The dream, 50 years later
Thousands of onlookers will join President Obama at the Lincoln Memorial on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and celebrate a powerful, poetic moment in the Civil Rights Movement. The commemoration stirs not only potent memories of that iconic day in 1963, but for some with Harvard ties, mixed emotions about the march’s lasting legacy. Charles V. Willie was a sociologist at Syracuse University in 1962 when he moved to Washington, D.C., after Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy tapped him to lead a federal research program there to combat juvenile delinquency. Now the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education Emeritus at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Willie had been a friend of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. since their days as teens at Morehouse College in the mid-1940s. So it was not long before Willie began attending planning meetings for what would turn out...