March on Washington, 1963

By: Kate Tuttle

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

March on Washington, 1963

Massive public demonstration that articulated the goals of the Civil Rights Movement.

The 1963 March on Washington attracted an estimated 250,000 people for a peaceful demonstration to promote civil rights and economic equality for African Americans. Participants walked down Constitution and Independence Avenues, then—100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed—gathered before the Lincoln Monument for speeches, songs, and prayer. Televised live to an audience of millions, the march provided dramatic moments, most memorably the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The 1963 March on Washington.  In August 1963 some 250,000 people assembled on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to protest for equality and full civil rights for all Americans. The march is widely considered among the most important and far-reaching demonstrations of the great American era of civil rights in the 1960s.

(Library of Congress.)

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Far larger than previous demonstrations for any cause, the march had an obvious impact, both on the passage of civil rights legislation and on nationwide public opinion. It proved the power of mass appeal and inspired imitators in the antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements. But the March on Washington in 1963 was more complex than the iconic images most Americans remember it for. As the high point of the Civil Rights Movement, the march—and the integrationist, nonviolent, liberal form of protest it stood for—was followed by more radical, militant, and race-conscious approaches.

The march was initiated by A. Philip Randolph, international president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and sponsored by five of the largest civil rights organizations in the United States. Planning for the event was complicated by differences among members. Known in the press as “the big six,” the major players were Randolph; Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League (NUL); Roy Wilkins, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); James Farmer, founder and president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and Martin Luther King Jr., founder and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Bayard Rustin, a close associate of Randolph's and organizer of the first Freedom Ride in 1947, orchestrated and administered the details of the march.

It was Randolph who first conceived of a march on Washington. In 1941 his threat to assemble 100,000 African Americans in the capital helped convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee. More than twenty years later, Randolph revived his idea. His primary interest, as always, was jobs—African Americans were disproportionately unemployed and underpaid. In a December 1962 meeting, Randolph and Rustin began planning the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

While Randolph (and the National Urban League's Young) focused on jobs, the other groups centered on freedom. Both SNCC and CORE were organizing nonviolent protests against Jim Crow segregation and discrimination. In 1963 King's SCLC was waging a long campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama. The violence Sheriff Bull Connor and his men visited upon peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham brought national attention to the issue of civil rights. As Rustin later said, credit for mobilizing the March on Washington could go to “Bull Connor, his police dogs, and his fire hoses.”

By June, King had agreed to cooperate with Randolph on the march. The older, more conservative NAACP and NUL were still ambivalent. After winning Randolph's promise that the march would be a nonviolent, nonconfrontational event—a promise that dismayed the more militant CORE and SNCC leaders, who had also joined with Randolph—the NAACP's Wilkins pledged his support. In addition, white supporters such as labor leader Walter Reuther and Jewish, Catholic, and Presbyterian officials offered their help. The date was set for August 28, 1963.

Operating out of a tiny office in Harlem, Rustin and his staff had only two months to plan a massive mobilization. Money was raised by the sale of buttons for the march at twenty-five cents apiece, and thousands of people sent in small cash contributions. The staff tackled the difficult logistics of transportation, publicity, and the marchers' health and safety. Attention to detail was crucial, for the planners believed that anything other than a peaceful, well-organized demonstration would damage the cause for which they would march.

On August 28 the marchers arrived. They came in chartered buses and private cars, on trains and planes—one man even roller-skated to Washington from Chicago. By eleven o'clock in the morning, more than 200,000 had gathered by the Washington Monument, where the march was to begin. It was a diverse crowd: black and white, rich and poor, young and old, Hollywood stars and everyday people. Despite the fears that had prompted extraordinary precautions (including presigned executive orders authorizing military intervention in the case of rioting), those assembled marched peacefully to the Lincoln Monument.

After the national anthem and an invocation by Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle came the speeches. Although the official march goals included an endorsement of Kennedy's civil rights bill—in part because the administration had officially cooperated with the march—some of the most passionate speeches criticized the bill as incomplete. John Lewis, the twenty-three-year-old president of SNCC, promised that without “meaningful legislation” blacks would “march through the South.” (His original text, edited to avoid controversy, had continued, “through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently.”) The speech written by CORE's James Farmer, imprisoned in Louisiana, was read by Floyd McKissick. Farmer said the fight for legal and economic equality would not stop “until the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North.” By the time Young and Wilkins spoke, the crowd was quieted by the heat. When Mahalia Jackson took the stage to sing “I've Been ‘Buked and I've Been Scorned,” the crowd revived.

King, the last speaker of the day, was introduced by Randolph as “the moral leader of our nation.” King's speech, eloquent on the page, was electrifying when delivered. With the passionate, poetic style he had honed at the altar, King stirred the audience and built to his reportedly extemporaneous “I have a dream” finale.

The rally concluded with Rustin's reading of the march's ten demands—which included not only passage of the civil rights bill but also school and housing desegregation, job training, and an increase in the minimum wage—and the marchers' pledge, followed by a benediction from Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College. The march ended at 4:20 in the afternoon, ten minutes ahead of schedule. As marchers returned to the buses that would take them home, the organizers met with President Kennedy, who encouraged them to continue with their work.

Although white racists decried it as a sentimental appeal to mainstream white America, the March on Washington was a success. It had been powerful yet peaceful and orderly beyond anyone's expectations, including those of the organizers themselves. Yet it was, according to most historians, the high tide of that phase of the Civil Rights Movement that looked to white support and government solutions. The bombing, just three weeks later, of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—which resulted in the deaths of four young black girls—reminded African Americans of the depth and violence of segregationist America. Increasingly, young African Americans turned to the Black Power Movement, or to the Nation of Islam (one of whose leaders, Malcolm X, had criticized the march) in their search for freedom and strength.

See also Black Power in the United States; Desegregation in the United States; Labor Leaders; Television and African Americans; Washington, D.C.

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