The more than 200,000 people who descended on Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963, proved that protests don't need to be violent to be powerful. In addition to meeting with President John F. Kennedy and members of Congress, the groups' leaders led a march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. The gathered masses stood peaceably for hours in the stifling August heat as musicians and orators appealed for equal rights for African Americans and, really, all minorities. Thanks to powerful words from civil rights champions, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s famed "I Have a Dream" speech, the march went down in history as the most convincing event in the movement that led to the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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