It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC, good morning everyone, and thanks to Bridget Bergen

and Nancy Solomon for filling in when I was on vacation last week.

And we begin this new week with a special edition of our show, as well as by talking about

the news of the day, because as some of you know, today is the 60th anniversary of the

March on Washington that gave us Martin Luther King's iconic, I have a dream speech.

But we're going to take a different tack to commemorate the anniversary and tie a two

today.

We're not going to play, I have a dream excerpts like you're probably hearing elsewhere.

We're going to focus more on the larger context of the March, and on the man who is a key organizer

of the March, a mentor to Dr. King and nearly twice his age, labor leader as well as civil

rights leader A. Philip Randolph.

In the context of the March, people just usually call it the March on Washington, right?

And don't realize that that was just a shorthand for the full name of it, which was the March

on Washington for jobs and freedom.

It certainly was, centrally a civil rights march, of course, but it was also a labor rights

march, a march for jobs and freedom.

We'll talk about that later in the show.

Being a march for freedom, I was thinking about how it can seem that that word has come

to be used more these days on the political right than in the movements for social justice.

It's really individual freedom from social justice or community concerns in this common

form.

A recent example, freedom from having to protect your neighbors from COVID during the

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