The March on Washington
The legacy of August 28, 1963
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech 52 years ago at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As William P. Jones reveals in his “magnificent work of historical reconstruction” (Michael Honey), The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, there was far more to the day than we usually remember. What follows is adapted from the preface to the book.
Nearly every American and millions of people around the world are familiar with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, yet most know little about the March on Washington at which it was delivered. The tremendous eloquence and elegant simplicity of the speech meant that many, then and now, came to associate the broader goals of the demonstration with King’s compelling vision of interracial-harmony—a dream of a nation that would finally live up to its founders’ proclamations about the “self-evident” equality of all people, in which children would be judged “by the content of their character” rather than the color of their skin and in which citizens would “be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.” Few know that King’s was the last of ten speeches, capping more than six hours of performances by well-known musicians (including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan), appearances by politicians and movie stars, and statements of solidarity from groups across the nation and around the world—as well as an actual march.
Even fewer know that it was a march “For Jobs and Freedom,” and that it aimed not just to end racial segregation and discrimination in the Jim Crow South but also to ensure that Americans of all races had access to quality education, affordable housing, and jobs that paid a living wage. We forget that King’s task was to uplift the spirits of marchers after a long day in the sun and, for most, a night traveling by bus or train from as far away as New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and even Los Angeles. One reporter observed that while King “ignited the crowd” with his optimistic vision of the future, the other speakers “concentrated on the struggle ahead and spoke in tough, even harsh language.” Yet those other speeches have been virtually lost to history.
On August 28, 1963, nearly a quarter-million people descended on the nation’s capital to demand “Jobs and Freedom.” By “freedom” they meant that every American be guaranteed access to stores, restaurants, hotels, and other “public accommodations,” to “decent housing” and “adequate and integrated education,” and to the right to vote. They also wanted strict enforcement of those civil rights, including the withholding of federal funds from discriminatory programs and housing developments, the reduction of congressional representation in states where citizens were denied the right to vote, and authorization of the attorney general to bring injunctive suits when “any constitutional right is violated.”
“We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution…”
Some of those demands were addressed by a civil rights bill that President John F. Kennedy had introduced to Congress on June 11, 1963, two months before the demonstration. Marchers wanted to pass that bill, but they believe it was far too limited. In addition to equal access to public accommodations and the right to vote, they demanded a “massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers—Negro and white—on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” They wanted to raise the minimum wage to a level that would “give all Americans a decent standard of living,” and to extend that standard to agricultural workers, domestic servants, and public employees, who were excluded from the federal law that created the minimum wage. For many marchers, the most important objective was the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to prevent private firms, government agencies, and labor unions from discriminating against workers on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin.
King delivered the finale at the Lincoln Memorial, but the tone for the day was set in an opening address by A. Philip Randolph, the seventy-four-year-old trade unionist who was the official leader of the March on Washington. Randolph agreed with King on the need for integration and racial equality in the South, but he linked those objectives to a broader national and interracial struggle for economic and social justice. “We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom,” he told the crowd that stretched out for more than a mile before him. He declared that the civil rights movement affected “every city, every town, every village where black men are segregated, oppressed and exploited,” but insisted it was “not confined to the Negroes; nor is it confined to civil rights.” It was critical to end segregation in southern stores and restaurants, the union leader insisted, “but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them.”
What good was an FEPC, he asked, if the rapidly expanding automation of industry was allowed to “destroy the jobs of millions of workers, black and white?” Whereas King appealed to the nation’s founding principles of equality and freedom, Randolph insisted that “real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions.” Ending housing discrimination, for example, would require Americans to reject the assumption that a homeowner’s “property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin.” In the civil rights revolution, he declared, “The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of a human personality.”
In addition to complicating popular memories of the March on Washington, the tenor of Randolph’s and others’ speeches also challenges a common misconception about the broader history of the civil rights movement. Until recently, the most influential accounts presented the 1963 protest as the apex of an exceptional moment when civil rights leaders transcended their ideological and strategic differences by focusing narrowly on “moral imperatives that had garnered support from the nation’s moderates—issues such as the right to vote and the right to a decent education.” The “classical” phase of the civil rights movement began with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954, which struck down the legalized system of segregation in the Jim Crow South, and it ended in the late 1960s, we were told, when the Black Power and New Left movements shifted the focus toward the urban North and to “issues whose moral rightness was not as readily apparent,” such as poverty and discrimination in housing and employment. That interpretation was embraced by critics representing a broad spectrum of American political thought. Conservatives praised King and other civil rights leaders for suppressing calls for “radical social, political, and economic changes” while leftists chided those same leaders for failing to “even grapple with [the] social and economic contradictions” of American capitalism.
