Marie Michael Library

57

DVD

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech to a crowd of more than 200,000 civil rights protestors gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Two months earlier, President John Kennedy has sent a civil rights bill to Congress, but it was struck down. Kennedy realized he was powerless to stop the civil rights movement so he embraced it instead. Nearly a year after the march on Washington, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act banned racial discrimination in public places, in public education and enforced the constitutional right to vote.