It’s been 50 years this week since the Civil Rights March on Washington.

Sammamish resident and retired educator Gene Cash was there — an 18-year-old young man standing up for the agenda of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

CORE, along with several other groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League wanted access to good housing, schools and jobs.

Cash was just out of high school. He said the march came about because of injustices; the Freedom Riders were one group that was targeted.

The Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who boarded interstate buses traveling to the segregated south in 1961. Even though it was legal to do so, as the result of a 1946 lawsuit which ruled segregated buses unconstitutional, the Freedom riders were greeted with violence and bus-burning.

“Dr. King was inspired by the young people who got on the buses, so he wanted to have a non-violent event,” Cash said.

Cash was amazed at the amount of people who showed up for the march – 250,000 strong. He said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech that day, was advised not to give the speech because he had delivered it many times in several churches. But Cash said Mahalia Jackson yelled at him to “give the speech!”

Cash was about 75 yards from King in a crowd that included African Americans, whites and other ethnicities. It was a very hot day, he said, but the march was very well organized with marshals standing between the marchers and Nazis in uniform. There was no violence.

“I think we were blessed that Dr. King was a baptist preacher,” Cash said.

One year later he was drafted, serving in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967. But the war didn’t scar him. No, what bothers him is what is happening in the US today.

“In Philly, there are more African-American males killed every day than Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said of his hometown. “There are African-Americans being killed in large cities every day.”

He said around 300 African-American males are killed yearly in Philadelphia.

Cash believes Dr. King would be disappointed with the violence among black males.

“Dr. King’s dream is not fully realized,” Cash said. “One of the things he would be disappointed in is a lack of a living wage for everyone, particularly homeless youth of any color in the nation. There are 15,000 in our state alone. I think what a lot of people don’t know is the poverty in Washington is hidden. You’ve got kids living on the waterfront and kids living in motels or cars, but when they get to school no one knows.”

But, he said King would be pleased with the good things people are doing.

For example, he said a group of youths from Mary Queen of Peace Church organized a food bank for migrant camps outside of Bellingham and fed 500 people.

After Cash left the service he became a student at Western Washington University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in education and also met his wife, Vannetta.

While at WWU, he and five other students closed down the administration building for three days demanding proper positive representation of all ethnicities in the curriculum. A college of ethnic studies was founded six months later and remains today. Cash went to graduate school at Whitworth, and started his career as a teacher, with his last position before retiring as the principal in the Federal Way School district. He was the first African American coach to take a basketball team to the state championship, when he was working in the Newport, Wash. school district.

“African Americans thought with Kennedy being shot the movement would be set back,” he said. “Johnson picked up the reigns and passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But the goal is a lifelong process. People have to be involved continuously to break down the stereotypes. Because of Dr. King we have an African American president. We are America and we shall overcome, but the process has just taken longer than I ever expected.”