MARCHING ON WASHINGTON, RECLAIMING OUR HISTORY

Honoring A Movement, Not Just a Speech

I can still remember the morning. We had spent the week circulating flyers and trying to anticipate what would happen. No one had ever even attempted a March on the scale of this one. And none of us who marched on Washington forty years ago today would have believed that the media in 2003 would mark it as the anniversary of one man’s speech and not the still unmet demands of a mass people’s movement.

It had been a hot summer of protest. The civil rights struggle was in full throttle with clashes, confrontations and protests. In August 1963, I was a full-time civil rights worker in Baltimore, Maryland. I was on the staff of the Northern Student Movement (NSM), the northern counterpart of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. (SNCC) Our interracial organization was organizing in community-based projects in 8 Northern cities, offering tutoring for disadvantaged students in ghetto schools and mounting marches and actions. Earlier in the summer, I was caught up in what became violent protests at the segregated Glen Echo amusement park in the Baltimore suburbs. Many of us were arrested and attacked by rednecks. My name was in the paper as one of those victims. They drew some blood, that’s all.

At that time, I also represented NSM on the Maryland State Committee for the March on Washington. We had been meeting all summer to plan/organize the mobilization and to try to make sure that all the labor, community, church, and student groups we had reached out to would come. Our own Baltimore Area Youth Opportunities Unlimited (BAYOU) project filled five buses out of East Baltimore, one of the most depressed communities in the state.

UNCERTAINTY

Throughout the summer, we had heard about the cat-and-mouse game being played by the Kennedy Administration which welcomed the march publicly but tried to distance itself from it and even sabotage it. Remember, the March was about jobs and economic justice, too. They tried to determine who should speak and who should not. They wanted to control what would be said. The head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, a mainstream moderate tried to suppress a speech by now-Georgia Congressman John Lewis. He insisted on his right to criticize the then hypocritical policies of the Kennedy Boys who were trying to manage the pace of the civil rights revolution. John refused to bow to JFK, another John. He went ahead despite tremendous pressure to moderate his militancy.

The media was not very enthusiastic. Columnists like Robert Novak red-baited SNCC and Martin Luther King Jr. Many snide and disparaging comments appeared about March organizer Bayard Rustin who was known as a radical and gay to boot. The March’s leader was the veteran labor leader A. Phillip Randolph who I met in his Harlem office as student journalist for the Clinton News, my high school newspaper, back in l960 when I covered the student sit-ins and first crossed the line between journalism and activism.

If you have ever been to Union Station in Washington, you can now see a sculpture honoring the man who led the sleeping car porters, a vanishing breed of railway worker. It was he who insisted that the March call for JOBS and Justice. He used to refer to Martin Luther King as “JAY R” (Jr.), in his deep-voiced polished articulation. He was a James Earl Jones before there was a James Earl Jones. He was also a fighter with great dignity who had led an earlier March that we forget now before I was born, in l941, against Jim Crow in the US military.

THE INTERNAL DEBATE

As an organizer of the march, (albeit, a lowly one) I was privy to the gossip and all the internal politics, to the compromises that had to be made and organizational in-fighting. How militant could we be? Should there be civil disobedience? Would there be counter-protests or violence? No one really knew how many people would turn out or that the “I have a Dream speech” would be what the media would choose to remember. We had no idea then how celebrities and “great men” would dominate the historical record almost as if the millions in whose name Dr. King spoke would be “disappeared” like some human rights advocate years later in Argentina.

As we drove to Washington, we could see that it would be big. Really big! Other marches on other issues would latter be bigger but this one at 250,000 was considered immense. And it was a first. (The Million Man March had a bigger crowd but a smaller impact.) The excitement was palpable as we sang freedom songs and passed a long line of busses from New York and the whole East Coast. We were pouring into the Capital like some unstoppable army of non-violent liberation. Reported the Baltimore Sun: “Like a stream hitting the Mississippi, the Baltimore busses intermixed with a seemingly endless flood of vehicles bearing ‘March on Washington’ signs moving South on the Expressway. (We passed a car with another message: “National Association for the Advancement of White People.”)

Our leaders all wore suits, as did many of the marchers, but many among the Deep South field secretaries came in the blue denim garb of sharecroppers, the uniform of the Southern movement. Union people wore white hats to signal their status as Marshals. If you have seen footage of the March, or the many pictures, you could see those proud black men and women surrounding King on the platform. (Try Google and “March On Washington” to enter a world of historical resources.)

