March on Washington

The march drew a vast crowd to the Lincoln Memorial, and the musical program included Joan Baez, Odetta, Mahalia Jackson and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan's song was about the murder of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi earlier that summer, and it argued that the man who pulled the trigger was a tool of politicians who stirred up racial hatred. He also sang "When the Ship Comes In" with Baez. Later that afternoon Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech. The day sealed his image as a voice of the movement, an image he soon found confining. Within a year he was writing more personal songs, and Another Side of Bob Dylan, released in 1964, moved away from topical protest.