Here, reprinted in full, are The Sun editorials following Dr. Martin Luther King's speech at the 1963 rally in Washington.

Rally in the Capital

Thursday Aug. 29, 1963

The atmosphere of yesterday's mass civil rights rally in Washington was one of orderliness, but it was an orderliness under laid with fervor and determination. If anyone had previously doubted that the nation has come to the time when it has to live up to its moral, philosophical and political professions, the doubt can linger no more. Our Negro citizens will have their rights and the their privileges as citizens, and will no longer wait through generation after generation. They will not wait through one more generation: and the country cannot ask them to wait.

The keynote of the demonstration was the word "Now," printed over and over on placards and sounded over and over the platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In truth not all the demands repeated yesterday can be satisfied tomorrow, or this year. Some of them must wait, not because "gradualism" is any long a respectable or a possible concept — it is not: events have carried us past that — but because of the nature of people and of political institutions. The great fact is that action has been and is being taken toward meeting the fundamental demands, and that it will be steadily, swiftly accelerated.

As one speaker said in effect yesterday, it has fallen to the Negro to bring this country face to face with full responsibilities of nationhood. In the time to come when all citizen are just citizens, to be judged and treated only according to individual character and ability, that may be the historic meaning of the days of decision we are passing through now.

Seeking to Fulfill

Friday Aug. 30, 1963

From its columned memorial in the capital the image of Lincoln looks over a prospect [that] becomes again serene. The reflecting pool mirrors only the elegant shaft of the Washington Monument. The crowds are gone. One might almost think nothing had happened there. What really did happen?

Not enough, to start with, to persuade Congress that all the demands of the marchers must be enacted posthaste into law, or to impel Congress toward faster action on the civil rights legislation now before it. So things should be. Even had the purpose of the march been intimidation, which it was not — the purpose was persuasion — the House and Senate are bound in their deliberative responsibilities not to be moved by any one particular application of pressure. The pressures already working on them are heavy enough.

If minds in either chamber have been changed by Wednesday's rally, no one has heard about it, though Representative Broyhill of Virginia says the march could "just antagonize the fence sitters" — a remark devoid of public value except to show which side of the fence Mr. Broyhill is on, and how far over on that side he is.

The remark all the same does bring us to the longer-range and more profound meanings of the rally. It is hard to believe that any genuine fence sitter, if such there be, could have been antagonized by Wednesday's rally. It is hard to believe that a true fence sitter could have failed to be swayed the other way — not by Marian Anderson's voice (a voice past its prime, but a spirit not) or Mahalia Jackson's, or by Martin Luther King's eloquence, moving as all these were, but by the crowd itself, in its earnestness and its goodwill. Supposing our fence sitter to be strictly political, surely he might be budged by the knowledge that these petitioners represented millions of votes, with millions more to come as the right to vote becomes established everywhere.

There is more to it, a lot more. A foreign diplomat in Washington who phoned this office yesterday on another matter (his own country, a democracy, is small and new and beset with difficulties) said incidentally: "You might be interested in how it looked to some of us who are not Americans — here were democracy and liberty expressing themselves, and seeking to fulfill themselves."

You can't weigh that, or measure it, or put it in a package, or feed it through an electronic computer, but it is the story of Wednesday in Washington. It is Wednesday's lesson, and it is a lesson that will not be forgotten as we seek on and on to realize our destiny as a nation.