{"id":1689,"date":"2013-08-28T09:47:12","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T13:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=1689"},"modified":"2023-10-10T09:45:42","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T13:45:42","slug":"mccr-was-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/2013\/08\/28\/mccr-was-there\/","title":{"rendered":"MCCR was There"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Elizabeth A. Mullen ~ As crowds gather today on the Mall in Washington, DC\u2014on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom\u2014<\/ins>we remember that participants in the March<\/a> came from all parts of society.\u00a0 In this photograph a contingent of medical workers, doctors, nurses, and others march under the banner of the Medical Committee for Civil Rights (MCCR).\u00a0 The MCCR was a short-lived organization, initially formed by physician Walter Lear to protest the AMA\u2019s policy of non-integration at its annual convention in Atlantic City in 1963.\u00a0 Following that protest, Dr. Lear brought together over 200 health care workers to join the March on Washington.\u00a0 While the MCCR disbanded shortly afterwards, it gave rise to the Medical Committee for Human Rights<\/a>, which formed in 1964 to support volunteer medical workers providing care to civil rights workers, activists, and volunteers working on the Mississippi Summer Project, known as Freedom Summer<\/a>, a volunteer project organized by\u00a0 the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC) to register African American voters in Mississippi.<\/p>\n The March of 1963 touched hundreds of thousands of lives that day in Washington, DC, transforming a generation. Today we recall the March, the generation that experienced it directly, and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s \u201cI have a Dream\u201d speech, in which he described the event as \u201cthe greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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National Library of Medicine #101455945<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n