To commemorate the anniversary, The Guardian asked readers to share their memories of the 1963 March - whether they were on site that day, involved in the civil rights movement, remembered watching, reading, or hearing about it at the time, or are affected by it today. You can read all of the stories here.  From David Dennis, a field organizer from the Congress for Racial Equality (Core):  I'm from northern Louisiana, born there on a plantation and part of a sharecropper's family. My first real involvement with the movement was when I went to college. I went to college at Dillard University. That was 1960. When I arrived on campus, some students were in jail for sitting in. I was one of the first in my family to graduate from high school so I thought of it as an opportunity be somebody. I participated in my first sit-in in the fall of 1960. I got arrested and from there, the group I was part of joined a chapter of Core. That group was the hoist group for the freedom riders.  There were two groups for the rides out of Nashville and there was a group in New Orleans. We decided to meet the group in Montgomery, so we were part of two buses that left going to Jackson. I was on the first bus. After that, what I did was a dropped out of college and became a field organiser for Core and went back home to Shreveport and organise there with sit-ins and voter registration drives.  We organised a group of students out of Southern University in Baton Rouge. There were arrests in December 1961 and the group of us spent Christmas and New Year in jail in Baton Rouge. We came out of that and organised around voter registration in the area. The fact that's ironic is that a group of us in Shreveport were arrested and put into jail on the same day that Barack Obama was born. Some of us have gotten together and have had discussions about how ironic that was.  On the day of the march, my connection there is I did not go to it. We organised demonstrations in Jackson with a lot of students from local schools -- there were a little over 300 of them. A warrant was put out for me for 300 counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors. During the march I was hiding out in Canton, Mississippi, at the Core freedom house there.  From Kate Gibbons, whose parents took her to the March:  I marched as a 14-year-old with my mother. My father, as a naval officer, could not attend. The day was very hot. It began in a church with services. We joined many other Unitarians and marched down the mall; sat and listened. Although we were very far from the Lincoln Memorial, I am still proud to have been there.  My parents were white; both were from Scranton, Pennsylvania. My mother was always politically active. In 1958 in Virginia the laws included whites-only water fountains and school segregation. My parents taught us these laws were wrong and needed to be changed.  I remember that there was a lot of fear in the suburbs of Washington DC about the civil rights march. My mother wanted to attend the march. I knew I wanted to go.  What I remember the most was coming to the top of the mall and looking down from the Capitol at more people than I had ever seen. We sat under trees on the left side of the mall for the afternoon. You could not see the speakers but could hear them.  I was proud for a long time that I went to the march. In the early 90s I was in Atlanta, and went to the Martin Luther King memorial. I was very moved when I looked at a photo of the march and could see where I had been sitting.  When I teach American literature, I begin the course with King's "I have a dream" speech.  My first day of teaching I played the speech, without considering how potent its impact might be on my students. As the scratchy recording shuddered to silence, I heard a muffled sound which I realized was the sound of a student sobbing. I quickly shooed the other students from the class and sat with L for a long time as she struggled to share her pride in King's legacy, and her anguish and rage that her classmates might think we'd attained that dream.  She was from Anacostia, the poorest neighborhood in DC, and one of the poorest in the nation. Her classmates were the daughters of the moneyed "elite" of ambassadors, senators, lawyers, doctors, and politicians. I wept with her and wrote her a long letter thanking her for the gift she gave me as a new teacher, about how to avoid making assumptions, about the vast gulf in my students' backgrounds and experiences, and the power of that speech to speak to a new generation.  When she graduated, she showed me a tattered piece of paper: it was my letter, read so many times it had fallen to pieces. She told me I was the first white person who had ever listened to her concerns, who had allowed her to talk about race openly. Most of my black students will tell you that they still think it's a taboo subject. The moment it comes up, white students aggressively talk about how it "all happened hundreds of years ago," and "why can't 'you' people just let it go" and "we're so sick of hearing about it" – sentiments we often hear on these pages; ones crushing to a girl that age living the very real fallout of racism and poverty.  It isn't a coincidence that King was assassinated at the very moment he expanded his vision to address war, violence, and poverty. Then, as now, it's dangerous – sometimes deadly – to confront a corrupt government, one truly led by the military industrial complex. Our current crisis lends urgency to learning from the civil rights movement.  A small group of dedicated, passionate, courageous, and determined men and women confronted a monolithic system of entrenched injustice. The Freedom Riders and civil rights activists were willing to be attacked by dogs, sprayed with fire hoses, to be beaten, to go to jail, to have their dignity and very lives threatened, and they did not back down. Their courage was equal parts humbling and inspiring.  That is the legacy we need to tap into right now when confronting war crimes and the NSA debacle.
President Obama to speak at event marking 50 years to the day that Martin Luther King gave his 'I have a dream' speech. Follow it live