What you may not know is that it was NOT covered live nationally. There was no CNN or CSPAN then. The networks all shot film for what were then 15 minute newscasts. Two films were made, one by the USIA which was shown worldwide as government propaganda to show all the civil rights progress in the USA. The other was bought by the King Family, which has in recent years licensed it to big corporations. The clips of “I have a dream” that we see most come from these two sources.

WE CHEERED UNTIL WE COULD CHEER NO MORE

I ended up with my cohort of young activists near the front. I had a clear line of vision to the stage and could see the whole program, including singers like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Marian Anderson. We cheered until we could cheer no more. King’s speech took us all to the mountain top with him as he spoke of “all of God’s children,” black and white, Jew and gentile, Protestant and Catholic, and being judged by the “content of our character, not the color of our skin.”

Dr. King’s eloquence was still ringing in my ears although I knew what many still don’t–that he deviated from his initial text and had actually given the Dream speech before during a mass Freedom march down Woodward Avenue in Detroit earlier that year in June. Like the March on Washington, it was the United Auto Workers, led by Walter Reuther, who funded most of both events. Workers and their organizations were in the forefront of this fight from day one. Don’t forget them even as the big media has.

Believe me, there was a lot of other great speechifying including the final pledge of action that our media also forgets today. What we are not reminded of were the demands for decent housing, adequate and integrated education, and a “federal massive works and training program” that puts unemployed workers, black and white, back to work. (Note the emphasis on “Black and White.” There was a demand for a “$2.00 minimum wage. It was a call to all Americans for Jobs and Freedom. These issues have been erased from most of our historical memory.)

Not everyone who wanted to come was able to. CORE leader James Farmer was in jail in Louisiana and couldn’t be there. Others who should have been, like voting rights organizer Herbert Lee and NAACP leader Medgar Evers, were dead at the hands of segregationists. Dr. King himself would join them in the ranks of the Movement’s Martyrs in a few short years.

For student activists like myself, John Lewis was our leader. Historian Howard Zinn, who taught in Georgia in those days and authored the first history of SNNC, wrote about his speech for The Nation in l963.

“Standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, John Lewis turned his wrath, not at the easy target, the Dixiecrats, but against the Administration.

“To many, the March had been presented as a gigantic lobby for the Administration’s Civil Rights Bill, but Lewis pointed quickly, unerringly, to the weaknesses in the bill. Furthermore, by sponsoring a new civil-rights bill, the Administration had skillfully turned attention to Congress and deflected the erratic spotlight of the civil-rights movement from possibly focusing on inadequacies of the Executive.

“The straight, crass fact at which John Lewis was aiming is this: the national government, without any new legislation, has the power to protect Negro voters and demonstrators from policemen’s clubs, hoses and jails–and it has not used that power.”

Afterwards John Lewis would criticize the coverage for its feel-good focus, saying “Too many commentators and reporters softened and trivialized the hard edges of pain and suffering that brought about this day in the first place, virtually ignoring the hard issues that needed to be addressed.” What he said then deserves to be heard in our nation’s newsrooms.

WHAT JOHN SAYS NOW

John is the only surviving speaker who appeared on the rostrum that day. He spoke at a commemoration last week that I would have been at if I had not been away. His view now:

“Forty years later, we see an economy that is not doing well. More and more people, young people and minorities, are not able to find work. There are still hundreds of thousands of people . . . who are trapped in a sea of poverty,” said Lewis, now a Georgia Democrat in the House of Representatives. He added: “The American people are too quiet. We’re too complacent. We need to make a little noise.”

THE REPORTING WAS VIVID

It is hard to remember now of all the great reporting that was done to bring the “noise” of this struggle to all Americans. Many of the best journalists were Southerners like Claude Sitton of the New York Times who wrote colorfully about how intimidating it was to confront segregation. One of his dispatches appears in a great two-volume collection called Reporting Civil Rights. Here’s one story I remember reading:

“Sheriff Harasses Negroes at Voting Rally in Georgia.”
The New York Times, July 27, 1962.

SASSER, Ga., July 26-”We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years,” said Sheriff Z. T. Mathews of Terrell County. Then he turned and glanced disapprovingly at the thirty-eight Negroes and two whites gathered in the Mount Olive Baptist Church here last night for a voter-registration rally.

“I tell you, cap’n, we’re a little fed up with this registration business,” he went on.

