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WEDNESDAY • AUGUST 28 • 2013
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A newspaper in education supplement TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Mass marches were never accepted by presi-
dential administrations in the nation’s capital,
Washington, D.C. Army veteran marches on
Washington in 1894 and 1932 had been met with
tear gas and arrests.
In the summer of 1941, A. Philip Randolph,
founder of the first Black union the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters, was angry that World
War II military spending was lifting whites out of
the Great Depression, but black unemployment
was ignored. He threatened President Franklin
D. Roosevelt with a mass march by 100,000 black
citizens for equal employment opportunity.
Roosevelt, like past presidents, brought all of
his power to bear to try to stop the march. But
Randolph was having none of it. A week before
the march deadline, Roosevelt gave into the pres-
sure and created the first national Fair Employ-
ment Practices Committee to address the issue of
black unemployment. Randolph postponed the
march — for what ended up being more than two
decades.
The administration of President John F. Ken-
nedy, like those in the past, was concerned about a
March on Washington being proposed for August
1963. He felt the nation was on the verge of ex-
ploding and a march might be a catalyst to start ri-
oting as had happened with marches in the South.
Congress was even more terrified of the march.
President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson
met with members of the March organizing com-
mittee to dissuade them because they thought it
would hurt their efforts to persuade Congress to
pass civil rights legislation. Randolph and Martin
Luther King disagree with them. They felt a non-
violent march would show their strength of num-
bers and would dramatize the civil rights issue in
a positive way. The effort to stop the march only
strengthened their resolve. The march was on.
The March on Washington represented a
coalition of ten major civil rights and religious
organizations. Each had a different approach and
different agenda.
The "Big Six" organizers of the March were
(left to right) John Lewis, of the Student Nonvio-
lent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Whitney
Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; A. Philip
Randolph, of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters; Martin Luther King, Jr., of the South-
ern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC);
James Farmer, of the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE); and Roy Wilkins, of the National As-
sociation for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP).
Randolph was chosen as the leader for the
march and he chose his assistant, Bayard Rustin,
to organize the march. Rustin was a controversial
choice because some thought him to be a com-
munist. In return for the choice, Randolph, who
thought it should be an all-black march, agreed
to invite white religious and labor leaders to help
organize, and their members to join the march.
They agreed to a date of August 28, 1963 with
the march starting on the Mall at the Washington
Monument and ending in front of the Lincoln
Memorial. It would be a massive peaceful display
of black and white citizens urging justice and
equal rights.
The goal was to bring at least 100,000 people
to attend. The word went out across the country
through the media, in churches and civil rights
meetings, and by word of mouth. They organized
thousands of chartered trains and buses to move
people from all over the country to Washington,
D.C. Over 250,000 people arrived for the march,
including 60,000 white participants.
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
They made plans for security to make sure white supremacist
groups like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan could not disrupt the
march and that no one who attended would cause trouble. On the
day of the march, 3,900 police from Washington, D.C. and nearby
suburbs and 2,000 National Guardsmen were called to duty, and
several thousand U.S. troops were on standby in Maryland and
Virginia.
A. Philip Randolph opened the speakers program in front of the
Lincoln Memorial. He addressed the crowd as, “the advance guard
of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.” He went on to
express the 10 demands of the march (see What We Demand).
As the speeches continued, the crowds swelled. City officials
became fearful of violence. But this was a peaceful gathering. Many
of the speakers encouraged the black people present to step up their
civil rights protests. SNCC leader John Lewis' speech, though altered
from its original draft, was still the most volatile. He prophesied
that with their superior strength of numbers the black people would
“splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them
back together in the image of God and Democracy.”
Now the time has come for preachers and everybody else to get to Washington and get this very recalcitrant Congress to
see that it must do something and that it must do it soon, because…if something isn’t done…our cities are going to continue
to go up in flames…The extreme voices calling for violence will get a greater hearing in the black community.
So far they have not influenced many, but I contend that if something isn’t done very soon to deal with this basic eco-
nomic problem to provide jobs…then the extremists voices will be heard more and those who are preaching non-violence will
often have their words falling on deaf ears…
We need a movement now to transmute the rage of the ghetto into a positive constructive force…
I can’t see the answer in riots. On the other hand, I can’t see the answer in tender supplications for justice. I see the answer
in…militant non-violence that is massive…attention-getting enough to dramatize the problems, that will be attention-getting
as a riot, that will not destroy life or property in the process. And that is what we hope to do in Washington…”
— Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., excerpts of comments to Rabbi Gendler about the purpose of the March on Washington
