D.C.'s Panic and Fear the Day Before the March on Washington

The word “orderly” must have carried so many coded meanings in 1963. It appears repeatedly, oddly, in so many of the headlines covering the March on Washington, 50 years ago this Wednesday, as if the real news that day were not the rising demand for equal rights, nor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of what such equality might look like, but the astounding fact that all-out rioting never took place.

Here, the hometown Washington Post summarizes the event the next morning: