The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that took place on August 28, 1963, in Washington, D.C., is remembered today primarily because it was the occasion when the final speaker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered what became known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.

While that speech is often excerpted to make it sound like King’s concerns were simply about the way individuals thought about race, in fact, the march’s organizers, Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, focused on economic discrimination and the lack of decent jobs for Black Americans. In the process of organizing the march, they brought on board not only civil rights organizers but also white labor organizer Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers.

King acknowledged the economic focus of the march when he centered his speech around the idea that Black Americans had received “a promissory note” that had become “a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” “But,” he said, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Dr. King was not the only speaker that day ; he anchored the event. Before him spoke the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a young John Lewis. Just 23 years old, he had been one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and Black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans in 1961 to challenge segregation.

At the Washington march, Lewis railed against the systems that kept Black Americans in poverty and permitted white men to commit violence against them, and explained that the remedy for the economic deprivation and racial violence Black Americans suffered was not in the civil rights bill proposed by the administration of President John F. Kennedy, but in the power of peaceful demonstrations and the vote. “‘ONE MAN, ONE VOTE’…must be our [cry],” he told the crowd.

“The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery,” Lewis said. “The nonviolent revolution is saying, ‘We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, nor the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a great source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.’”

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts to protect voting rights. That year, when Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president, calling for a rollback of business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put what Johnson called the Great Society into place.

They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.

But the government did not simply address poverty and safety. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.

In 1968, former vice president Richard M. Nixon won the presidency after promising that he would not continue to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South. With that promise, racists made a permanent move from the Democrats to the Republicans, joining forces with businessmen who wanted an end to regulation and to taxes and the social welfare programs they funded. The race to tear apart the postwar government that helped all Americans by appealing to racism was on.

In Washington, D.C., on the 28th September 2026, students, union members, civil rights organizations including the NAACP and National Urban League, and 90 community partner organizations held a “March on Washington 2026 : Defend the Vote.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court weakened yet another key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. “We know in this fight we’re fighting powerful forces, but this is why we rally today,” National Urban League president Marc Morial said. “This is why we seek to bring Americans together of goodwill from all races, from all sections of the country to push back as forcefully as we can.”