Answer:
The March on Washington helped create a new national understanding of the problems of racial and economic injustice. For one, it brought together demonstrators from around the country to share their respective encounters with labor discrimination and state-sponsored racism.
Explanation:
The March on Washington helped create a new national understanding of the problems of racial and economic injustice. For one, it brought together demonstrators from around the country to share their respective encounters with labor discrimination and state-sponsored racism. With activists from New York City, the Mississippi Delta, or Cambridge, Md., all describing their various encounters with police brutality, labor discrimination, or housing deterioration, it became very difficult to cast racial segregation as an exclusively Southern problem.
Through the mass participation of organized labor, students, religious leaders, and un-unionized domestic workers, the march also re-articulated for national and international audiences the extent to which racism and economic exploitation remained intertwined. In a planning document co-authored by Bayard Rustin, the march's chief organizers explained that, "integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation, and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists." The ability of over 200,000 marchers to organizer under such a message—peacefully and with such forceful spokespeople as Martin Luther King, Jr.—forced party politicians and more moderate political operators to respect the ability of the American Left to make clearly stated demands and generate mass support. In addition, the march helped to provide local activists with the moral authority to push back against less progressive forces in their respective home states, making 1963 a critical year, and the march itself a critical event in the transformation of local political regimes around the country.
