Two Marches

The two people this site follows each sent a crowd to the same stretch of grass in Washington, thirty years apart.

August 28, 1963

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought about a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial to demand a civil rights law, jobs, and a fair wage. Bayard Rustin, its deputy director, ran it from a headquarters in Harlem and issued the manuals that told every bus captain where to go (March on Washington, Organizing Manual No. 2). Two weeks before, a senator had read Rustin's police record into the Congressional Record to try to stop him (Arrested, Attacked, Pardoned).

April 25, 1993

The March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation began with a letter. In January 1991 Urvashi Vaid, then executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, wrote to groups across the country proposing a new march. Two years later hundreds of thousands of people came, by the Park Service's count 300,000 and by the organizers' about a million (April 1993). Vaid was one of the speakers.

What connects them

The 1993 march was the third national lesbian and gay march on Washington, and the line back to 1963 is direct. A 2022 resolution in the House of Representatives says the first of them, in 1979, "was inspired by the March on Washington in 1963." The same resolution names both of this site's figures: Rustin, "an openly gay Black man who organized the March on Washington in 1963," and Vaid, who "cofounded the Creating Change Conference in 1988" (Creating Change).

Four months after Vaid's march, on the thirtieth anniversary of Rustin's, President Clinton issued a statement recalling that "such visionary leaders as Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin understood three decades ago, jobs and freedom are inextricably linked." Rustin, who had lived openly as a gay man while being kept in the background because of it, did not live to see a march on Washington for gay rights at all: he died on August 24, 1987, seven weeks before the second one.

Sources

• H. Res. 1198, 117th Congress (2022) (govinfo).
• President Clinton, statement on the 30th anniversary of the March on Washington, August 28, 1993 (govinfo).
• This site's articles on the 1963 March and the 1993 March, and the sources they cite.