Years of Struggle.

The 1963 March on Washington, in which a quarter of a million people demonstrated for civil rights on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, was the largest demonstration for human rights that the country had ever seen. It was the idea of A. Philip Randolph, the aging founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, who had been a labor and civil rights activist for nearly four decades. Randolph had previously organized such a march in 1941 to demand more jobs for blacks in the wartime defense effort; when President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to issue an executive order calling for an end to discrimination in defense industries, Randolph called off the demonstration. But in the summer of 1963, with both job opportunities for African- Americans still lingering woefully behind those for whites and images of the Birmingham riots burned into...