Historians have complicated the traditional narrative by tracing the “radical roots of civil rights” back into the 1930s and ’40s and by demonstrating that civil rights activists of many ideological varieties always insisted that access to jobs, housing, and economic security was as vital to their struggle as voting rights and integration. They also reminded us that the movement faced stiff resistance to those demands in the most moderate regions of the urban North, as well as in the conservative South. With few exceptions, however, scholars simply inverted the older story by allowing the March on Washington to remain a moderate exception to a radical “long civil rights movement.” The most influential recent studies still either end the story before 1963 or shift our attention from “leaders on the platform high above the crowd” to local movements and grassroots activists that, scholars contend, more accurately “capture the motivations that led relatively obscure individuals to the March.” By relegating well-known leaders and events to the background, historians have reinforced the old thesis that political constraints of the era “kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class, off the agenda” during the classical phase.
Both the power and the limitations of the traditional narrative are evident in the political career of Barack Obama, who became the nation’s first black president during the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. During his campaign for president in 2008, Obama credited the civil rights movement—often gesturing directly to Congressman John Lewis, who spoke at the March—with “leading a people out of bondage” and laying the foundation for his own success. When discussing social and economic policy, however, he suggested that the racially egalitarian politics of Lewis’ “Moses generation” had lost their effectiveness in an era when poorly funded public services, stagnant wages, and skyrocketing unemployment rates threatened the livelihoods of all Americans, regardless of their race. “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” he stated in his campaign’s most direct attempt to address the question of racial inequality, suggesting that African Americans could transcend the “racial stalemate” that dominated American politics by “binding our particular grievances—for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans.” Referring to his own white grandparents, who came of age during the Depression and the Second World War, the candidate suggested that the social-democratic and race-neutral policies of the New Deal era offered a more effective model for social and economic policy in the twenty-first century.
Obama’s appeal to the “greatest generation” certainly aided his election in 2008, but when he ran for reelection four years later the lessons to be drawn from their experiences seemed less clear. The president had implemented an ambitious economic recovery program and the most dramatic reform of the nation’s health care system since the 1960s, both of which benefited white Americans as much as or more so than nonwhites. Yet the racial polarization of American politics had only increased. Although unemployment rates had fallen at a slightly faster rate for black and Latino workers than for whites, they remained far higher than the national average. Still reluctant to address racial inequality directly, Obama spoke out powerfully against clear cases of discrimination and racist violence but had no narrative to explain the more complex interactions between racial and economic inequality. Meanwhile, polls indicated that white voters were even less likely to support the black candidate than they had been four years earlier. Rather than transcending racial differences through a color-blind appeal to economic interests, Obama won reelection by uniting a broad coalition of nonwhite workers, women of all races, liberal youth, and a few white men around demands for equality and economic justice.
“A gentle army of quiet, middle-class Americans who came in the spirit of the church outing…”
While Randolph, King, and other national figures were the official spokesmen for the March on Washington, the primary task of organizing the protest fell to staff and elected officials of local civil rights organizations, unions, churches, and other groups who lived in the same working-class communities that formed the primary base of support for the movement. Perhaps the most important evidence of agreement between leaders and marchers was simply the fact that so many people travelled hundreds or even thousands of miles—most missing a day or more of work and all but a few paying their own way—to be in Washington that day. Some were students or full-time activists, but the vast majority consisted of auto workers and meatpackers, teachers and letter carriers, domestic servants and sharecroppers who—aside from their membership in unions and civil rights organizations—had little history of political protest. Journalist Russell Baker described them as “a gentle army of quiet, middle-class Americans who came in the spirit of the church outing,” suggesting that they were in Washington for pleasure or out of a sense of religious or patriotic duty. Malcolm X, a black nationalist who accused Randolph, King, and other leaders of tempering the radicalism of the protest, argued that the marchers had been “fooled.” Given the size and enthusiasm of the crowd, however, it seems more likely that they believed deeply in the message that Randolph, King, and others proclaimed from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day.
