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History of the United States II / Unit 14   USH2 1982 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds

The March on Washington

Captions available

The idea

On August twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, to press Kennedy to act on civil rights. Its demands, the Yawp records, included civil rights legislation, school integration, an end to job discrimination, job training and a higher minimum wage.

In practice

The crowd walking eight-tenths of a mile from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where King spoke of his dream of an integrated society.

Where people slip

The crowd is given two ways: over two hundred thousand in Digital History, more than two hundred fifty thousand in the National Archives. The National Archives also answers unit twelve's open question: A. Philip Randolph, whose threat of a march in nineteen forty-one had won Executive Order eighty-eight oh two, proposed this march in late nineteen sixty-two and directed it, with Bayard Rustin handling the organisation. The anchor adds that the date was the eighth anniversary of Emmett Till's murder.

Your place on the trail

Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.

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