Harry Targ
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2026/8/28/thousands-take-part-in-march-on-washington-to-promote-voting-rights
Thinking about the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, my thoughts returned to the profound intellectual, political, and moral transformation many of us experienced about civil rights, the pursuit of peace, and the fundamental need for economic and social justice that resulted from the first historic March.
After the August 28, 1963 March many of us, young and old, Black and white, men and women, straight and gay, of all class, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds came to the realization that we had to march, to protest, to sing and shout, and to organize to continue to work for peace and justice.
As the years unfolded, we studied and learned more about the historic struggle for justice that began hundreds of years before August 1963 and after the March on Washington, we realized, the struggle would not end.
And over the years the analyses, visions, and political practices of all of us, even the organizers and speakers at the first March, changed. Dr. King himself said in a famous speech at Riverside Church in New York in 1967 that social and economic justice cannot be achieved at home while we were engaged in massive war against the Vietnamese people. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Dr. King’s understanding of the economic dimension of racial injustice deepened as well. Again in 1967 he said: “One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”
A March on Washington today would have an even broader agenda than the event of fifty years ago. The National Action Network, the organization that launched the 2013 commemoration, identified nine key talking points that inspired it: jobs and the economy; voting rights; workers’ rights; stand your ground laws and gun violence; women’s rights; immigration; LGBT equality; environmental justice, and youth.
Harry Belafonte, paraphrasing a former President of the United States, reported that "when the state finds itself moving away from its commitment to the rights of the citizen, when those rights are being trampled and misguided, when there are those who would wrest from the Constitution the equality that it attempted to give all of us, then the citizens of the nation have not only the obligation, but the right, to challenge the state and those who run it. And, he said, if we fail to do that, if we fail to meet those moral criteria, then we, the citizens, should be charged with patriotic treason.”
Fortunately, contemporary generations of workers, occupiers, peace activists, anti-racists, women’s liberationists, gay rights activists, and environmentalists are heeding the call to carry on the legacy of the Marches on Washington, advocating what was called meeting the “moral criteria” embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