“As the 70-year-old peace officer spoke, his nephew and chief deputy, M. E. Mathews, swaggered back and forth fingering a hand-tooled black leather cartridge belt and a .38-caliber revolver. Another deputy, R. M. Dunaway, slapped a five-cell flashlight against his left palm again and again.

“The three officers took turns badgering the participants and warning of what “disturbed white citizens” might do if this and other rallies continued.”

Lest you think this is just belongs to a distant past, consider: It is stories like this one that we need remember as we think about what happened in Florida in the year 2000. With 175,000 ballots uncounted in the tightest presidential election in history, it is clear that the voting rights that so many fought for (and would not be protected by law until l964) are still being violated. And we are all now living with the consequences.

UNFORGETTABLE

No one who stood in the August heat that day, many with their feet in the reflecting pond, will ever forget it. It was so new, so hopeful, so filled with righteousness. Linn Washington writes about a young Ed Bradley, now of 60 Minutes, who was also there that day. “DJ Georgie Woods, an avid Civil Rights Movement activist, asked Bradley to serve as a “bus captain” for one of the buses that Woods had chartered to take people to the Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington.

For Ed Bradley, the “March was bigger than anything I’d ever experienced. There’d never been a demonstration like that in our lifetime. It was a feeling that we’d done something special; we were a part of something special,” noted Bradley, who was studying to be an elementary school teacher at Cheyney State in 1963.” (Not that Cheney!)

The March and the Movement changed many of our lives. After it ended, the leaders went to lobby the White House which was surrounded by a security army. Kennedy welcomed the leaders and had the good political sense to stage a photo-op even as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who had been bugging Dr. King, had operatives out spying as best they could. Many of us in the ranks feared our leaders would be co-opted.

RECOMMITTED

After the March, like many others, I recommitted myself to the Movement and dropped out of college at Cornell. I moved to Harlem to work for NSM full time, and ended up editing the magazine Freedom North. I became an organizer in the great Harlem rents strikes.

That night, I wandered with some Southern organizers I knew over to a big DC hotel where many of the leaders were staying and celebrating that the march was consummated so peacefully despite many warnings of impending apocalypse. I spent the night in DC in someone’s hotel room and actually ran into Malcolm X who was there but did not come to the March. All of our movement activists were debating the March’s impact and how to keep the pressure on. We knew that fulfilling the dream would take work.

WHAT THE PAPERS REPORTED–AND DIDN’T

The next morning, in a torrential rain–the hard rain that Dylan said was gonna fall–I took the bus back to Baltimore wondering how we could ever top the great March on Washington.

On the way out of town I picked up some newspapers: The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and News-Post, and New York Daily News. I stashed them away, but, somehow, just in time for this anniversary, found them in a forgotten stash of fading memorabilia. Today, no one saves newspapers. Everyone thinks everything is on line.

Those papers are yellowing and torn but fascinating to review. Here’s the Washington Post headline: “MAMMOTH RALLY OF 200,000 JAMS MALL IN SOLEMN, ORDERLY PLEA FOR EQUALITY.” (Today the accepted turnout figure is 250,000) The lead story reported on a “massive display of fervor.” Security was reported to be greater than that for a presidential inauguration. The police chief estimated that 80 percent of the crowd was black. The Post put the number at 69.1% based on one photo analysis. A second Page 1 story said “Rally Impact on Congress Still Doubtful.” Remember, the political debate then was all about the pending civil rights bill which did later pass.

Not far from that story on the same front page was another more ominous one, about a repressive crackdown by the Diem regime in Saigon. Diem would later be assassinated by the CIA, working for a president who would be assassinated himself in less than three months. In those years JFK was flipping back and forth in his support for the war.

Not everyone heard our call for non-violence. Washington’s escalation of the Vietnam War took place when Lyndon Johnson, who was in the White House with Kennedy on that day, took over. Within a few years, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael would be organizing resistance to the war with slogans based on Muhammad Ali’s declaration: No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” The movement that was so unified in Washington in l963 would soon fragment and divide over the war and other issues. The Mississippi Freedom Democrats would split from the Democratic Party. Black power would splinter black-white unity. The government would target black leaders. All of that was still to come as well.

The Baltimore Sun seemed more concerned about order than justice with headlines about the peaceful nature of the march, “As of early this morning,” reported the lead, “no reports had been received from any part of the country of violence and disturbances” by participants. The Baltimore News-Post also led with a story headlined “Massive Crowd is Orderly.” What did they expect? Or, put another way, what did they fear?

