In connection with the 2017-2018 exhibition Let Us March On: Lee Friedlander and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Yale University Art Gallery hosted a panel discussion about the 1957 march, which marked the third anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools. Friedlander was 22 when he made the photographs documenting the speakers and the crowd at the event.
As part of the Yale talk, historian William P. Jones, author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, relates the roots and organizing methods of the Prayer Pilgrimage to the renowned March on Washington of 1963. Other speakers connect the historic mass demonstrations to the current activist strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement.