Sixty years ago, Andrew Young and his staff had just emerged from an exhausting campaign against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

But they didn’t feel no ways tired, as the Black spiritual says. The foot soldiers were on a “freedom high,” Young recalls.

“They wanted to keep on marching, they wanted to march from Birmingham to Washington,” he said.

And march they did, in the nation’s capital. Just four months later, they massed for what is still considered one of the greatest and most consequential racial justice demonstrations in U.S. history.