FEAR ON WHITE FACES

This media focus shows that the White establishment was scared shitless when all these black folks came to town.

Years later, writer Tom Wolfe would claim to explain: “When black people first started using the confrontation tactic, they made a secret discovery. There was an extra dividend to this tactic. There was a creamy dessert. It wasn’t just that you registered your protest and showed the white man that you meant business and weakened his resolve to keep up the walls of oppression. It wasn’t just that you got poverty money and influence. There was something sweet that happened right there on the spot. You made the white man quake. You brought fear into his face.”

There clearly was a fear buried in the news reports. What is striking now, when the whole March is portrayed only as an I HAVE A DREAM festival, Dr. King’s speech did not even make page one. It was buried in a page 3. A Post story headlined “Restrained Militancy Marks Rally Speeches.”

Some articles did indicate it received the “biggest applause.” Amazingly, all the BiG media downplayed THE SPEECH. In a sense they BURIED THE LEAD. The story that would become page one in our history books was missed at the time by much of the media. If the media was wrong to miss its significance then, our news outlets are just as wrong to overplay its significance now. Many of the reports I watched on CNN and MSNBC this morning, four decades, on, in effect, edited the movement out of the picture! It was always about the larger we, not just the famous he.

THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING (SORT OF)

There was a Telestar satellite beaming coverage overseas with a special cold war press emphasis on how the Russians covered it. (They didn’t, the Post surmised, because mass protests there are forbidden.) The paper reported: “The image was often jerky during two fifteen minute telecasts. One Polish viewer is quoted as saying “How prosperous they seem.” Remember, many marchers wore their Sunday Church going finery. They were there to impress, as well as to press the issue.

AP reported that even as the US Congress equivocated, “Red China as well as Russia expressed declarations of support for the march. Europe surveyed the march with anxious sympathy.” Senator (later LBJ Vice President) Hubert Humphrey praised the marcher’s “good manners.’

None of this takes away from the magic of that moment and the fact that 40 years on, I am still thinking about those days and how they changed our world, and my own world, at least in part.

These were the days of what we called THE Movement, pronounced Mooovy-ment. It was our community and our classroom, united by faith, often undermined by fear of mad Sheriffs and brutal cops. Remember, in many parts of the country, racism was enshrined in law and social practice.

The short bus ride I took to Washington on that August morning was not as short for those who came from the deep South, from what MLK Jr. called the “hills and molehills of Alabama, Old Stone Mountain in Georgia or Lookout Mountain in Tennessee” or from the bayous of Louisiana or the cotton fields of Mississippi. That March represented the strivings and the struggle of many generations that never thought they would ever see that day.

AMAZING

How amazing it is now to think how I, a son of a garment worker with a family that also fled to this country for freedom from victimization would be so welcomed into a world of ex-slaves; that I who came out of a Bronx housing project would be integrated-yes we all believed in that then–into a centuries-long struggle with deep roots in the earliest days of this country and the African continent before that.

We won the fight against overt forced segregation but, 40 years later, far too many of us live in a still divided nation, separate and unequal. Institutional racism still persists, in our media as well. The struggle is unfinished. And ongoing.

Thinking back now, I realize how incredibly lucky I was to be an eyewitness, and a participant as a small cog in a wheel of history that was so much richer, so much deeper, and so often powered by song.

OUR SONGS, OUR SPIRIT

I learned all the songs that kept our spirits awake and remember them still. Not just our anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” but “This Little Light of Mine” and “We Will Never Turn Back.” We had amazing freedom singers then, and spoke of our goal as achieving a “Beloved Community.” Non-violence was our creed; democracy and human rights our objective.

Just last night before I started writing about the March, I listened to a scratchy disc, with the voice of Bernice Johnson Reagon who I first got to know as an activist from Albany Georgia. On the record she was singing “Over My Head, I see Freedom in the Air.” As she had in a jailhouse there as part of a movement led by another King, C.B. King I think was his name. It embedded itself in my brain because it sounded like it flew out of some deep place in her heart. She could visualize freedom then and has done so much over years with groups like Sweet Honey in the Rock to convey the infectious spirit of those times.

It is a spirit that can’t be reduced to sound bites, speeches or slogans. She speaks of this music as “the reservoir from which blacks draw the songs they use in political and social struggle.” If you haven’t ever heard those songs, or sang along to them, do so before you go. And clap as you do. They were the real media of that Movement.

