Sunday Reads: The 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

Good Day!!

Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963.

In August of 1963, I was just about to begin my sophomore year in high school. I was so inspired by the the events I saw on TV that day! John Kennedy was president, Martin Luther King was a hero, and it seemed that the times they really were a-changing, to paraphrase Bob Dylan.

When I got back to school, I interviewed a number of my classmates who had attended the march, and wrote a feature article about their experiences for my school paper The Munsonian.

Little did we know that on November 22 that year, John Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson carried out many of Kennedy’s goals; but his obsession with Vietnam destroyed his presidency, and he decided not to run for reelection.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King would be assassinated. The man whom Kennedy had defeated in 1960 would win the 1968 presidential election, and the rest was history, so to speak. The high hopes for freedom and equality were dashed. Nixon and the Republicans used racial animus to gain power–the famous “Southern strategy.”

This page at The Smithsonian gathers interesting memorabilia from that day in 1963.

On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered in the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march was the brainchild of longtime civil rights activist and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. With the support of the gifted organizer Bayard Rustin, the march was a collaboration of all factions of the civil rights movement. Originally conceived as a mass demonstration to spotlight economic inequalities and press for a new federal jobs program and a higher minimum wage, the goals of the march expanded to include calls for congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act, full integration of public schools, and enactment of a bill prohibiting job discrimination. The program at the Lincoln Memorial featured an impressive roster of speakers—including John Lewis—and closed with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Midway through his address, King abandoned his prepared text and launched into the soaring expression of his vision for the future, declaring, “I have a dream today.”

On 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture reflects on its historical legacy. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” will be on view in the museum for a limited time, Aug. 7–Sept. 18, 2023, in the Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom gallery. 

People gathered in Washington DC over the weekend to mark the anniversary.

From the AP: Thousands converge on National Mall to mark the March on Washington’s 60th anniversary.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands converged Saturday on the National Mall for the 60th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, saying a country that remains riven by racial inequality has yet to fulfill his dream.

“We have made progress, over the last 60 years, since Dr. King led the March on Washington,” said Alphonso David, president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. “Have we reached the mountaintop? Not by a long shot.”

The event was convened by the Kings’ Drum Major Institute and the Rev. Al Sharpton ‘s National Action Network. A host of Black civil rights leaders and a multiracial, interfaith coalition of allies rallied attendees on the same spot where as many as 250,000 gathered in 1963 for what is still considered one of the greatest and most consequential racial justice and equality demonstrations in U.S. history.

Inevitably, Saturday’s event was shot through with contrasts to the initial, historic demonstration. Speakers and banners talked about the importance of LGBTQ and Asian American rights. Many who addressed the crowd were women after only one was given the microphone in 1963.

Pamela Mays McDonald of Philadelphia attended the initial march as a child. “I was 8 years old at the original March and only one woman was allowed to speak — she was from Arkansas where I’m from — now look at how many women are on the podium today,” she said.

For some, the contrasts between the size of the original demonstration and the more modest turnout Saturday were bittersweet. “I often look back and look over to the reflection pool and the Washington Monument and I see a quarter of a million people 60 years ago and just a trickling now,” said Marsha Dean Phelts of Amelia Island, Florida. “It was more fired up then. But the things we were asking for and needing, we still need them today.”

CBS News: On the March on Washington’s 60th anniversary, watch how CBS News covered the Civil Rights protest in 1963.

On Aug. 28, 1963, Walter Cronkite began his evening news broadcast with a vivid description of the March on Washington. The day would come to be a watershed moment in the equal rights movement for Black Americans.

“They called it the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” said Cronkite. “They came from all over America. Negroes and Whites, housewives and Hollywood stars, senators and a few beatniks, clergymen and probably a few Communists. More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning in a kind of climax to a historic spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights.” 

One of those clergymen was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who made his famed “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the afternoon of Aug. 28. He spoke for 16 minutes in a rallying cry for all to have equal rights….

The March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs was meant to support the Civil Rights Act, which President John F. Kennedy was attempting to pass through Congress. The act called for an expanded Civil Rights Commission, the desegregation of public schools and other locations and voting rights protections for Black Americans.

On the day of the march, more than 250,000 people walked from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. Cronkite remarked that the march sometimes looked “more like a parade of signs than of people,” as marchers carried signs calling for equality and the end of police brutality.

Along the parade route was CBS News correspondent Dave Dugan. He called the enthusiasm of the march “contagious,” with older attendees “taking it rather relaxed and calmly” and younger marchers singing freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome,” bubbling with energy and “exuberance.”

The Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November of 1963. It outlawed discrimination based on race, sex and other protected classes, prohibited discrimination against voters of color and racial segregation in schools. It would be one of the most important legislative bills passed in American history.

NBC News: 60th March on Washington event merges Black America’s current concerns with history.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— As a teenager in 1963, Ann Breedlove rode in a caravan of buses and cars from Albany, Georgia, to the March on Washington. It took more than a day, she said, but the journey proved to be pivotal.

It was then that she learned of the power of fighting for justice, a cause she has taken up for the last six decades.

