I have a dream. One day, this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its dream.

Because we intend to fire our people up so much, until if they can't have their equal share in the house, they'll burn it down.

This civil rights act is a challenge to all of us, to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice.

Welcome back to this History X Repulca series, where we're charting some of the key moments in the transformative history of the US civil rights movement, the fight for equality that dominated mid-20th century America, with a legacy that continues to shape the world around us today.

I'm Rihanna Davis, section editor for BBC History magazine, and in this six-part series, I'm speaking to leading historians to explore some of the crucial moments that defined this struggle for racial equality.

In each episode, our experts will recount one significant story from the movement, and consider its place in the wider fight for civil rights.

In our last episode, we delved into the history of direct action, revisiting Rosa Parks's momentous decision not to vacate her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, and the city-wide bus boycott that followed and inspired the nation.

In today's episode, we're moving forward in time by almost a decade to 1963's March on Washington.

On 28 August, a multiracial crowd of more than 250,000 protesters descended on the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., and marched to the Lincoln Memorial, calling for jobs and freedom.

To keep protesters spirits high, a variety of speakers and entertainers performed for the crowd, from the National Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, to the singer, Bob Dylan.

However, it was the last speaker of the day whose words have been immortalised in history.

In the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on a podium and addressed the expectant crowd, as well as the watching TV cameras, sharing with the world his dream for a brighter America.

When we're thinking about the US Civil Rights Movement, it's important to remember that these events happened only a few decades ago. They're still within living memory for some.

That's the case for our first expert for this episode, Claiborne Carson, the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, who actually attended the March on Washington as a 19-year-old student.

I asked him to share his memories of the protest, which was the first he ever attended, and how it felt to witness history in the making.

For me, the idea of going to the March started when I was at a student conference, a national student conference, national student association, meeting in Indiana, the University of Indiana.

This happened to be right before the March was scheduled to happen. I think when I went to Indiana, I didn't know that that was going to lead me to go to the March 2.

But while I was at the student conference, there was this person there, Stokely Carmichael, who was a student at Howard University representing them.

He was at the March trying to get the National Student Association to come out and support the March. I think he wanted financial support, as well as moral support for the March.

There was a lot of reluctance at the conference to do that because many of the chapters were in the South at segregated universities.

And it actually turned out to be correct that for the National Student Association to take a position in favor of the March might lead those chapters to be closed down, because that would be implying that they were supporting integration that hadn't happened at their campuses.

So I talked with him and tried to get on board with the idea of getting the NSA to support the March.

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