WE WERE A DIVERSE BUT MIGHTY STREAM

History is written by winners and so we can be pleased today to have many TV programs and series like “Eyes on the Prize” chronicling those civil rights years, but usually only in terms of black emancipation. But there was more to it, let us not forget. Our movement drew its strength from the mix of the people it attracted, people from all classes and contexts, from upwardly mobile homes, and deeply fragmented families, from great poverty and real wealth. We were diverse, a salad bowl, not a melting pot, all part of the mighty stream worked to shake this country up and push it to live up to its ideals.

We were inclusive, what the real America was and is: Mexican-Americans, Japanese Americans, gays and straights, Southern Whites and Northern kids like myself who were politicized and educated in the fulcrum of a force who exercised what Dr. King called, the right to fight for what is right. The struggle may have been driven by the fight for the rights of black people but the real struggle was for the soul and future of this country.

PEOPLE MADE THE MOVEMENT AND THE MOVEMENT REMADE THE PEOPLE.

I was lucky to be one of those fighters in my formative years, to be exposed to the culture of a people’s movement, to be exposed to and in a sense taught by great leaders and role models like Martin and Malcolm, who I was privileged to meet personally. But the greatest of this movement was the great people it inspired to act and shake the dust off their lives, people like John Lewis and Bob Moses, Jim Foreman, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hammer, Stokeley Carmichael. Jerome Smith, Ike Reynolds, James Baldwin, Chuck McDew, Danny Mitchell, Casey and Tom Hayden, Mary Varela, Frank Joyce, Eric Craven, Danny Cassidy, Bob Knight, Sharon Jeffrey, Andrea Cousins, Granville Cherry, Jesse Gray, Q. R. Hand, Bill Strickland and so many, many others. I knew many of them and learned from them all. People like these made the movement and the movement remade us in the people we became.

That March on Washington was not just a political event, not just a day to mark and remember. It was for me and for so many others a personal milestone, a turning point of possibility, a part of the reason I am doing what I am today. It offered us an immersion in the work of social change that defined our lives and times. It taught us that we could make a difference. And still does. It made us what we are and history what it is.

It showed that movements from below can be more important than politics from above.

I never suffered the way many in our movement did or made the sacrifices that claimed lives and destroyed souls. I have no claim to, or desire for, recognition. I was just a foot soldier in the Movement Army, but I do feel I did my duty and served as an American of conscience who was blessed to share, for a brief moment, in a glory that was bigger than us all.

I was 21, just coming of age when the March marched into my memory. Twenty years later I made a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial for that anniversary. I was in Atlanta for the first King Birthday celebration. But even if I can’t be there this year physically, I am emotionally. All I can share are these sentences expressing my own spirit of nostalgia and dedication. Many of us never turned back even as we look back now.

I am happy to report that my little light is still shining.

POSTSCRIPT:

After the website Common Dreams.org posted an earlier version of this piece yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to get this letter from Remi Ogunlana. Your comments would be welcome too at: dissector@mediachannel.org. If what I wrote touches you, please pass it around and forward it to others. Praises be to the Mediachannel for giving me the outlet and your attention.

“Dear Danny,

“I read your memories of the March on Washington on commondreams.org. Your account of the event was so heartfelt, I am moved to contact you.

I am an African American female with a consciousness shaped by growing up in the 1950s and 60s. To me it seems that our society is reverting to an acceptance of pervasive inequalities and injustices. Federal subterfuge has gone unnoticed by many non-right wingers, resulting in masses of people of all ethnicities unable to pinpoint root cause and unable to take appropriate action.

In my opinion, it is important for people like you, Danny, to push the story of the Civil Rights Movement and tell why its story is relevant today for all people in this country. It is important for your to explain the story to non-minorities so they can understand the benefit to them of a society that practices justice at all levels of American society.

As you know, American history, has never been taught truthfully or adequately to produce enlightened citizens. People who have lived the history, have a duty to continue inserting and nurturing the ideals of equality and justice into our collective consciousness. I believe very strongly that we must pierce through the deception of this era with our writings and conversations and demonstrations of all kinds.

There is a possibility that I have not related anything new to you, so please just accept that I needed to say these things. Perhaps my words can serve as unsolicited confirmation of your work. Please, let’s hear more of your voice. Push it through, please.”

Peace”.

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