When Barack Obama steps before the Democratic Party and the American people tonight, it will be a triumphant moment in which he will be standing on the shoulders of a lot of giants, but none more than those of the man who may be our greatest, most unifying civil rights leader, A. Philip Randolph.

Randolph was the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In 1941, he organized a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the military and the war industries. He cancelled the march only after gaining from FDR an executive order that began to roll back the bigotry and open the way for minority advancement.

It happens that tonight, Senator Obama will be speaking on the 45th anniversary of another march on Washington, organized by Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mr. Obama has called that day the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. While King’s address was the inspirational and rhetorical highlight of that historic gathering, the March had a deeper significance because of its overall thrust and program.

The March called not only for racial equality but also for economic and social justice through programs promoting full employment, adequate minimum wages, decent housing, and improved education. As King himself knew, his “dream” was not enough. It had to be backed by the March’s concrete proposals, which cut across racial and class lines to speak to the needs of most Americans.

Demands for racial equality, made at the doorstep of the nation’s political leaders, created the climate that produced the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in our nation’s history. Its economic and social demands, developed not only by Randolph but by Rustin, marked the starting point of their campaign to form a majority political coalition of minorities, labor, religious institutions, and other progressive organizations to secure the March’s program.

Just as King’s “dream” was not enough, Mr. Obama’s “hope” is insufficient. To step up to the challenge of the March for Jobs and Freedom on whose anniversary he speaks tonight, Mr. Obama will need to present a social and economic program for poor, working, and middle income Americans of all races and ethnic backgrounds.

On August 16, at a forum in California, Mr. Obama said that “work” should be the centerpiece of social policy. We think that this is a perceptive observation. Work enables us to support ourselves and our families, provides us with a sense of dignity, and enables a society to grow. It is also linked to freedom, since the absence of work creates dependency. That same understanding underlay the 1963 gathering, which is why it was called not the “March for Freedom” but, rather, the “March for Jobs and Freedom.”

Work is also the most basic social need because it is closely linked to others, like health care, housing, education, upgrading the infrastructure of our cities, and so on. Furthermore, the current 5.7% unemployment rate has brought the issue of jobs and — equally important — job security to the forefront of public attention. The American people are ready to listen. The fact that today’s jobless rate is close to the 5.4% unemployment figure for August 1963 shows the persistence of unemployment and provides just one more reason to follow in the Randolph-Rustin strategy of focusing on jobs.

We know that Mr. Obama will use his inspirational genius tonight to galvanize the Democratic delegates, along with many of the millions watching his speech on television. But for a more lasting impact on the electorate, Randolph, were he alive today, surely would counsel the need to present a kitchen-table agenda, one that highlights programs to make available to everyone affordable health insurance and to assure a supply of decent, reasonably-priced housing.

Most importantly, he would counsel the need to present a jobs and job security program that includes everything from public works projects for restoring the nation’s infrastructure and for employing the unemployed; to re-training classes for those whose skills have become obsolete; to tax breaks for cutting-edge firms that promise to create large numbers of jobs and the end of tax breaks for corporations that move jobs offshore; to supporting the labor law reform legislation now before Congress that helps workers defend their jobs in the workplace through union representation.

If Mr. Obama does this, if he combines his dazzling oratorical abilities with an articulation of this agenda, then he will truly be in the tradition of the March on Washington on whose anniversary he speaks and will be off to a magnificent start at creating a winning political coalition in the final stretch of this long presidential campaign.

Mr. Hill was staff coordinator at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 and is president emeritus of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Mrs. Hill is a longtime civil rights and trade union activist and member of the A. Philip Randolph Institute advisory board. They are at work on a memoir.