Civil Rights Events

March on Washington

August 28, 1963

 

The 1963 event was officially dubbed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Its main aims were racial equality and full employment for blacks and whites. Unemployment was rising then, especially among minorities. And although there had been several major pushes for equal rights over the last decade, little progress had been made. By 1962, civil rights legislation (to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or sex) was stalled in Congress, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy was unwilling to lend any help [sources: Erickson, Penrice].

 

 

Frustrated, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO] proposed a march on Washington to demand equal rights and jobs for all. But the response from mainstream civil rights organizations was tepid [source: Penrice]. Then King signed on. Suddenly, the idea began to pick up steam. Civil rights groups that often disagreed with each other banded together -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

 

 

In June 1963, a date was set: Aug. 28, 1963. The buzz was 100,000 would attend, mainly blacks. Many people became unnerved. Mainstream media wondered if the march would devolve into a riot. President Kennedy asked organizers to call off the march, but they refused. So to help ensure public safety, liquor stores and bars were shuttered that day. Stores hid or moved their valuable items. Federal employees were given the day off. And innumerable military personnel were on standby (McManus 1-2).

 

 

Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to Bayard Rustin, interviewed in 2013 declared:

 

 

A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] had tried to put on a march in 1941 to protest discrimination in the armed forces and for a fair employment policy commission. He called off that march when FDR issued an executive order [prohibiting discrimination in the national defense industry]. But Randolph always believed that you had to move the civil rights struggle to Washington, to the center of power. In January 1963, Bayard Rustin sent a memo to A. Philip Randolph in essence saying the time is now to really conceive of a big march.  …

 

 

John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, added:

 

 

A. Philip Randolph had this idea in the back of his mind for many years. When he had his chance to make another demand for a March on Washington, he told President Kennedy in a meeting at the White House in June 1963 that we were going to march on Washington. It was the so-called “Big Six,” Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. and myself. Out of the blue Mr. Randolph spoke up. He was the dean of black leadership, the spokesperson. He said “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.” President Kennedy didn’t like the idea, hearing people talk about a march on Washington. He said, “If you bring all these people to Washington, won’t there be violence and chaos and disorder and we will never get a civil rights bill through the Congress?” Mr. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.”

 

 

Harry Belafonte said; “We had to seize this opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission.”

 

 

Joyce Ladner, SNCC activist, had a practical motive for supporting a march.

At that point, the police all over Mississippi had cracked down so hard on us that it was more and more difficult to raise bond money, to organize without harassment from the local cops and the racists. I thought a large march would demonstrate that we had support outside our small group.

 

 

Harry Belafonte would bring celebrity support.

 

 

To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic. We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day. Those that wanted to sit on the platform could do that, but we should be in among the citizens—the ordinary citizens—of the day. Somebody should just turn around and there was Paul Newman. Or turn around and there was Burt Lancaster. I went first to one of my closest friends, Marlon Brando, and asked if he would be willing to chair the leading delegation from California. And he said yes. Not only enthusiastically but committed himself to really working and calling friends (Oral 4-8).

On July 2, 1963, leaders from six civil rights groups — A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis — announced plans for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These men all wanted equality for black Americans, but the tactics and methods they adopted often varied.

 

 

These leaders also disagreed on who should handle march logistics. Randolph wanted to put Bayard Rustin in charge, as Rustin was a skilled organizer — during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Rustin had counseled King on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. But Rustin was gay (he'd been arrested in 1953 on a "morals" charge), had joined the Communist Party for a short time and had gone to prison for refusing to serve during World War II.

 

 

The solution was for Randolph to become march director and select Rustin as his deputy; Rustin then set up an office in Harlem and got to work. His tasks included getting funds for a sound system, having brochures printed, arranging for drinking water and directing volunteers to prepare boxed lunches. Plus he had to plan for how many toilets the crowd — 150,000 were hoped for — would require (Kettler 1-2)!

 

 

Volunteers prepared 80,000 50-cent boxed lunches (consisting of a cheese sandwich, a slice of poundcake and an apple). Rustin marshaled more than 2,200 chartered buses, 40 special trains, 22 first-aid stations, eight 2,500-gallon water-storage tank trucks and 21 portable water fountains (Oral 3).

 

 

Rustin did everything from coaching volunteer marshals in nonviolent crowd control techniques to creating a 12-page manual for bus captains, instructing them on issues like where to park their vehicles and locate bathrooms for passengers. He managed to divvy up the limited podium time among competing interests without angering anyone (McManus 6).

 

 

There was wariness and anger in Washington, D.C. about the march, which opposing politicians denounced as a Communist plot. President John F. Kennedy feared that any disturbance could derail his proposed civil rights legislation (though he eventually accepted the march and offered some support). Two Southern Democrats in Congress even tried to legislate the demonstration away — one wanted to halt mass protests while a civil rights bill was under consideration, the other attempted to outlaw interstate travel for "any conduct which would tend to incite to riot."

 

 

Three weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond read out details of Rustin's 1953 arrest on the Senate floor. However, given Thurmond's stance as a staunch segregationist, no one broke with Rustin. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who worked in Rustin's Harlem office, later noted, "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement, but you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."

