Like
a lot of people back in ’63 I was glued to the television for the beginning-to-end coverage provided by CBS
News of the March for Jobs and
Justice on August 28. I was a 14
year old in Cheyenne, Wyoming at the
time. I was both thrilled and awestruck. Listening to Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech
literally changed my life.
The March was the brain child of labor and Civil Rights leader A. Phillip Randolph.
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The march originally was the brainchild
of an elder of both the labor and Civil Rights movements. A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters and of the Negro
American Labor Council as well as a Vice
President of the AFL-CIO modeled his call for a march on Washington on a similar event he had planned back in 1941 to force President Franklin D. Roosevelt to open
up employment in the burgeoning defense industry to Blacks.
Just the threat of thousands
of Negros descending on the Capital had been enough to cause the
President to establish the Committee on
Fair Employment Practice and bar
discriminatory hiring in the defense industry. Randolph wanted to bring similar pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Congress to move on stalled Civil Rights legislation, but also to bring
up new issues of jobs that had been overshadowed
by the tumultuous battle for civil rights in the South.
Randolph brought together the leaders of all of the largest national Civil Rights organizations
including James Farmer, President of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE);
John Lewis, President of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC);
Roy Wilkins, President of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young, President of the National Urban League; and Dr. King, President of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
to form a coalition to sponsor the march. It was no small feat because of turf wars, ideological differences, and egos.
In addition Randolph sought support from the Labor
movement, most significantly from Walter
Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW). The White dominated craft unions of the AFL, however, were notable for their
absence.
Bayard
Rustin
of the pacifist Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR) and the
organizer of the 1947 Journey
of Reconciliation, an early forerunner of the Freedom Rides that was meant to test a Supreme Court ruling that
banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, was tapped to coordinate volunteers and logistics, recruit marchers from across the country, and attend to all of the other details of the march while Randolph pulled
together political, labor and religious support for the march.
Other than being a star
speaker that day King was not heavily involved in the planning or
management of the event. He even left the details
of mobilizing SCLC supporters to his aides.
As word spread, it became apparent that the march was
going to turn into the largest event of its kind in history. The media
began to pay attention. On the day
of the march, buses poured into the
city from sleepy Mississippi towns and from gritty industrial hubs like Detroit
and Chicago. Trains from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia
were jammed. Thousands of local Washington
residents swelled the throng.
Organizers put the crowd at more than 300,000. The National Park Service, in charge
because the speakers’ platform was erected at the Lincoln Memorial, said 200,000.
Whatever was the case, crowds filled the Mall far passed the Washington
Monument. About 80% of the marchers
were Black. Marchers included many celebrities
including actors like Sidney Poitier, Harry Bellefonte, and Charlton
Heston—yes that Charlton Heston.
Charlton Heston, Harry Bellefonte, novelist James Baldwin, and Marlon Brando added star power to the March.
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It was a Wednesday afternoon but the three major broadcast networks broke away from their usual programming of afternoon soap operas to cover the swelling crowd and speeches live.
Marian
Anderson, who had sung on the same steps at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt after she was denied
use of the Daughters of the American
Revolution Constitution Hall in 1939, opened the program with the National Anthem. Several other performers took to the stage
over the course of the program, perhaps most notably Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan
Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson.
Peter Paul & Mary were among the notable entertainers who performed. They led the crowd in Pete Seger's anthem If I Had a Hammer.
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The Catholic
Archbishop of Washington, Patrick
O’Boyle led the invocation. Other religious leaders on the program
included Dr. Eugene Blake on behalf
of the Protestant National Council of
Churches and two leading Rabbis.
After Randolph’s opening remarks each of the major civil
rights leaders took the stage in turn. Floyd
McKissick had to read the remarks of CORE’s James Farmer, who was in a Louisiana jail. The youngest leader,
John Lewis of the militant SNCC, excoriated
the Kennedy Administration for not acting to protect Civil Rights workers who were under regular and violent attack
across the South. Randolph and others
who were trying to flatter and coax the President into action forced Lewis to
strike the most inflammatory portions of
his speech, but what was left was still plenty critical.
Slain NAACP
organizer Medgar Evers’s
wife Myrlie was on the announced
program to lead a Tribute to Negro
Women, but did not appear. In
fact several prominent female figures in the Movement were either not invited
or had their requests to be added to the program rejected by Randolph. In the end the only woman to speak was jazz
singer and dancer Josephine Baker who wore her World War
II Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal of
the Légion d’honneur.
It all led up the last major address—the highly
anticipated speech of Dr. King. If civil
rights veterans knew what to expect from the notoriously eloquent leader, millions of Americans viewing at home were in for
an eye opening experience. The speech,
built to the thundering crescendo:
Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow 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!”
The hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who showed up for the March for Jobs and Justice were just as important as any of the movement heavies and celebrities.
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The nation, or
much of, it was awestruck and impressed. That speech, along with the continued televised violence against Blacks
struggling for equal access to
public accommodations and the vote, helped set the stage for the major Civil Rights
legislation enacted in the next three years.
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