During the summer between her junior and senior year of college, Loretta Slepikas took a chance and got on a bus that carried her into the midst of one of the United States’ most important events of the 20th century.

Across the country, 24-year-old Betsy Lamb was living in Williamsburg and working with the Lutheran church there. She heeded the call from a pastor to organize a trip to Washington, D.C., filling seven buses for the more than 200-mile journey. Today, Lamb and Slepikas call Bend home. But both agree those bus trips changed their lives.

Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, when more than 200,000 took to the streets of the nation’s capital to demonstrate the challenges the black community was facing in the U.S. At the rally, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech before a crowd that packed the Lincoln Memorial and surrounding area near the reflecting pool.

Slepikas, who has lived in Bend for 23 years, is 71 now. But in August 1963 she was 21, spending the summer in Madison, Wis., on the campus of Edgewood College, an all-women’s Catholic school. Her best friend in college was a black woman from Harlem, and that summer they were both living in Madison.

“She said something like, ‘Are you going to come with me to the March on Washington?’” Slepikas remembers. “And I might’ve said something like, ‘What’s that?’”

But once her friend explained the events of the day and the many people who would be present, she was in.

“I knew a little bit about prejudice; it’s not like I was going in blind,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have thought of doing it myself, I wouldn’t have gone without encouragement.”

Plagued by “Jim Crow” laws requiring segregation between whites and blacks of everything from water fountains to lunch counters, African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s launched a variety of protests for voting and equal rights. In the years leading up to the march, civil rights leaders organized sit-ins to integrate lunch counters, boycotted buses, and were violently assaulted during protests in Birmingham and other southern cities.

So Slepikas and her friend headed to the march, armed with $200 the Dominican nuns who ran the college gave for travel expenses.

The pair procured seats on a bus with a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students.

“They asked us to carry a sign of the college while we marched,” Slepikas said. “The nuns supported us. They couldn’t do it themselves, but we could. That’s the kind of women they were.”

When Slepikas boarded the bus on Aug. 27, 1963, news cameras filmed the students, so she held a newspaper up to her face so her parents wouldn’t see her on the news.

“My parents were still in a small town; they’d just gotten a TV and were watching the news,” Slepikas said. “I knew they would’ve been really worried.”

The farthest she’d traveled at that time was to Illinois.

Slepikas remembers stepping off the bus in Washington, D.C., the streets covered in buses.

Right away, Slepikas bought a button.

“I had no idea how significant that would be,” she said.

The march, she said, was very hot. According to the Farmers’ Almanac, temperatures topped out at about 82 degrees that day. And, she said, everyone was dressed nicely.

“We were walking with thousands of people,” she said. “There were so many faces of color. The mood was so positive and joyful. We sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ and black spirituals. It was a thrilling, beautiful time.”

Slepikas settled near the reflecting pool on the left side of the Lincoln Memorial, and watched performances from Joan Baez and Odetta, Peter Paul and Mary and Mahalia Jackson.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech, many others spoke.

The event’s official title was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and, according to the original program, it started with the national anthem and continued with an invocation from the archbishop of Washington, the Rev. Patrick O’Boyle. Myrlie Evers-Williams, in later life a Bend resident for more than two decades, was invited to speak at the event but was unable to attend.

Slepikas listened as John Lewis, then the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now a longtime Georgia congressman, spoke, as well as other notable names. But the words of Kingwere what most people had come to hear.

“I just remember that it was silence. Two hundred and fifty thousand people, and it was silent,” Slepikas said. “It was so beautiful, just the cadence of his voice, and it was very moving and hopeful and joyful.”

It didn’t immediately hit Slepikas what an important event she’d just participated in.

“I knew there were a lot of people and so that was significant,” she said. “There were black and white people together, which was significant. And there were so many well-known people there.”

With loudspeakers hooked up to telephone poles throughout the city, Slepikas said the speeches could be heard all over.

“When I heard MLK’s speech, I thought it was nice. I didn’t get it until years later,” she said. “Fifty years later I realize in a new way how incredibly significant of a time that was. That day is more a symbol of what we’re still coming to grips with.”

Shortly after the march concluded, Slepikas and her friend walked through D.C., then hopped on their bus and returned to Wisconsin.

“I left thinking, ‘All racism is over,’” she said.

But it wasn’t, of course, and Slepikas now knows she was being naive.

“The next time I went back was after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,” she said.

Slow drive from Brooklyn

Slepikas isn’t the only Bend resident who was present at the March on Washington.

Betsy Lamb was 24 and living in Brooklyn. Now 74, she remembers the March on Washington very well.

Today a Bend resident, Lamb had chosen to live in the Williamsburg neighborhood in the 1960s to work in the inner-city at a Lutheran church. She helped organize seven busloads of people to travel to Washington, D.C., to attend the march.

“By the time we knew well enough how many people would be attending, the good buses had all been taken,” she said. The bus engines had governors on them to limit their speeds. So Lamb’s seven-bus caravan crept the more than 200 miles at low speeds, passed by other buses headed the same direction.

“We were very aware of our slow speed going down, but going back after such a beautiful day it didn’t stand out so much anymore,” Lamb said.

Her group met in front of a Lutheran church northeast of the Lincoln Memorial, and eventually settled on the grass to Lincoln’s left near the reflecting pool.

“We were just on the grass there with mobs and mobs of people,” she said. “It was quite impressive.”

She said she knew from the beginning that the event was historic.

“We went through all of these various speakers, who talked about the needs that needed to be addressed in all these different areas, poverty and jobs,” Lamb said. “There was no question in my mind that this was a historic moment. At the same time it wasn’t until I got home and began reading the papers and seeing all the reflections that the immensity of that moment struck me.”

Lamb said that section of Brooklyn at the time was populated heavily by African Americans, and so she recognized the struggles the black community was experiencing. But the March on Washington, she said, stuck with her in an important way.

“It colored my life,” she said. “It wasn’t really until later that I began to realize the systems of injustice that affect people, and that realization, once it took hold, as well as my experiences in Williamsburg and inner-city Chicago, all these experiences and the people that I had known and the struggle that was sort of epitomized in the march, that really came together to make me quite an activist during the following years of my life.”