To Practice Democracy Anew: K–12 Civic Learning in Uncertain Times

In August 1963, a teenage Harry C. Boyte, accompanying his father, Harry Boyte Sr., a field organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, arrived in Washington, D.C., where they prepared for the March on Washington. The younger Boyte later recalled listening as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rehearsed what became the “I Have a Dream” speech. That moment, etched in memory, foreshadowed a life devoted to democratic practice and civic renewal (Boyte, 2012, 2016). That special moment in a D.C. hotel in 1963 offers a fitting metaphor for democracy: to sustain it, it must be practiced peacefully, persistently, and together.