Tonight I will participate in a Twitter chat with some of the best scholars at Duke on the topic of the March on Washington and the commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary. But rather than try to answer the somewhat tired question of whether Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream” has been fulfilled, we will try to zero in on the march’s significance in the long quest for economic justice.

It will be the latest of several media appearances I have made on the commemoration of this march – including the Triangle Tribune’s commemoration article and a segment on Carolina News 14’s “Capital Tonight.” I also wrote a recent op-ed, published in Raleigh’s News & Observer, on the loss of teacher tenure as both a labor and civil rights issue. Too often, conversations of civil rights have focused solely on issues of vote suppression here in North Carolina. In reality, they cannot be separated from issues of economic justice.

In that sense, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is the perfect model. It married two overlapping challenges: black labor’s concern over continued race-based job discrimination amid rapid industrial and agricultural automation, and the larger freedom struggle’s battle against the southern racial caste system, from voting rights and public accommodations to basic dignity. Much of that fight continues.

Anyhow, check the conversation out at 8 p.m. Wednesday at #dukechat and #mow.

John Lewis seems to be everywhere these days.

The 73-year-old freedom struggle leader-turned-congressman from Georgia, in many ways, has been the civil rights conscience of Congress for a while now. But he has become particularly visible since the Supreme Court struck down a key component of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a cause for which he was beaten severely on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lewis is now leading the fight to reform the law to restore more Justice Department oversight. And according to the New York Times, Lewis has been able to use his stature to even find conservative Republican co-sponsors for such an endeavor.

Of course, the timing of all of this is not a coincidence. Lewis is also the sole surviving prominent speaker from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, to be commemorated later this month. As the 23-year-old coordinator of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was the youngest and most radical speaker that afternoon. While the Times glosses over his critical role in the march – a common oversight by the mainstream media – his speech was arguably the second-most important one delivered, after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.”

And in contrast to King’s optimism, Lewis delivered a tough indictment of President Kennedy’s recently introduced civil rights legislation, as well as both major parties on the issue. One of my favorite lines is: “The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?” The conservative wing of each party, led by white supremacists from the Sunbelt, often foiled the often weak but well-intentioned efforts of each party’s liberals.

Fifty years later, the parties have realigned quite a bit, but Lewis continues to offer tough words for anyone standing in the way of civil rights, such as after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Ultimately, I am pleased that Lewis is receiving so much attention these days. His story and message are important ones to remember when the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, at times, seems like a distant memory. Of course, it’s not. The issues activists such as Lewis – and the recently deceased Julius Chambers – engaged with remain just as important to our democracy now as they did then. So, as we prepare to commemorate the 1963 march, it’s important to recall the direct links between the claims then and now. Good jobs, real opportunity, and citizenship rights remain at the top of the freedom agenda. As Lewis said in 1963: “We cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”