Like March on Washington, Gloucester County Conspiracy carries lessons for today.

Ben Jealous writes for USA Today: “Three hundred years before a multiracial coalition stormed Washington’s National Mall to demand equal rights and economic justice, the working men of Gloucester County, Va., made a stand of their own based on class, not race. We often ask whether Martin Luther King Jr. would recognize the world in 2013, but it is equally valid to ask whether he would have recognized the world of 1663, when black and white children of slaves and servants did play together in the tobacco fields.”