Custom Search

Just How Many Marched on D.C. (Includes photos of the Million Man March of 1995) (with videos)

Chelsea Schilling

Estimates start at 60,000, rise to as high as 2 million

Just how many people turned out at the Sept. 12 march on Washington?

Politifact reported that Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the Washington, D.C., Fire and Emergency Department "unofficially" estimated that between 60,000 and 75,000 people attended the march.

Officers with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department told WND the department does not provide crowd estimates. Capitol police declined to comment.

However, Wizbang estimated between 500,000 and 1 million. The blog displays the following time-lapse image of the march:

The London Daily Mail originally estimated a turnout of "up to 2 million," but that estimate now reads "as many as one million people."

Meanwhile, Fox News' Glenn Beck said he believes he heard estimates closer to 1.7 million coming from the University of Illinois.

Pajamas Media's Charlie Martin used several crowd counting techniques to estimate a crowd of "probably well more than 850,000."

Visit Shop.WND.com, the site of the one and only "tea party store" now

The Los Angeles Times reported Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, said rally organizers believed the crowd reached 75,000 in the morning, but that it grew to between 200,000 and 300,000 as the day went on.

Farouk El-Baz, a Boston University research professor and expert on crowd estimation, told the Los Angeles Times his casual research from press coverage indicates 75,000 as the maximum number of attendees.

Grassfire/ResistNet national coordinator Darla Dawald told WND the crowds were "all the way back at the sides to the monument and also out on Pennsylvania Avenue."

Though she said she cannot be sure of how many people were at the event, she estimated "about one million."

Joe Wierzbicki, national coordinator of the Tea Party Express, said there is "a huge divergence of opinion on the crowd estimate."

"I've seen reports of 'tens of thousands' to 75,000 to 'hundreds of thousands' to 1.5 million and 2 million," he said. "It is our general belief and estimation that the rally had hundreds of thousands of participants based on the expanse of the crowd from the steps of the Capitol well back along the Capitol Mall."

FreedomWorks reported 50,000 registrants for its activities in the days leading up to the event. Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks' director of federal and state campaigns, said the group is still working on trying to get an estimate. TPM reports FreedomWorks' crowd estimates are around 600,000 to 800,000.

The National Park Service will not provide estimates since Million Man March organizers threatened to sue in 1995 when the National Park Service estimated the crowd at 400,000. However, the service suspended that policy early this year for Obama's inauguration, USA Today reported. In 1995, the Million Man March believed its own numbers were closer to 1.5 million. The following are photos of the event: