There have been twenty-seven marches in Washington, D.C. since President Obama took office in 2009. The most recent was on February 13 called “Forward on Climate” in which an estimated 40,000 people demanded action on “climate change” and was largely devoted to protesting the expansion of the Keystone pipeline.
The weather that day was brutally cold and it probably did not occur to participants that humans can do nothing about the climate or that they used lot of gasoline, an oil derivative, to get to and from the march.
The only march in which I participated was the Vietnam Moratorium march on November 15, 1969. It drew 600,000 people and there were comparable marches around the nation that day in which some two million participated. It was a very unpopular war, having been vastly expanded under President Johnson and continued into the Nixon years. There were a dozen major marches opposing it, starting in 1965 and lasting until 1974 when an estimated ten thousand people rallied for the impeachment of Nixon. The war ended in 1975.
Between 1950 and 1999, there were forty-five marches that merited being cited as being of some significance. The most famous was the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a civil rights march during which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I have a dream” speech. An estimated 250,000 participated. It had been preceded in 1957 by the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom during which Dr. King demanded “Give us the ballot.”