August 28, 1963, marked a great day for democracy in America. On that day nearly fifty years ago, more than 250,000 people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to mount a peaceful protest demanding equal rights and economic equality for African Americans. Led by a contingent of civil rights organizations, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom called for the desegregation of public schools, protection of the right to vote, and a federal program to train and place unemployed workers. This historic demonstration ultimately led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and soon became the iconic expression of social protest that inspired the women’s rights movement, as well as movements for the disabled and other disenfranchised groups, and serves to this day as a blueprint for democratic action.
This Is the Day: The March on Washington, which is published by Getty Publications to coincide with Black History Month and the 50th anniversary of the march, presents Magnum photographer Leonard Freed‘s powerful visual testimony of the event that culminated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. The 75 photographs in this powerful volume, most of them never published before, were chosen from hundreds of images Freed made in the nation’s capital that day before, during, and after the march. These images present a spectacular wide-angled views of the hundreds of thousands of marchers overflowing the National Mall, intimate group portraits of people straining to see the speakers, and tight close-ups of individual faces filled with hope and yearning, as epitomized by a young woman who threw her entire being into singing “We Shall Overcome.”
This Is the Day: The March on Washington
Photographs by Leonard Freed
Foreword by Julian Bond
Essay by Michael Eric Dyson
Afterword by Paul Farber
J. Paul Getty Museum
128 pages, 8 ¾ x 9 ¼ inches
79 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-121-3
hardcover
US $29.95T (UK £19.95)
