W. E. B. Du Bois Visits Duluth

Washington, D.C. August 28, 1963. It was a hot and humid late summer day. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, from all walks of life, descended on the nation’s capital to demand a massive moral and political revolution in the direction of race relations. The March on Washington also drew a proverbial who’s who of America’s civil rights movement—political activists, labor leaders, lawyers and judges, rabbis, priests, and preachers, musicians and singers, celebrated figures of the stage, film, television and literary world were all there. Speech after speech, song after song…but then a hurried rustling of quiet voices exchanged between a small cohort of civil rights leaders. News had arrived of the death, just last night, of one man whose life-long work had helped make possible what was then happening.