Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. We’ve been asking people who were around in 1963 to tell us their memories, whether they went to the March on Washington, or witnessed it on TV or radio.
A number of you reached out through our Public Insight Network, including JoKatherine Holliman Page. She’s a 74 year-old African American woman born in Pueblo. Fifty years ago, she was enrolled in a master's program at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C.
Aurora resident Craig Bowman, also African-American, was in his early teens in 1963. He remembers that summer vividly and absorbing the events of that day from the Denver oprhanage he called home.
We also spoke with Dr. Vincent Harding, of Denver about meeting Martin Luther King, fighting for civil rights, and how far the country has come--or not-- in 50 years. Harding's a retired minister and historian -- and was a friend of Martin Luther King. As a young man, Harding joined the Mennonite church; his faith in nonviolent protest led him to the fight for civil rights. He met King for the first time, in 1958… Harding and some Mennonite colleagues -- black and white -- made a pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama, where King was recuperating from a stab wound; he’d been attacked by a critic -- a black woman named Izola Curry -- in a Harlem bookstore. It was the first attempt on King’s life.
