August 28, 1963
Alabamians John Lewis and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered speeches in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A native of Pike County and the event’s youngest speaker, Lewis harshly criticized the Kennedy administration and the limited scope of the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later in the day, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which was carried live by television stations. More than 250,000 people participated in the march, making it one of the largest human rights rallies in United States history.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
The burning Greyhound bus pictured here carried Freedom Riders into Anniston on May 14, 1961, as part of an effort to test a newly enacted integration law regarding bus stations in the South. After the riders were attacked at the station in Anniston, the bus was firebombed after breaking down several miles outside the city. Many of the riders were beaten, with several being severely injured, by a white mob as they departed the bus. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Birmingham Public Library Archives)
Freedom Riders, from left, John Lewis, Charles Butler, Catherine Burks Brooks, Lucretia Collins and Salynn McCollum sit on a bench in the Birmingham Greyhound station on May 17, 1961. Soon after the photo was taken, the group was arrested and later released in a rural all-white area on the orders of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of The Birmingham News)
John Lewis, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was struck on the head by a state trooper during an attempt to march on the state Capitol in Montgomery in March 1965. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of Library of Congress)
Aerial view of marchers, from the Lincoln Monument to the Washington Monument, at the March on Washington, 1963. (Photograph by Thomas O’Halloran, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
Civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office of the White House after the March on Washington, D.C., 1963. Photograph shows (left to right): Willard Wirtz (Secretary of Labor); Floyd McKissick (CORE); Mathew Ahmann (National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice); Whitney Young (National Urban League); Martin Luther King Jr.(SCLC); John Lewis (SNCC); Rabbi Joachim Prinz (American Jewish Congress); A. Philip Randolph, with the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake partially visible behind him; President John F. Kennedy; Walter Reuther (labor leader), with Vice President Lyndon Johnson partially visible behind him; and Roy Wilkins (NAACP). (Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
John Lewis speaking at a meeting of American Society of Newspaper Editors, Statler Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C., 1964. (Photograph by Marion S. Trikosko, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.
