| Tomorrow marks the sixtieth anniversary of a signal moment in American history: the “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., to a quarter of a million civil-rights supporters at the Lincoln Memorial. King’s call for racial justice served as the climax of the March on Washington, and played a critical role in galvanizing public opinion before Congress voted on two titanic pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On the morning of the march, the New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin arrived early at the lawn beside the Washington Monument. Supporters were starting to gather, and would proceed, en masse, to the site of the speech. Trillin had previously reported on the desegregation of the University of Georgia, and, in Washington, would gauge the growing size of the crowd by the steady disappearance of visible grass beneath its feet. Amid the arrival of civil-rights luminaries and activist groups from across the country, quotidian moments also unfold: the announcement that a lost child has been found; “early-morning business” conducted by an ice-cream truck. Still, the sense of anticipation is palpable. At one point, a Freedom Rider from Massachusetts “asked the people in the front row to link arms,” Trillin writes. “Beginning to sing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ they moved on down the street.” | 
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