For those who were alive to witness King's speech, the timing couldn't be more appropriate.
"It's beautiful," said Eliza C. Smith, 88, of Millersville, a former NAACP leader in Anne Arundel County. "It makes me feel very proud to have lived long enough to witness this. I'm alive and I'm watching what's going on with great pride and which I hope will be history-making."
Smith was a stay-at-home mom in New York at the time of King's speech. She was going to watch it on television but then she and a friend decided to drive to D.C. instead. She remembers the spirit of camaraderie there. People sitting on the grass and sharing food, talking to complete strangers.
But what she remembers most, what everyone present seems to remember most, is the silence. There was an almost eerie silence that enveloped The Mall when King took to the podium after more than a dozen speakers before him.
"Everything was quiet," she said. "You couldn't hear all those people sitting there, you couldn't hear anyone talking. No noise. All those people and no noise at all," she says, still incredulous at the thought.
Dobson, now 84, can't talk about the speech without getting emotional. The minister emeritus of Union Baptist Church in Druid Hill, Dobson helped organize 25 busloads of people who went to Washington for the march. He remembers the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the ride and the license plates from states across the country.
"The first shock was to see the people coming from everywhere," said Dobson. "And this is the truth, there were buses lined up from it looked like state to state. In my lifetime, it was the most magnificent thing I've ever seen."
By the time King took to the podium, the atmosphere was like a church worship experience, said Dobson. "We knew it was a historic moment," he said. "When he opened his mouth and he said, 'I have a dream,' it mesmerized the crowd. I've never been in an experience since where a man or a woman had the ability to bring to unity that many people so that there was a holy hush over the whole crowd that allowed everything he said to be heard."
It was also an integrated crowd, Dobson remembered, with white and black folks mingling and working together.
Linda S. Schulte was in the minority. A high school student at the time, Schulte took the train to the march with a group of friends, all white. "We were all kind of involved in the civil rights thing at the time," said Schulte, 62, of Howard County. "We just had strong feelings about being part of history and all of us felt it was the right thing to do."
