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The March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom
August 28, 1963
In the summer of 1963, a single event captured the attention
of the United States and the world: the March on Washington. More than 250,000 people came to the nation's capital to demand
equality for blacks and to urge Congress to pass pending civil rights legislation. Some believed the march would never happen.
After all, A. Philip Randolph, one of the organizers of the 1963 march, had made a similar threat in 1941. That march never
took place, but he achieved his goal, forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee,
integrating the defense industry. In 1963, the people did march.
The goals of the March were as diverse as its leaders. Some saw it as a
means to raise the nation's consciousness over the plight of blacks. Others believed the rally would build support for President
Kennedy's civil rights bill. For another group, the March demanded "untrammeled opportunity for every person to fulfill his
total individual capacity." They all agreed, however, that it should embrace both blacks and whites.
News of the March spread through local civil rights and church groups around
the country. More than 2,000 "freedom buses" and thirty "freedom trains" converged in Washington, bringing more than a quarter
million marchers--over 60,000 of them white. The March was the largest demonstration of its kind in the history of the United
States.
Although it is best remembered for Dr. King and his "I Have a Dream Speech,"
five other black leaders were co-chairs of the event along with King: A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The roots of the 1963 March on Washington go back to a 1941 initiative
by A. Philip Randolph, the trailblazing president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph had organized the original
March on Washington Movement, which was designed to pressure President Roosevelt to guarantee jobs for black men and women
in the wartime armament industries. The 1941 march was canceled at the last moment when Roosevelt capitulated to the demands
and issued the first executive order protecting African-American rights since the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war
Randolph also succeeded in persuading President Harry S. Truman to ban racial discrimination in the military.
At the
end of 1962, Randolph began to talk to organizer Bayard Rustin about staging a big Washington demonstration. They conceived
of two days of rallying and lobbying "to embody in one gesture civil rights as well as national economic demands." A coalition
would be formed to bring in as many people as possible. A massive protest gathering might be accompanied by direct-action
campaigns, such as sit-ins in congressional offices.
Randolph and Rustin originally planned to stress economic inequities and
to press for a new federal jobs program and a higher minimum wage. A nationwide recession that had begun in 1959 was still
in progress in 1963. The black unemployment rate was twice that of whites, with over one and a half million blacks looking
for work. To stress these economic concerns—in addition to the standard civil rights agenda—the massive protest
was dubbed the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." But the events in Birmingham and the Kennedy civil rights bill
changed the agenda; the emphasis shifted to lobbying for the civil rights bill that was wending its way through Congress.
The march was scheduled for August 28. That left just under two months for Rustin (working out of an office on Harlem's
West 130th Street) to organize the turnout and handle the logistics of getting an expected 100,000 demonstrators in and out
of town. Within two weeks he had distributed two thousand copies of his Organizing Manual No. One to movement leaders at centers
throughout the nation.
President Kennedy tried to persuade the leadership to cancel the march.
"We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against
us; and I don't want to give any of them a chance to say 'Yes, I'm for the bill, but I am damned if I will vote for it at
the point of a gun.'"4 Failing to stop it, Kennedy publicly embraced the march.
Fears of a possible riot
were intense, and the Washington authorities and the march organizers were determined to ensure a peaceful day. D.C. police
units had all their leaves canceled; neighboring suburban forces were given special riot-control training. With Birmingham
in mind, the attorney general expressly forbade the presence of police dogs. Liquor sales were banned for a day—for
the first time since Prohibition. Two Washington Senators' baseball games were postponed. The Justice Department and the army
coordinated preparations for emergency troop deployments; seventy different potential emergency scenarios were studied. A
crew of lawyers was convened to prepare in advance proclamations authorizing military deployments. Fifteen thousand paratroopers
were put on alert. The Justice Department and the police worked with the march committee to develop a state-of-the-art public-address
system; unbeknownst to the march coordinators, the police rigged the system so that they could take control of it if trouble
arose. The main rally would be at the Lincoln Memorial. For the organizers, that site had a powerful symbolism, particularly
on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The police liked the site because, with water on three sides, the demonstrators
could be easily contained.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly tried to scuttle the march. In
the months leading up to it he intensified his already passionate campaign to defame Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover tried
to persuade the Kennedys that King was being influenced by Communists, and his specious denunciations of some King associates
were taken much more seriously by the Kennedys than was warranted. As a result, they strong-armed King into cutting off some
of his closest friends and advisers on the grounds that they might be enemy agents. Hoover's baseless suspicions about King,
his virulent attacks on him, and his repeated attempts to destroy his reputation with the Kennedys were spurred by racist
delusions and other pathological animosities. Hoover tried, unsuccessfully, to exploit wiretap information about King's sexual
indiscretions and about Rustin's homosexual liaisons. On the very morning of the march, Hoover assigned several agents to
telephone celebrity participants in a futile last-ditch attempt to get them to withdraw their support. His attacks on King
are some of the darkest examples of official paranoia and character assassination in America.