Even on the basis of King’s dream of racial equality and integration, that message was hardly moderate. By 1963, the civil rights movement had already changed Americans’ views about racial equality. Polls showed that 83 percent of whites believed that “Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job,” for example, nearly double the percentage that held that same view when A. Philip Randolph first called for a March on Washington in 1941. Even in the rigidly segregated South, a majority of whites had no objection to riding a bus with a black person or to a black family “with the same income and education” buying a house on their block. Civil rights leaders faced resistance, however, when they asked the government to enforce those ideals. Nearly a decade after the Brown decision, only one percent of black students in the South attended school with any white students. Yet 75 percent of white southerners and 50 percent of white northerners accused President Kennedy of “pushing integration too fast.” Three-quarters of white northerners believed that a property owner had the right to sell or rent a home to a family regardless of their race, but less than half of them thought the government should force them to do so.
The economic policies that marchers demanded were no less controversial. They wanted to raise the minimum wage to $2 an hour, even though Kennedy had struggled to increase it to $1.25 just two years earlier. By 1963, Kennedy had abandoned the “old slogans,” like wage increases and public works programs of the New Deal era, in favor of “new tools” for creating economic growth, such as tax cuts and free trade. A. Philip Randolph’s FEPC had been defeated in nearly every session of Congress since the Second World War. After watching Bayard Rustin close the March on Washington by reading the full list of demands while “every television camera at the disposal of the networks was upon him,” left-wing journalist Murray Kempton remarked: “No expression one-tenth so radical has ever been seen or heard by so many Americans.”
Of course the true test of any political movement lies not so much in its goals or objectives as in its ability to achieve them, and in this regard as well, historians have been too eager to dismiss the March on Washington. While some adopted Russell Baker’s assertion that marchers were simply affirming the basic principles of “middle-class” America, others agreed with Malcolm X that they were naïve to believe that they could challenge 400 years of white supremacy with a “one day ‘integrated’ picnic.” More recent scholars have acknowledged the radical roots of Randolph, King, and other leaders but—echoing broader trends in the literature—conclude that media coverage “simultaneously blunted the march’s broad political demands” and reduced its message to King’s optimistic Dream, while continued resistance from Congress “meant that the march yielded no immediate legislative gains.” It is true that newspapers and television broadcasts were filled with praise for King’s speech, but they also highlighted the other leaders and the full list of the march’s demands. It took nearly a year to pass Kennedy’s bill, and many supported it to honor the president after his assassination in November of 1963 rather than to respond to the civil rights movement.
But the Civil Rights Act that President Lyndon Johnson signed on July 2, 1964, had the marks of the March on Washington all over it. Most importantly, it included the FEPC clause that Randolph had fought for since the 1940s. Unexpectedly, the law also banned employment discrimination based on sex, in addition to race, color, religion, and national origin, thus realizing—through a complicated and often contradictory set of events—Anna Hedgeman’s and other black women’s efforts to expand the scope of the March on Washington Movement. In addition to supporting the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson pledged to couple it with an “unconditional war on poverty,” an idea he adopted from the Kennedy administration but bolstered with measures—such as the minimum wage increase and federal investments in education, housing, and job training—that were demanded by the March on Washington. Those items were scaled back dramatically as the War on Poverty made its way through Congress, and civil rights leaders would soon realize how weak the Civil Rights Act was, but they had won a victory for African Americans and the cause of racial equality that was certainly appropriate for the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Speaking to a conference of black leaders sixteen months after the March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph observed that the “Civil Rights Revolution has been caught up in a crisis of victory.” Comparing that crisis to the disillusionment that set in among former slaves and abolitionists in the 1870s and 1880s, when the achievements of emancipation were undermined by the rise of Jim Crow, and to the decline of labor militancy following the upheavals of the 1930s, he warned that many activists were frustrated with the limited nature of the victories they had already achieved, that they had stopped moving forward and were in danger of losing ground. He was responding to divisions that had challenged the movement during preparations for the march and widened during the campaign to pass the Civil Rights Act. They included debates over the utility of mass protest versus legislative lobbying, the relationship between race and sex discrimination, and the possibility of interracial cooperation. In many respects our historical memory of the March on Washington is still caught up in that crisis of victory, in part because those conflicts have not been resolved but also because we still allow them to overshadow the significance of what was actually accomplished by bringing a quarter-million people to the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963.
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William P. Jones, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is a specialist in civil rights and labor history and contributes to The Nation and other publications. He and his family live in Madison, Wisconsin.