 

 

Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the sole female member of the march's administrative committee, had spent years battling for civil rights and knew how much of a contribution women had made to the movement: Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Diane Nash fought to continue Freedom Rides when others wanted to quit and countless women faced danger in order to register voters.

 

 

Given all this, Hedgeman and others wanted a female speaker for the march. But Rustin cited the overloaded program as a reason not to add anyone else (he also felt other women would get jealous if just one were chosen). As the march's date approached, Hedgeman wrote a letter to the committee to demand a female speaker, noting, "It is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial."

 

 

In the end, a "Tribute to Negro Women" was added to the program. At the march, Daisy Bates, who'd helped the Little Rock Nine as they'd integrated their school system, read a prepared statement, then several women who'd contributed to the movement were named. It was a compromise, but it didn't offer a female civil rights speaker.

 

 

With violence expected, Washington planned to have 6,000 officers — police, marshals and National Guardsman — on hand on August 28, with thousands more soldiers available at nearby bases. (Kettler 3-5).

 

 

… some of the march's most vocal dissidents were black, namely Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and later the leader of SNCC. But over time he moved away from King's theory of nonviolence and toward one of self-defense; he also coined the "black power" slogan. The March on Washington, in Carmichael's view, was "only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement," so he refused to attend. Black nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X bitterly referred to the event as "The Farce on Washington" and discouraged fellow Nation of Islam members from attending. Curiously, he himself attended (McManus 9).

 

 

The potent symbolism of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial—timed to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and following President John F. Kennedy’s announcement in June that he would submit a civil rights bill to Congress—transfixed the nation (Oral 2).

 

 

Rachelle Horowitz commented:

 

 

It was about 5:30 in the morning, it’s gray, it’s muggy, people are setting up. There’s nobody there for the march except some reporters and they start annoying Bayard and pestering him: “Where are the people, where are the people?” Bayard very elegantly took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. Took out a pocket watch that he used, looked at both and said, “It’s all coming according to schedule,” and he put it away. The reporters went away and I asked, “What were you looking at?” He said, “A blank piece of paper.” Sure enough, eventually, about 8:30 or 9, the trains were pulling in and people were coming up singing and the buses came. There’s always that moment of “We know the buses are chartered, but will they really come.”

 

 

Courtland Cox, a SNCC activist, said:

 

 

Bayard and I left together. It was real early, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning. We went out to the Mall and there was literally no one there. Nobody there. Bayard looks at me and says, “You think anybody is coming to this?” and just as he says that, a group of young people from an NAACP chapter came over the horizon. From that time, the flow was steady. We found out that we couldn’t see anyone there because so many people were in buses, in trains and, particularly, on the roads, that the roads were clogged. Once the flow started, it was just volumes of people coming.

 

 

Civil right activist Barry Rosenberg related:

 

 

I could hardly sleep the night before the march. I got there early. Maybe 10:30 in the morning, people were milling around. There were maybe 20,000 folks out there. It was August; I forgot to wear a hat. I was a little concerned about getting burned up. I went and got a Coke. When I got back, people just poured in from all directions. If you were facing the podium, I was on the right-hand side. People were greeting each other; I got chills, I got choked up. People were hugging and shaking hands and asking “Where are you from” (Oral 11-12)?

 

Attendance climbed to about 250,000. The huge procession headed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial without the march's leaders, who had to hurry to the front.   John Lewis recalled:

 

 

Early that morning the ten of us [the Big Six, plus four other march leaders] boarded cars that brought us to Capitol Hill. We visited the leadership of the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we met on the House side with the chairman of the judiciary committee, the ranking member, because that’s where the civil rights legislation will come. We did the same thing on the Senate side. We left Capitol Hill, walked down Constitution Avenue. Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. We thought we might get 75,000 people showing up on August 28. When we saw this unbelievable crowd coming out of Union Station, we knew it was going to be more than 75,000. People were already marching. It was like “There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” We said, “What are we going to do? The people are already marching! There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” What we did, the ten of us, was grab each other’s arms, made a line across the sea of marchers. People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial.

 

 

Joyce Ladner said: “As the day passed a lot of individual people were there. Odetta and Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan. They began warming up the crowd very early, began singing. It was not tense at all, wasn’t a picnic either. Somewhere in between; people were happy to see each other, renewing acquaintances, everyone was very pleasant” (Oral 12-14).

 

 

“It’s a pleasure being here and nice being out of jail. And to be honest with you, the last time I’ve seen this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.” — Activist and comedian Dick Gregory

 

 

Juanita Abernathy remembered:

 

 

I don’t know where that march started out. It looked like we marched forever before we got to the Mall. You were used to marching; you wear comfortable shoes so your feet won’t hurt and you don’t get blisters. We got to the stage and Coretta [Scott King] and I sat on the second row. Mahalia [Jackson] sat on the first row, because she was singing. We were on the left side of the stage. I wanted to scream, we were so happy, we were ecstatic. We had no idea it would be that many people—as far as you could see there were heads. What I called a sea of people; because all you could see was people, everywhere, just a sea of heads and what jubilation. Which said to us in the civil rights movement: “Your work has not been in vain. We are with you. We are part of you” (Oral 12-17).