Press coverage was more extensive than for any previous political demonstration
in U.S. history. It was also one of the first events to be broadcast live around the world, via the newly launched communications
satellite Telstar. The three major television networks spent over three hundred thousand dollars (more than twice the march
committee's budget) to broadcast the event. CBS covered the rally "gavel to gavel," from 1:30 to 4:30, canceling As the World
Turns, Password, Art Linkletter's House Party, To Tell the Truth, The Edge of Night, and Secret Storm.
The most controversial speech was given by John Lewis. When a draft of
the speech was circulated in advance, march leaders and Attorney General Kennedy raised strenuous objections to Lewis's calling
the Kennedy civil rights bill "too little, too late" and especially to his rhetoric: "We will march through the South, through
the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We will pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.
We will fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy."7 A compromise
speech was hammered out only after the aging Randolph made a personal appeal to Lewis and other SNCC leaders not to mar the
occasion that he had worked for all his life. Lewis's toned-down speech was received with unmatched enthusiasm; it was interrupted
by applause fourteen times. When he finished, Lewis walked past the other leaders on the platform. Every black hand reached
out for his, while every white speaker sat still, staring into space.
At the end of a long procession of speech and song, Martin Luther King,
Jr., stepped up to the podium to deliver the closing address. Part of it had been written during the preceding hurried hours,
parts of it rehearsed many times. With its final crescendo improvised in response to the crowd, "I Have a Dream" became instantly
famous and remains one of the great moments of modern oratory. King began, "I am happy to join with you today in what will
go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." He concluded:
“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every
village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black
men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old
Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
As the marchers dispersed, thrilled with new confidence in their strength,
the leaders rushed to a White House strategy meeting on the pending civil rights bill. When they entered the Cabinet Room,
the president smiled at King and said, "I have a dream," acknowledging a catchy refrain. Kennedy felt that the march had been
nice but it would hardly extricate him from the political dilemma posed by the bill. Foreseeing disaster for the Democrats
if he backed it too forcefully, he would not give the civil rights leaders a strong commitment of support.
Some movement
stalwarts felt that the march had been manipulated by the president to project a prettified image of racial harmony. Malcolm
X called it the "Farce on Washington." Historian Clayborne Carson, who was attending his first civil rights demonstration,
originally experienced it as an "epiphany" but then had second thoughts when Stokely Carmichael of SNCC told him it was "only
a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement."
But the size and diversity of the gathered masses,
the pageantry of their display, the emotional intensity of the songs and speeches, and the peacefulness and good humor of
everyone under the hot sun deeply impressed most observers. Russell Baker wrote in the New York Times: "No one could remember
an invading army quite as gentle as the two hundred thousand civil-rights marchers who occupied Washington today...The sweetness
and patience of the crowd may have set some sort of national high-water mark in mass decency."
All these years after the March on Washington, some of its goals have been
achieved. Segregation has been virtually abolished, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally extended the franchise to southern
blacks, and there is now a record number of black elected officials around the country. Educational achievement among African
Americans has also improved dramatically, and more blacks now hold positions of responsibility in the public and private sectors.
______
1. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters:
America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 816.
2. The prints were designed by Lou LoMonaco
and published by the Urban League.
3. Most of the facts and figures in this chapter come from Thomas Gentile, March
on Washington: August 28, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: New Day Publications, 1983), and Parting the Waters, chaps. 21-23.
4. Kennedy, quoted in Howard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-80 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981),
p. 160.
5. Signs are quoted from photographs in the Black Star archives.
6. Young, transcribed from I Have a Dream:
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-68 (New York: ABC Records, n.d.), side B, cut 3.
7. Lewis, quoted in Darlene
Clark Hine, eds. Eyes on the Prize: A Reader and Guide (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 123.
8. Lerone Bennet,
in Doris E. Saunders, ed., The Day They Marched (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1963), p. 12.
9. King, ibid., p.
85
10. Gentile, March on Washington, p. 250
11. Clayborne Carson, "Reconstructing the King Legacy: Scholars
and National Myths," in Albert, Peter J., and Ronald Hoffman, eds. We Shall Overcome (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990)
p. 240.
12. Baker, in Anthony Lewis, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (New York: Random House,
1964), pp. 254-55.
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