Though exuberant, the crowd assembled fell far short in number from the masses that gathered in 1963. On Saturday, the crowd packed the area directly in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but the grassy expanse along each side of the pool held only sparsely distributed clusters of onlookers.
"I feel like numbers count," said Sheila Noyes, 68, a systems administrator for a nonprofit organization in Washington, with a notable sense of disappointment. "But there aren't many people here today."
Ray Hammond, 76, who attended the march in 1963 and who sat at the rally on Saturday in a folding chair shielding his eyes from the sun, attributed the fewer numbers to a lack of respect and understanding among young people for the relevance of the civil rights struggle.
At the original march, Hammond said: "Troops were surrounding us. All of us knew we could be killed. It was true for thousands of people, and we still decided to come. It was a feeling of wonder and apprehension."
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