They gather at the base of the Washington Monument. People pour in from wherever there is still hope of a coming country. They rumble up from the fields of Georgia on broken-down grain trucks. They ride down They drive over in long silver cars trom the Middle Atlantic suburbs. in one hundred busses an hour, streaming through the Baltimore tunnel.
They converge on two dozen chartered trains from Pittsburgh and De-troit. They fly in from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas. An eighty-two-year-old man bicycles from Ohio; another, half his age, from South Tomora. One man takes a wiek to roller-skate the eight hundred mut from Chicago, sporting a bright sash reading FREEDOM.
By midmorning, the crowd tops a quarter of a million: students, small businessmen, preachers, doctors, barbers, salesclerks, UAW members, management trainees, New York intellectuals, Kansas farmers, Gulf shrimpers. A "celebrity plane" airlifts in a load of movie stars—-Harry Belafonte, James Garner, Diahann Carroll, Marlon Brando. Longtime Freedom Riders, veterans of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Albany, join forces with timid first-timers, souls who want another nation but didn't know, until today, how to make it. They come pushing baby strollers and wheelchairs, waving flags and banners. They come straight from board meetings and fresh out of prison. They come for a quarter milion reasons. They come for a single thing.