IhaveadreamMarines.
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So many scenes from the August 28, 1963, March on Washington are now familiar to so many of us and the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is so much a part of the national consciousness it’s easy forget that for the hundreds of thousands of people who marched and rallied that day, the event was wholly, thrillingly new. There had been, of course, other civil rights protests, marches and demonstrations. But none had been so large (estimates range from 200,000 to 300,00 people) and none garnered so much attention before, during and, especially, after the event itself. LIFE presents pictures celebrating the people who transformed the 1963 rally into an era-defining event, some have never been seen before.