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250,000 came with no invitations
A belief people carried
Dr. King was not the only great orator in America, and he was not the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America. What he did was tell people what he believed. I believe, I believe, I believe, he told them. People who believed the same things took his cause as their own and passed it on, and some of them built structures to get the word to even more people.
Then 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time. They rode buses for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. A quarter of the audience was white, so what drew them was a belief about America.
The higher law
Dr. King held that there are two types of laws in this world: those made by a higher authority and those made by men. Only when every law made by men is consistent with the higher authority's laws will the world be just. He gave the I have a dream speech. A twelve-point plan would have been a different speech altogether.
How was the march organized without the internet?
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was organized largely by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph from a small New York office. Churches, unions, and civil rights groups spread the word through their own networks and mailings. According to the organizers' accounts, about 2,000 chartered buses and 21 special trains carried people to the capital. The date was August 28, 1963.
Where did the dream passage come from?
Dr. King had already spoken about a dream in public, including at a rally in Detroit in June 1963. At the Lincoln Memorial, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson is widely reported to have called out for him to tell the crowd about the dream. He then moved from his prepared text into the passage that became the speech's best-known section. The speech lasted about seventeen minutes.
Where does the higher law idea come from?
Dr. King's distinction between just and unjust laws appears in his April 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. There he drew on Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who held that an unjust law is no law at all. Aquinas wrote in the thirteenth century that human law is legitimate only when it aligns with natural and divine law. The letter was written on the margins of a newspaper and on scraps smuggled out of the jail.
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