of Abraham Lincoln brooding behind him, Martin Luther King Jr. turned mere spectacle into a kind of national epiphany. "I have a dream today," he declared. And again, "I have a dream today." And again. He used the words as more than refrain, more than cadence, almost as biblical exhortation. And as his listeners cheered him more loudly each time he repeated them, King built toward his stirring peroration: "When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when 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.' "
Last week, a day short of two decades after that electrifying moment, a throng almost as large assembled in the same spot. The participants were there partly in commemoration, to mark a day and a speech and an idea that had changed America forever, and partly in fresh complaint, to push for dreams that remain unfulfilled. The second March on Washington was thus both an opportunity to measure the sometimes astonishing distances the nation has traveled on the road to racial equality and a time to ponder its new and less certain agenda for the future. King's long-stilled eloquence was missing, of course, but it was not far from anyone's mind. "I can assure you that Martin Luther King Jr. will be marching with us and that he will still be leading the parade," said his widow Coretta Scott King. "We still have a dream."
If the dream was there, the fire was not. The reprise had a forced quality, as if the participants had been jaded by all the marches and speeches of the intervening two decades. Billed as a "March for Jobs, Peace and Freedom," the gathering marshaled proponents of a bewildering variety of causes and organizations, from environmentalists to advocates of a nuclear freeze to gay-rights lobbyists.
Some 4,000 buses carrying the marchers started arriving in the capital Friday evening from 347 cities across the nation. Early Saturday morning, demonstrators began collecting in 29 staging areas, slowly at first and then in ever growing droves. In contrast to the 1963 marchers, more than two-thirds of whom were black, last week's crowd was close to 50% white. As in 1963, the marchers were orderly; the 3,700 city police on hand made fewer than two dozen arrests.
The diversity of causes and interests at times made for a certain cliquishness, with union and church groups, dressed in identical T shirts, sticking together. At one point, a small band of Hare Krishnas moved along the sidewalk, oblivious to a Pennsylvania group a few feet away carrying signs advocating peace in Central America. In the shade of an old beech tree near by, a band of antinuclear activists stood in a circle, hands linked, eyes closed, as a middle-aged woman in braids and a long skirt led them in prayer.