How many attended mlk speech

A badge featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, the success of the speech attracted the attention and suspicion of the FBI.

Federal authorities monitored the March on Washington closely , fearing sedition and violence. Policing of the march turned into a military operation, codenamed Operation Steep Hill, with 19, troops put on standby in the D. The FBI later stepped up its surveillance of King, which lasted until his assassination in Though it is one of the most famous and widely celebrated speeches in U.

As reported in the Washington Post , King himself obtained the rights a month after he gave the speech, when he sued two companies selling unauthorized copies. Though some parts of the speech may be used lawfully without approval for example, individual teachers have been able to use the speech in their classrooms , the King estate requires anyone who wants to air the speech to pay for that right.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Kennedy signaled his approval publicly in July when he was assured it would be a peaceful event. The March was not universally supported by activists. Prominent objectors included Malcolm X and Strom Thurmond.

In , organizers were planning a march to demand desegregation in the U. But President Franklin Roosevelt averted the march by signing Executive Order in June, , banning discrimination in the federal government and defense industries.

Almost no one could clearly hear Dr. An expensive sound system was installed for the event, but it was sabotaged right before it. William Edward Burghardt "W. Roy Wilkins asked the marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence. Of the estimated , people who attended the March , about 60, were white. People came from all over the country, and few arrests were reported. King had suggested the familiar "Dream" speech that he used in Detroit for his address at the march, but his adviser the Rev.

Wyatt Tee Walker called it "hackneyed and trite. So, the night before the march, King's staff crafted a new speech, "Normalcy Never Again.

King was the last speaker to address the crowd in Washington that day. Then he paused and said, "I still have a dream. Walker was out in the audience. It had never been used on a world stage before.

The rest, of course, is history. The march almost didn't include any female speakers, either. It was only after pressure from Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the national planning committee, that a "Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom" was added to the official program. It took further convincing to have a woman lead it.

Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP who played a key role in integrating schools in Little Rock, told the crowd: "We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States.

And we will sit-in and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge to the women of America. Earlier, Josephine Baker, an internationally known American entertainer who had moved to France to find fame, addressed the crowd.

Dressed in a military jacket draped with medals for her contribution to French resistance in World War II, she spoke in very personal terms about freedom:.

I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you. I want you to have a chance at what I had. But I do not want you to have to run away to get it. Women had been central to the civil rights movement -- Diane Nash, Ella Baker, Dorothy Height and many others -- but were only included in the program that day after one woman spoke up. The most prominent white speaker was called the 'white Martin Luther King'.

Walter Reuther was the head of the United Automobile Workers, which provided office space, staff and funding for the march in Detroit and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He was the seventh speaker listed on the program , and shared his remarks to the crowd. Irving Bluestone, Reuther's former administrative assistant, shared this popular story to explain who Reuther was at the March on Washington: "Standing close to the podium were two elderly women.

As Reuther was introduced, one of the women was overheard asking her friend, 'Who is Walter Reuther? He's the white Martin Luther King. An openly gay man organized the march in less than two months.

Bayard Rustin is "the most important leader of the civil rights movement you probably have never heard of," as LZ Granderson put it in a CNN column. Not only did he organize the march in a matter of months, Rustin is credited with teaching King about nonviolence.

He also helped raise funds for the Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Council. During the time, his sexual orientation was known, and he was often in the background to prevent it from being used against the movement. Rustin, who died in , was honored with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in It wasn't the first planned 'March on Washington'.

Labor leader and civil rights advocate A.