Rustin was a crucial force driving civil rights activism, especially in organizing protests on the National Mall. The first March on Washington movement emerged in 1941 when African American activists, including Rustin, successfully pressured…

From 1961 to 1971, Whitney Young was the Executive Director of the National Urban League (NUL), a civil rights organization which emphasizes economic parity and self-reliance. In March 1963, A. Philip Randolph asked Young and the NUL to participate…

Hillel Kook was a Jewish activist and member of the Revisionist Zionist movement who was also known by the alias Peter Bergson. He lived in the United States during World War II and led the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. In…

African American contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939. A peaceful crowd of seventy-five thousand people stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument to attend the free…

As a women's rights activist in the early 1900s, Burns organized political marches and rallies to pressure male lawmakers into passing a Constitutional amendment allowing women to vote. In 1913, she helped organize a suffrage march on Pennsylvania…

Eighteen steps from the top landing of the Lincoln Memorial, an inscription marks the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood to give his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. The marker was placed in 2003 to mark the 40th anniversary of that speech.…