For the first time since 1963, a civil rights march has the potential to come close to the original in leaving a lasting impact — not just by paving the way for legislative victories, but by braiding disparate moral dramas and individual stories from local communities into a teeming tapestry on America’s front lawn. And since it comes in a presidential election year — unlike the original — this march will be charged by the politics of the moment, poised to channel resistance to President Trump’s record of race baiting into a massive get-out-the-vote effort.

Still, this will be no easy test of the relevance of a 57-year-old organizing tactic. The 1963 march pioneered the now-familiar ritual of elevating all manner of causes — from peace and women’s rights to calls for an end to abortion — by massing supporters on the Mall within sight of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Sharpton, 65, perhaps shows his age by resorting to it almost by default. With the recent flourishing of another style of protest — autonomous, local demonstrations exploding in real time on the streets and social media with no central planning — will young Black Lives Matter demonstrators turn out for what they might consider their grandfathers’ march on Washington? And is a massive march on the Mall even possible in the time of covid?

Within a day of Sharpton’s announcement, Washington hotels began to sell out for that weekend. A half-dozen of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations quickly joined as co-sponsors. Sharpton said he was overwhelmed with people promising to march. “I’m sure all of them thought it was a well-laid-out plan already,” he told me. “But if you know the ’60s, that’s how they did. I mean, it has always been a leap of faith."

Philip Randolph called for that earlier leap of faith in the spring of 1963. At first, the civil rights leader and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters could get only a couple of civil rights organizations to sign on to a march — notably the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, headed by future congressman John Lewis. Marching on Washington was a novel and seemingly militant tactic, and it appealed to the young activists of SNCC.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., then 34, was initially too engrossed in the desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Ala., to focus on Randolph’s idea. That changed after Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, deployed police dogs and fire hoses against peaceful protesters and children. A shocked nation riveted its attention on the civil rights struggle. King saw an opportunity for the movement to capitalize on the spotlight. “We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough, and the greatest weapon is mass demonstration,” King said in a June 1, 1963, conversation wiretapped by the FBI, according to Drew D. Hansen’s “The Dream,” a history of King’s famous speech.

President John F. Kennedy invited the organizers to the White House and asked them to call off the march. Flooding the nation’s capital with demonstrators could harden opposition to a major civil rights bill the administration had just sent to Congress, Kennedy argued — the bill that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “It may seem ill-timed,” King said to the president. “Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed.”