This week In National Press Club history

August 26, 1963: Two days before the March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom, A. Philip Randolph, chief march organizer and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, briefs reporters on the march’s goals at a National Press Club luncheon.

The current display in the Club lobby honors the many civil rights leaders who have appeared at the Club since 1962, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the Club just a week after his release from jail in Albany, Georgia. They include Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, nine weeks after King’s assassination; James Meredith, recuperating in 1966 from buckshot wounds sustained in Mississippi during his March Against Fear to encourage blacks to register for the vote; King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who speaks in 1976 about her husband’s legacy and current initiatives at the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change; and Representative John Lewis, who in 1999 discusses his book Walking in the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, and is today the sole surviving speaker from the historic March on Washington.

August 26, 2009: The National Press Club mourns the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who had made more appearances at the Club than any other individual in the Club’s history. “He was always a gracious and informative guest who was unfailingly accessible to the media,” recalled Club President Donna Leinwand.