Across America, black fury had broken loose.
A swirl of protests, touched off by weeks of racial strife in Birmingham, Alabama, where police dogs had torn at the flesh of protesters and powerful fire hoses had been trained on children, now engulfed much of the country.
Between May and late August in 1963, there had been 1,340 demonstrations in more than 200 cities. Some were communities long splintered along racial lines. Others had never before been touched by violence. The randomness of the disturbances made it all the more terrifying. Now, with 200,000 protesters about to converge on the nation's capital, there were fears that Washington itself could witness the same chaos and disorder.
For the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the untitled leader of the civil rights movement, the events of the early summer had transformed the struggle for black equality from what he called a "Negro protest" into a "Negro revolution". America, he feared, had reached "explosion point".
