Alough it may seem like only yesterday, two decades have now elapsed since "the long, hot summer" of 1963, a summer in which the American civil rights movement reached its high-water mark with a peaceful protest march in Washington on August 28 in which 200,000 participated—a march climaxed by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s resounding reiteration, "I have a dream...." It was a summer in which black Americans demonstrated for "full freedom now" throughout the land, from Danville to Detroit, from Charleston to Chicago. The extent of the demonstrations was underscored in a Justice Department report issued at the beginning of August. It disclosed that there had been 758 demonstrations in 186 cities over a ten-week period, 199 having taken place in the last week of July alone.

As one observer noted at the time of this peaceful uprising, "This revolt has no precedent in American history. It is a revolution involving 10 percent of the nation's population. Yet it is a revolution in which the revolutionaries carry no arms, throw up no street barricades, liquidate no rulers and, with remarkably few exceptions so far, initiate no violence. It has a rallying song but rather than a stirring La Marseillaise, it is an old Baptist hymn, sometimes mournful, sometimes serene, called "We Shall Overcome.""

The civil rights movement did indeed overcome Jim Crow and legal segregation through such measures as the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And, in retrospect, it stands alongside Gandhi's campaign to oust the British from India as a tribute to the concept of using nonviolent means to achieve justifiable ends. Still, if much was achieved in the 1960's, much remained to be done—and still remains to be done in the 1980's and beyond—if blacks and other minorities are ever to receive a full, fair share of those blessings of liberty most white Americans have long taken for granted. And the prospects—in the view of two veterans of the civil rights conflict, Leslie W. Dunbar and Harry S. Ashmore —are anything but pleasing.