On Saturday, Breedlove was back in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. Her feelings on being there were mixed.

“I see many little children and young people walking around here and they will remember this day as a day that they were present for something that mattered,” said Breedlove, who now lives in Atlanta. “That’s what it was like for me. I wasn’t into social justice as a teenager. But coming to the march changed me. And that’s what this can do for these children here.”

The parade of dozens of speakers, each addressed many of the same concerns of the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, speaking to the progress yet to be made. The emphasis then was multi-pronged: end segregation; strengthen voting rights; improved public education; fair wages and civil rights. It was a watershed moment in the Civil Rights movement, marked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, the most famous of the dynamic orator’s addresses.

Saturday was billed as a “continuation, not a commemoration,” hosted by a number of organizations, including Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Drum Major Institute, which is modeled after King’s principles. The speakers addressed some of the aforementioned issues, along with the added concerns over Black history being scrubbed from K-12 education, the chipping away of abortion access, the Supreme Court abolishing race-conscious college admissions, and a reversal on LGBTQ rights.

“It’s a shift, a change that has taken place,” Breedlove said. “It’s too bad we are still talking about these issues. But our leaders and Black people are speaking louder. We’re tired — sick and tired — of asking for justice. It’s time to fight back. I’m a great grandmother who remembers the Ku Klux Klan raiding our house and us having to get under the bed when they came on their horses. Today is different. That’s not happening. But we still are getting it in different ways.”

“Our voices are going to be louder than the politicians,” she added, “who are not doing what they need to do to help us.”

Another speaker at the 1963 march was a young John Lewis. An opinion piece by Rutgers history professor David Greenberg at The New York Times: How John Lewis Saved the March on Washington.

The tides of history sand down complex events to smooth, shiny baubles, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — whose 60th anniversary arrives Monday, Aug. 28 — is no exception.

This oversimplification of history is at work not only with respect to Martin Luther King’s historic speech, which decried persistent Black poverty before dreaming of racial harmony, but also that of John Lewis, at 23 the march’s youngest speaker. Anointed a veritable saint before his death in 2020, Lewis was regarded back then as an enfant terrible fronting a headstrong new generation of rebels. Neither caricature quite captures the principled yet pragmatic Lewis, whose 1963 speech bluntly assailed deficiencies in the civil rights bill others were championing — but who succeeded in doing so without undermining the day’s unity.

Lewis’s experience with his controversial speech offers us a window onto the competing political pressures at work — the tricky context of an evolving protest movement groping for the right mix of defiance and accommodation. Striking such a delicate balance remains a challenge and an imperative for protest movements pushing for social change today.

That John Lewis even spoke at the March on Washington was something of a fluke. Only weeks earlier, he had been tapped as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a fledgling body formed during the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960. Of all SNCC’s units, Lewis’s Nashville chapter was the most thoroughly steeped in Gandhian nonviolence, and among the Nashvillians Lewis had imbibed those teachings most completely. After the Nashville movement forced the city to thoroughly integrate its public facilities in May 1963, Lewis — with his earnest, gentle demeanor and unimpeachable devotion to peaceful methods — was a natural choice to become SNCC’s public face.

A bit more:

Even as those methods led that spring to major victories in Nashville and (more famously) Birmingham, however, discontent with the Gandhian ways was mounting. The Birmingham campaign spawned demonstrations in 200 cities nationwide, and while many proceeded peacefully, some — such as in Cambridge, Md. — turned violent, sparking fears of mass mayhem that summer.

Media commentators now spoke of the “new militancy.” King would use this ambiguous term in his March on Washington speech. To some, like Lewis, militance meant not a renunciation of nonviolence but an intensification of protest, the adoption of a defiant edge. But rivals of King’s such as Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X threatened that rioting would rock America’s streets if the government didn’t act on civil rights.

Partly to stave off violence, President John F. Kennedy announced a sweeping civil rights bill that June. At that moment, too, the movement elders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin were lining up co-sponsors for the Washington march. Many of SNCC’s young radicals balked, fearing it would be, Lewis later recalled, “a lame event, organized by the cautious, conservative traditional power structure of Black America.” But Lewis, an inveterate optimist, naturally inclined to cooperate and compromise, was for it.

On June 22, Lewis — who just several years earlier had been living with nine siblings in a shotgun shack on an Alabama farm — joined some 30 civil rights honchos in the White House Cabinet Room to meet with the president. Kennedy intended to dissuade them from holding the march, which, because of the outbursts earlier that summer, he feared might turn destructive.

Awed to be in such august company, Lewis stayed silent through the meeting. But King, Randolph and others made clear that the march would take place. Kennedy acquiesced and then pivoted, spending the rest of the summer trying to turn the gathering into a rally to pass his bill.

SNCC, meanwhile, scored its own victory. Once shut out of meetings of the major civil rights groups, it now won recognition as one of the six main march sponsors. That meant a speaking slot for Lewis before an audience immeasurably larger than he had ever addressed.

I don’t dare post any more. Read the whole thing at the NYT.

That’s the end of my trip down memory lane. The real anniversary is tomorrow.

Take care everyone!