It may difficult to realize, 35 years after the fact, the sheer surprise of the success of the first March on Washington. PNS commentator Peter Sussman, who was there, remembers that feeling, the words of one speech -- and some lessons apparently unlearned. Sussman, a San Francisco writer and editor, is co-author with Dannie M. Martin of "Committing Journalism" (W.W. Norton). Sussman is a former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, where this article will appear.

In the pre-dawn darkness of August 28, 1963, I boarded a chartered bus on Long Island. I was making a personal gesture of support for the "civil rights movement" -- something I knew mostly from newspapers.

The movement was primarily a Southern phenomenon at the time, involving sit-ins, bus boycotts and other actions against maddeningly unjust laws and practices.

A one-day round-trip to Washington seemed a harmless, if probably futile, exercise in moral witness. The sleepy stragglers trudging toward the bus along the streets of white, upper-middle-class Great Neck, N.Y. on that morning, were not sure just what the point was -- but we wanted to be counted.

It's hard to leap back 35 years -- past the anti-war, pro-choice, gay-rights, Million Man and other marches on and in Washington -- to see afresh what occurred that day. But this, the March on Washington -- formally, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom -- was the first mass march of its kind. There were no models. We did not know what to expect.

So we were astonished -- there was a rush of collective excitement that I can feel to this day -- to see in the predawn half-light, at a toll booth, a bus adorned with a banner reading, "Harlem CORE Marches on Washington."

Another bus going to the same place! It was a kind of confirmation and we cheered loudly enough to startle the few other drivers already on the highway.

We started to spot other buses on the turnpike -- one here, one there, then clusters, some riding like families of behemoths. At a rest stop on the pike, we began to sense for the first time the dimensions of our pilgrimage. There were parked buses as far as one could see, endless rows spilling off the asphalt onto the grass beyond. Temporary loudspeakers crackled out the names of groups as their buses were ready to depart.

By the time we approached the outskirts of Washington, the highway was nothing but buses. Entering the capital, we passed through some of the city's poorest black neighborhoods. The unbroken line of banner-bedecked silver buses seemed at times to overwhelm the shabby houses, but in front of those houses was a welcoming committee more moving than any tickertape parade. Blacks -- children in front, adults behind them, most dressed in white shirts and Sunday suits -- stretched for miles without break, applauding each and every one of the thousands of buses that wheezed and snorted past.

We did not have the words to describe the crowds at the Lincoln Memorial. They stretched beyond our field of vision in every direction. We had come to be counted, but there were far too many of us to count on that sweltering August day. Some said there were 200,000 people; some said a million. But it made no difference -- it was clearly far more than had ever done this before.

There was no sense of racial differences in that sea of people. We were overwhelmed by a utopian vision. It happened on the streets of Washington. It could happen anywhere, anytime.

I remember little of the official program except for one speaker. My friend and I were about to go off in search of something to eat -- discussing whether that was even possible in such a crowd -- when a middle-aged woman next to us remonstrated in a deep Southern accent, "You can't go now. Martin Luther King is about to speak." We knew the name, of course, but he was just one in an endless succession of speakers at a distant microphone. But we dutifully stuck around.

"... Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountainside ... LET FREEDOM RING!!"

The words were still ringing in our ears many tired hours later as we descended from the bus into the darkness alongside Northern Boulevard in Great Neck. And in other ears as well. My parents, previously skeptical, were waiting up, buoyed by the epic panorama that had dominated all the evening newscasts. History had passed that way, and they wanted to talk about it, to share in it.

Martin Luther King's inspired speech on Aug. 28, 1963, redefined and reinvigorated the American Dream, and hundreds of thousands of people lived out that dream symbolically on the streets of Washington. We learned the power of individuals to add their numbers together to influence government policy, and we learned the power of an ideal whose time was long overdue.

Today, 35 years later, it's still overdue, which is why it may help to relive that day for those who weren't around. We must rediscover the meaning of a community that extends beyond our own neighborhoods and races. It's time for each of us, in our own places and circumstances, to get back on the bus.