Audra McDonald

It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least it should be by now) that America is a country founded upon — as well as cursed, colonized, and fertilized by — a bedrock of racism that continues to this day. Should you be unable to wrap your head around that in 2024, we’re not sure what to say to you. But to chalk up modern social inequity and state-sanctioned violence against certain communities to being “merely” a racially-biased phenomenon and simply leave it at that is insufficient. There’s something deeper…

The 1963 March on Washington did not merely come together on its own via a whim, a wish, and good will. It took years of strategizing, planning, building coalitions, dodging bureaucratic obstacles and opponents both within and outside the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Students and veteran activists worked phone lines, sweated over the details (how many latrines do we need? how many can we get?), and sought out allies of all stripes from across the country. What happened on that hot day in the District of Columbia…