We start the 2013-14 academic year on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. It’s been nearly impossible to escape the media commemoration of the March for Jobs and Freedom, of Martin Luther King’s speech, of speeches and songs. But it’s worth really pausing and asking some specific questions about topics that often get overlooked. On the UT Austin university homepage, UT historians (and several other faculty and students) offer some poignant and pointed reflections.
You can find recordings and many more stories on the National Archives website here.
You can read Peter Dreier about one of the key organizers of the march, Bayard Rustin, marginalized for being gay and a former communist.
Finally, you can reread Laurie Green’s essay, posted here in January, on the ways the Marchers were thinking in 1963 about the unfulfilled promises of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.