This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rosa Parks attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, but the program that recognized her there almost did not exist.
The march's official speaking program, as first planned, scheduled no woman to address the crowd at all, despite women having organized substantial parts of the civil rights movement's ground work for years. Organizer Anna Arnold Hedgeman protested the omission directly, and female civil rights leaders, on discovering they had been routed into a separate procession from the main march, objected before the event took place. The result was a late addition to the program, a segment honoring women's contributions: Myrlie Evers was originally slated to speak but missed her flight, and Daisy Bates spoke a brief statement in her place, introducing five women by name to be recognized by the crowd, Bates herself, Diane Nash of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, absent that day, Prince Estella Melson Lee, widow of the murdered NAACP activist Herbert Lee, Rosa Parks, and Gloria Richardson of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, whose own chair and microphone were removed as she tried to speak.
Parks was not a march organizer and did not speak at length that day; the Tribute to Women segment was, by design, a recognition rather than a platform. Its own late, contested addition to the program is itself part of the record: the march remembered today for a single address from a single man was also the site of an internal argument, forced by the women organizing alongside him, over whether women would be acknowledged in the program at all.