In June 1963, President Kennedy introduced a Civil Rights bill, which not only covered voting rights but mandated an end to segregation in public places, gave the federal government new tools to desegregate public education, and created new job training and vocational education programs. Civil rights leaders decided to organize a March on Washington to support this bill. (JFK was afraid it would hurt the bill's chances and tried to dissuade them.)

In his televised address announcing the bill, President Kennedy said “We are confronted with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.”

That’s what it was to me and many others: a moral issue. For the past several years, but especially in 1962 and ’63, our TV screens had shown opposition and violence in Mississippi and Alabama to African Americans trying to exercise fundamental rights, including young men and women, just a few years older than me, who wanted what I wanted: a college education.

Because it was a moral issue, many churches got involved in the March, including Catholic clergy (the Archbishop of Washington gave the invocation, and the program included Protestant and Jewish clergy.)

I lived just outside a small town in western Pennsylvania, with an Italian mother, a father of mixed and only partially known Eastern European background, and I attended a Catholic high school. I was inspired by JFK, Martin Luther King, the essays of James Baldwin, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” etc., but it was reading about a local organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that gave me the idea I could actually be part of the March.

I contacted the priest who was named as the Council’s director. He helped secure my parents’ permission, and I was accepted as part of the group that would take one of the special trains to the March. As it turned out, I was the group. In the entire diocese, I was the only one to sign up. Our delegation was two priests and me.