Starred Review Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." The historic August 28, 1963, march on Washington drew 250,000 people to the nation's capital and wrote a new chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. Now poets Lewis and Lyon have written their own chapter in this collection of original poems that examine and celebrate the occasion and its aftermath in a variety of voices, both real and imagined. The coauthors pose three questions o were the marchers? Why did they risk their lives to be there? How were they changed by that day? d answer them in eloquent verse, both free and rhymed. The imagined voices memorialize the splendid variety of the people who marched, among them Ruby May Hollingsworth, 6, a first-grader from Mountain Home, Arkansas; Emma Wallace, 23, a farmhand from Seymour, Iowa; and, from Amarillo, Texas, Raymond Jarvis, 25, an out-of-work store clerk with a BA degree in business administration. From any perspective, however, the march was history in the making, and this collection is a fitting memorial to it.

Poets Lewis and Lyon here give voice to a cross-section of the 250,000 participants of the 1963 March on Washington: from first grader Ruby May Hollingsworth and Aki Kimura, a Japanese American sent to internment camp during WWII, to Coretta Scott King. Many fine works on the civil rights movement are available; this adds the power of poetic imagination. Reading list, websites. Bib., ind.