Introduction

Almost everyone has heard of the “American Dream,” wherein all people have an equal opportunity to advance and improve their lot through education and hard work. In the early days of America, though, that simply did not exist for most African Americans.

The root of the problem existed initially with slavery, an institution that had been around for ages and had been prevalent across the globe. The Greeks, the Romans, and even the Africans themselves practiced a form of it, although these early forms of slavery and indentured servitude didn’t compare with the brutality and human degradation instituted by chattel slavery in America. Although the Hammurabic Code, dating back to the Babylonian times, provided for the eventual liberation of slaves, many civilizations were far from being that understanding.

The Portuguese and Spanish brought what we know as African slavery to Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. In the early sixteenth century, the Spanish brought the first African slave to Mexico, and later to Cuba. So, upon the discovery of the New World, a land of opportunity and freedom from religious persecution for many, the first Africans to arrive there in the mid-1600s did so as slaves.

There is little doubt that slavery was a huge economic driver, but was it right? Was it just?

Christianity, and the enlightenment it brought, would in time heighten the moral conscience to stir many in the North to moral outrage enough to lead to one of the bloodiest and most brutal of wars, the Civil War, and from it the Emancipation Proclamation.

But a proclamation of equal rights was not enough to make it so. For 100 years following, America would struggle with biases and prejudices of the past that restricted the rights—civil and economic—of African Americans.

It would take a heroic effort by African Americans to stand up to the rest of America and declare that the time had come to open the American Dream to all. That effort reached its peak on August 28, 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC were in the forefront of a march of around a quarter of a million Americans, largely African Americans, on Washington, D.C.

The photos and narrative that follow share what led to that event, the event itself, and what came after, letting you share a more intimate feel for The March That Changed America.