The March on Washington seen from the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963

Warren K. Leffler's photograph for U.S. News & World Report looks from the Lincoln Memorial over the crowd of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which fills both sides of the Reflecting Pool. The National Archives puts the crowd at more than 250,000.

The picture

The camera stands at the Lincoln Memorial and looks east. People fill the ground on both banks of the Reflecting Pool, and the Washington Monument closes the view. The scan the archive holds is a small proof, 122 by 150 pixels, and FRAME checked it for lettering: no sign, banner, or placard can be read. The only marks are a frame number and a Kodak edge print on the border, which are lab marks, not part of the scene. There is no transcription because there is nothing to transcribe.

Who was speaking

Many civil rights pages on this site describe a government or a council talking at citizens. This one runs the other way. The organizers named in the record are A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and the coalition behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They were private citizens using the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, in the capital, in public, under their own names.

FRAME files the photograph under transfer. The march was staged at Lincoln's memorial in the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the setting lends the marchers' demands the weight of the national monuments. That is a technique. It was also earned: the people in the picture were asking the country to keep a promise it had already made in its own founding documents. The archive adds that the crowd was real and cites the National Archives figure of more than 250,000.

For the organized resistance the movement faced, including state-funded pressure on named people, see Citizens' Councils, state money, and the civil rights campaign. Some of the FBI's covert media work in these years was aimed at civil rights leaders; that file is in COINTELPRO and the press. A Washington cartoonist's view of the Senate fight a month later is Let Me Through!

Record and rights

Library of Congress, item 2003688163, retrieved 28 September 2026. The rights note calls it a U.S. News & World Report photograph in the public domain, with the Library's "no known restrictions on publication." No NAID applies.