They came to the nation's capital to hear a great African-American orator offer his vision for the future from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the gleaming marble monument that honours the President who ended slavery.
But yesterday, exactly half a century after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, it was Barack Obama they had gathered to hear.
On a sweltering August afternoon in 1963, Dr King, the Baptist preacher and civil rights leader, had drawn the largest crowd the country had witnessed as he delivered the rousing call for racial equality that reverberates to this day.
Yesterday, under rainy skies, America's first black President stood on the same spot to remind the country of the remarkable progress that has been made in the five decades since the March on Washington.
"We rightly and justly remember Dr King's soaring oratory that day," Obama declared. "His words belong to the ages. But we also remember that that day also belonged to those ordinary people whose names never got in the history books. There were couples in love who couldn't marry, soldiers who fought for freedoms abroad that were denied to them at home."
