5 things you didn't know about the March on Washington and MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech

On August 28, 1963 hundreds of thousands of people poured into Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington, one of the most important civil rights demonstrations of the 20th century.

Many remember it as the day where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famed "I Have a Dream" speech, but the original goals and primary organizers of the march are often overlooked, according to William P. Jones, author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights. Marches on the national mall have become somewhat common, but Jones said the demonstration in 1963, which helped secure legislation barring employment discrimination, "transformed that type of protest."

"Almost everybody anticipated that this was going to be a really threatening and violent event," he said. "Because the '63 march was so effective it became a model."

Thousands of people gathered Friday to mark the 57th anniversary of the march in Washington, D.C., for the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks Commitment March on Washington hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network, or NAN. The march, which is held on the anniversary of Emmett Till's death, comes as several police killings of Black people this year have fueled ongoing protests, some of them violent, across the country. 

Here are five thing you didn't know about the original march.

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The full name was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

While many associated the March on Washington with the push to end segregation and secure voting rights, the full title of the march sheds light on the organizer's main demand: radical changes to the economic system.

"Those things were deeply interconnected," he said. "The march by promoting that slogan 'for jobs and freedom' seems to make that point that economic justice and racial equality went hand in hand and you weren’t going to get one without the other."

The initial goal of the march was to push for equal access to jobs and a federal law banning employment discrimination, which was legal prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jones said. Organizers also wanted the federal government to raise the minimum wage and create a jobs program for all unemployed workers.

Jones said the purpose of the march is often overlooked because of the attention given to King's speech, which doesn't touch on the specific goals of the march likely because King was last to speak to the crowd which had already heard the goals many times that day.

The march was organized by an openly gay Black man

One of the primary organizers of the march was A. Philip Randolph, a Black union leader and socialist who was seen as the "dean of the civil rights movement," according to Jones. When Randolph began planning the march, he asked Bayard Rustin, a prominent civil rights strategist who had trained King in nonviolence, to lead to demonstration. 

Organizers including Roy Wilkins, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, objected to Rustin being the primary leader of the march because he had previously been affiliated with the communist movement and because he'd been arrested over his sexuality.

"Those objections did not really prevail in part because A. Philip Randolph recognized how important it was to have Bayard Rustin in the leadership role of the march," Jones said. "It was also in part because Rustin himself really was completely unapologetic. He refused to make the argument that his sexuality had any bearing on his ability to be an effective organizer."

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Rustin was named the associate director of the march and was responsible for drawing up the official plans, writing out the goals and speaking at the very end of the march.

Black women played a huge role in organizing but were largely excluded from speaking

Leaders of key civil rights organizations including King, Randolph, Wilkins and the late Congressman John Lewis known as the "Big Six" are often credited with organizing the march, but Black women including Anna Arnold Hedgemen were "really key in pulling off the march," according to Jones. Hedgemen was the only woman on the organizing committee Jones said, but the male leaders of the march refused to involve women in the official leadership, no women's organizations were listed as co-sponsors and female speakers barred from giving a key note address.

Josephine Baker, an entertainer, read a statement and Daisy Bates, a newspaper publisher and president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP, gave a "tribute to women." Some women proposed picketing the march and events involving Randolph, but ultimately decided they didn't want their protest to detract from the message of the march Jones said.

He said the march was a catalyst for women like Dorothy Heights, president of the National Council of Negro Women, to become more vocal and demand to be included. Jones noted that even though Heights' group was the largest Black organization at the time, organizers did not allow her to speak.

"After the march it created a really profound I think movement among some of the really prominent Black women’s leaders to push much more powerfully for including women in the leadership," Jones said.

John Lewis' speech was censored

Lewis was the youngest speaker at the march representing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose members collectively helped him write his speech. Jones said copies of the speech were circulated the night before the march which raised some red flags with organizers.

Jones said some leaders objected to the speech's "overly radical language," a reference to marching through the South like General William Sherman and the fact that SNCC did not support President John F. Kennedy's civil rights bill. While Randolph let Lewis keep the "radical" language, he had to strike the reference to Sherman because Randolph felt it went against the non-violent message of the march. Lewis also ended up voicing support for Kennedy's bill, but included a thorough list of why he felt it was insufficient.

"What’s more important about his speech than the fact that it was changed was actually what remained," Jones said. "It remained an incredibly radical expression of the goals of what young civil rights activists wanted."

The most iconic part of King's speech was improvised

Randolph faced push back when he proposed that King give the final keynote address because he was much younger than the other speakers, except for Lewis, who had been civil rights leaders since the 1930's, Jones said.

"People objected and he said 'well who wants to speak after him?'" Jones said. "Everybody recognized that he was a much better speaker than any of them."

King's speech did not go as originally planned, Jones said. His initial written speech characterized the march as a call to reclaim to vision of the nation promised in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But as King delivered the address, Jones said the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out and told him to "tell them about the dream," and he fell back on a speech he had given many times before. He first used the dream rhetoric in 1960 when speaking to a union and gave a similar version of the speech again during a mass march in Detroit.

"It was obviously a good choice," Jones said.

"I Have a Dream" speech: What you didn't know about King's iconic speech

Contributing: Niquel Terry Ellis, USA TODAY

Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg