Civil rights March on Washington, D.C.
Warren K. Leffler's view from the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 shows the crowd of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom filling both sides of the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument. The march was held at the Lincoln Memorial in the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, so the setting ties the marchers' demands to Lincoln and to the national monuments. The crowd was real: the National Archives puts it at more than 250,000.
- Date
- August 28, 1963
- Period
- Cold War
- Made by
- March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (organizers A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and the civil rights coalition)
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Photograph
- Issuer type
- Movement
- Regime
- Kennedy Administration
- Leader
- John F. Kennedy
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Persuade or win support
- Themes
- Race and ethnicity, Labor
- Event
- Civil Rights Movement
- Techniques
- Transfer
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Library of Congress, retrieved September 28, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (U.S. News & World Report photo; LoC: No known restrictions on publication)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Text on the object
No printed or legible text on this object.
Checked at full zoom: this file is a small (122x150 px) contact-sheet/proof scan, and no protest-sign, banner or placard text is resolvable anywhere in the dense crowd. The only lettering visible is on the print border itself — a frame number and a 'KODAK' edge print — which are photo-lab marks on the scan, not text on the photographed scene, and are excluded per the archive's convention of not transcribing archival stamps.