Several male civil rights leaders gave speeches, as did union and religious leaders. In his talk, Randolph said, "Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy" (Kettler 1-4).

 

 

John Lewis, interviewed in 2013, had this to say about his speech.

 

I started working on my speech several days before the March on Washington. We tried to come up with a speech that would represent the young people: the foot soldiers, people on the front lines. Some people call us the “shock troops” into the delta of Mississippi, into Alabama, southwest Georgia, eastern Arkansas, the people who had been arrested, jailed and beaten. Not only our own staffers but also the people that we were working with. They needed someone to speak for them.

 

The night before the march, Bayard Rustin put a note under my door and said, “John, you should come downstairs. There’s some discussion about your speech, some people have a problem with your speech.”

 

The archbishop [of Washington, D.C.] had threatened not to give the invocation if I kept some words and phrases in the speech.  In the original speech I said something like “In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s proposed civil rights bill. It was too little, too late. It did not protect old women and young children in nonviolent protests run down by policemen on horseback and police dogs.”

 

 

Much farther down I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way General Sherman did, nonviolently.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t say that; it’s too inflammatory.” I think that was the concern of the people in the Kennedy administration. We didn’t delete that portion of the speech. We did not until we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.

 

 

It was at the back side of Mr. Lincoln that Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said to me, “John, they still have a problem with your speech. Can we change this, can we change that?” I loved Martin Luther King, I loved and admired A. Philip Randolph, and I couldn’t say no to those two men. I dropped all reference to marching through the South the way Sherman did. I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, we will march through cities, towns and hamlets and villages all across America.” I was thinking about how I was going to deliver the speech. I was 23 years old and it was a sea of humanity out there that I had to face (Oral 9-10, 18).

It was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that is best remembered at the event.

 

 

Courtland Cox: What’s interesting was not only the crowd all the way to the Reflecting Pool, but that people were up in trees, they were everywhere. When King started speaking, and as he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson began like a chant and response. She was like his amen corner. She kept saying “Tell ’em Rev” the whole time he was speaking. She was just talking to him.

Julian Bond: When Dr. King spoke, he commanded the attention of everybody there. His speech, with his slow, slow cadence at first and then picking up speed and going faster and faster. You saw what a magnificent speechmaker he was, and you knew something important was happening (Oral 19-20).

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

 

 

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

 

 

…

 

 

America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

 

 

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.  … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

 

 

… This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.  …

 

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone (Dream 1-3).

 

 

As the speech was winding down, Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of King's, felt it needed to go in a different direction. So she shouted to him from behind the podium, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did, improvising that well-loved section from speeches and sermons he had given in the past (McManus 10).

 

 

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal."

 

 

…

 

 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

 

 

I have a dream today.

 

 

…

 

 

When we let freedom 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 of 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" (Dream 4-6).

 

 

Joyce Ladner: Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march. Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.

Rachelle Horowitz: The podium sort of cleared. Those of us who had worked on the march, the staff people and the SNCC staff, stood at the bottom of the memorial. We linked arms and we sang “We Shall Overcome” and we probably cried. There were some SNCC people who were cynical about Dr. King and we forced them to admit it was really a great speech.

John Lewis: After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.

Joyce Ladner: After the march, all the people had left and a group of SNCC people were standing there with remnants of things to clean up. This small group of people had to go back south. We were dedicated to going south, to take this giant problem on, fighting the problem we had left behind.

 

My sister Dorie and I walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, Malcolm X was holding forth. He was talking about the “Farce on Washington.” Reporters and others were crowded around him. His ideal would have been, you take your freedom, grab it, not ask the government to free you. I do recall very clearly wondering who was right, King and us or Malcolm?

 

Actor and future director Ken Howard: One thing about the march: It was a step. You have to realize the tumultuousness of the times. Just a few weeks later, four little black girls got blown up at a church in the South. After the march, you had the feeling that things will change—and then these little girls were killed. As they said about the walk on the moon, it was a “small step,” but it was a step nonetheless that people heard. The loss of those girls was sad, but it was another step, because individuals began to see there was an injustice being done.

 

Only in retrospect do you see just how each little piece enabled a building to be built. Who would have thought a minister from a small black church in Atlanta would have a monument on the Mall? You wouldn’t think a minister from a small black church would be a “drum major” in a movement helping a people gain their rights as citizens. It’s only from the mountaintop of time that you see that it all made a difference. Each individual thing played a role (Oral 21-25).

 

Works cited:

 

 

“An Oral History of the March on Washington.”  Smithsonian Magazine.  July 2013.  Web.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/oral-history-march-washington-180953863/

 

 

Kettler, Sara.  “March on Washington: The Activists Who Took a Stand for Equality.”  Biography.  August 25, 2017.  Web.  https://www.biography.com/news/march-on-washington-facts

 

 

“Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington Address.” University of Delaware.  Web.  http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/color/articles/king.html

 

 

McManus, Melanie Radzicki.  “How the March on Washington Worked.”  How Stuff Works.com.  August 26, 2013.  Web.  https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/march-on-washington.htm