Million Man March

Held in 1995, the Million Man March was one of the most significant events in African American civil rights activism. Invoking the image of the protest march and the March on Washington, the Million Man March was a one-day event held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995, and consisted of an all-day program of speeches from prominent civil rights leaders.

The exact in-person attendance is a matter of controversy, though it is generally agreed to have fallen short of or barely reached the “million man” goal. The National Park Service issued an official estimate of 400,000 after initial claims [Page 1466]of attendance as high as 2 million, prompting threat of a lawsuit by activist and speaker Louis Farrakhan. Three days after the event, the director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University issued a figure that has been more widely accepted: 837,000 attendees with a margin of error of 25 percent, yielding a range from 669,600 to 1,004,400 attendees. Following the Million Man March, the next appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of the Interior provided no funding for crowd-counting activities for federal properties in Washington, D.C., the Park Service having elected to cease crowd counting.

The earliest protest march on Washington was that of Coxey's Army in 1894, protesting job losses during the Long Depression. Significant marches in the first half of the 20th century were held in support of women's suffrage, against the Holocaust, and against the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1950s and 1960s, protest marches became associated, first, with the civil rights movement and, later, with the antiwar movement. The 1958 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first large-scale Washington, D.C., civil rights demonstration, held in front of the Lincoln Memorial and supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The last speaker at the Prayer Pilgrimage was Martin Luther King, Jr., addressing a national audience for the first time (the “Give Us the Ballot” speech).