While the drums roll, the marchers stride forward, and the chants roar, one man stands at the foot of the Washington Monument gripping a poster that has browned and decayed with age: “We March For Effective Civil Rights Laws Now!”

His name is William Andrew Allison, a 92-year-old retired railway mailman, and he has returned to the site of the March on Washington 50 years later with the same sign he carried the first time.

Born in North Carolina on July 5, 1921, Allison graduated from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte in 1951. There, he was a brother of the Alpha Epsilon chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi – a predominantly African-American fraternity at a predominantly African-American school.

After finishing school, he became a teacher. When he found that the pay was unsustainable, he switched careers to become a railway mailman and moved to Temple Hills, Maryland.

As August 28, 1963 approached, Allison and his neighbors made preparations to descend into downtown D.C. to join a protest for racial equality and justice led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.