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"Without the songs of the movement, personally I believe that there wouldn't have been a movement," says Rutha Mae Harris, one of the original Freedom Singers.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Singers performed along with artists like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson at the March on Washington.

The group came together in Albany, Georgia in 1962. Their mission was to raise money and awareness for the civil rights movement. It's a journey that took them more than 50,000 miles, across over 40 states in less than a year.

Harris tells NPR's Michel Martin that the Freedom Singers were in California when they got a call to board a plane that Harry Belafonte had chartered.

"That's how we got to the March on Washington. We were on the plane with all these movie stars. And the five of us had our own room on the plane," she says. "We thought we were in high heaven."

Did "NSA leaker" Edward Snowden really surprise Russian officials when he showed up at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport on June 23?

Maybe not.

The Associated Press writes that, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, a Russian goverment official says that "Snowden appeared at the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong on his own initiative two days before the flight, showed his Aeroflot ticket and asked for help."

The Washington Post adds that Kommersant also says Snowden, "spent several days living at the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong" before his flight to Moscow.

The report raises questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin's claim that Snowden's decision to go to Moscow was a "complete surprise" to Russian authorities.

Kommersant's reporting also sheds some new light on what happened on July 11 when there was much speculation that Snowden would be on a flight from Moscow to Havana. The AP writes that Kommersant:

"Citing several 'informed' sources, said that Cuba informed Russia that the Aeroflot flight from Moscow would not be allowed to land in Havana if Snowden were on board, citing pressure from the United States. A source identified as someone 'close to the State Department' confirmed to the paper that Cuba was among a number of countries that had been warned not to provide assistance to Snowden."

Fifty years ago this week, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators came from across the country to take part in the 1963 March on Washington, the city was not yet the cosmopolitan capital that it arguably is today.

But it was a mecca for African-Americans, says historian Marya McQuirter.

"Washington was definitely a different city 50 years ago," she says, "for a number of reasons. By 1957, it had become the largest majority black city in the country."

That was, in part, because of "white flight," she says, but also because D.C. was "an attractive place for African-Americans migrating from the South."

As well as from the North.

Ella Kelly came to Washington from New York's Harlem, first to study at Howard University, then to live.

"It was Southern, and you learned that very quickly," she says. "I don't mean that in a negative way. There were things such as you'd stand at the corner, waiting to take the bus, and little ladies would say, 'Good morning.' That kind of thing."

Kelly, a retired public school teacher and government worker, remembers Washington then as a beautiful city. But she remembers ugliness, too, like the time she and her husband looked at an apartment for rent.

"The manager of the building was an African-American woman," Kelly says. "There was a sign outside that said, 'Apartment available.' We knocked on the front door. She came to the door, and she said, 'We don't rent to colored.' She was a person of color. My husband and I looked at each other ... 'OK, whatever,' and we left."

That kind of segregation was not uncommon in Washington.

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What The March On Washington Called For, And What We Got

President Obama will stand in the symbolic shadows of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln Wednesday, as he marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

Aides say Obama will use the opportunity to celebrate the progress that's been made, thanks to the civil rights movement. He'll also discuss the work that he says still has to be done to realize King's dream of racial justice in America.

That includes fighting to protect voting rights and building what the president calls "ladders of opportunity" for poor people of all races.

Obama doesn't often talk publicly about race. But it's clearly a subject he's thought and written a lot about. So when an African-American professor asked the president last week during a college visit in New York, where does he think the country is in terms of civil rights, Obama's answer was complicated.

"Obviously, we've made enormous strides," said Obama. "I'm a testament to it. You're a testament to it."

At the same time, Obama said, discrimination has not disappeared. And while it's nothing like it was 50 years ago, the legacy of Jim Crow has left lasting barriers to success.

"There are a lot of folks who are poor and whose families have become dysfunctional because of a long legacy of poverty, and live in neighborhoods that are run down and schools that are underfunded," he said.

After the Trayvon Martin verdict last month, Obama spoke in personal terms about the experience of being profiled as a black man in America. His remarks were praised in some quarters, but criticized in others.

"I don't think that the racial climate in this country is helped when the president wades in to what are always turbulent racial waters and stirs things up, which is what he did," says Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher disagrees, saying resistance to frank talk about race is one reason the country hasn't made more progress.

"It's a conversation that makes a lot of white America uncomfortable and they would rather not have," says Belcher. "And understand, they have not had to have the conversation."

Obama has also not shied away from tough conversations about problems within the African-American community, where he says too many young men continue to make bad choices. He told graduates of Morehouse College in May there's no longer any room for excuses: "Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you've gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured. And they overcame them. And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too."

On Wednesday, Obama is likely to talk about civil rights in broader terms, encompassing not just blacks and whites but Latinos, women and gays, much as he did in his second inaugural, when he spoke in one breath of Selma, Stonewall, and Seneca Falls — the touchstone battlegrounds for all these civil rights movements.

Obama likes to quote King's comment that all of us are "tied in a single garment of destiny." But he's also warned in recent weeks that because of persistent economic anxiety, that unifying fabric is in danger of unraveling.

"Because times have been tough, because wages and incomes for everybody have not been going up, everybody is pretty anxious about what's happening in their lives and what might happen for their kids, and so they get worried that, well, if we're helping people in poverty, that must be hurting me somehow. It's taking something away from me."

Obama told that college professor in New York last week "it's in all of our interests" to lift up poor communities and help young people succeed — delivering on that promissory note that King talked about 50 years ago.

On Wednesday, the president is expected to leave his audience with the challenge of renewing that promise.