The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a gathering of labor leaders, civil rights activists and a mass of people estimated at over 250,000, was one of the preeminent events in American history. In addition to contributing directly to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the march is also remembered for Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, widely considered the greatest piece of oratory ever delivered.
While most Americans know about the march, there remains a void in the collective consciousness about how it came to be and what really took place on August 28, 1963.
With the 50th anniversary on the horizon, the Atlanta Daily World spoke to some of the architects and attendees of the march that catalyzed the movement and changed history.
THE MAKING OF THE MARCH
Bernard Lafayette, director of American Friends Service Committee, former director of SNCC’s Alabama Voter Registration Project, and associate of Martin Luther King Jr.:
The March on Washington in 1963 was part of a total strategy in the movement to bring about social change. It was not simply another march or demonstration. It grew out of the Birmingham movement. It came about because of things that were already in motion.
One key component in the strategy for nonviolence is that in order to win or succeed in making major change, or in order for a revolution to succeed, there are certain components that are necessary. One is that no revolution has ever been successful without winning the sympathy, if not the active support, of the majority. The March on Washington was the part of the strategy to demonstrate that the majority of people in America were ready for change.
Xernona Clayton, wife of Jet Magazine editor Ed Clayton, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter and PR manager, and close friend and travel companion of Coretta Scott King:
SCLC, Martin Luther King’s movement, had just come out of a very, very stressful movement. The Birmingham movement took all of the energy and all of the planning and all of the manpower and everything. So Birmingham just sapped the energy of the SCLC in that neck of the woods.
A lot of people don’t realize that Martin Luther King did not call this march. This was a call from A. Philip Randolph, who called all the civil rights organizations and told them he had this idea and asked them to join. Some people didn’t but Martin Luther King felt that he could and should. He knew there would be reluctance from some people, but that was a massive call to try to get everybody to go to Washington.
Ralph Worrell, organizer District 65 Retail Wholesale Department Store Union and assistant to Cleveland Robinson, chairman and March on Washington organizer:
It was about six months, took about six months putting this thing together. A. Philip Randolph, he was a key figure that put this whole thing together; he and Bayard Rustin, who coordinated the march.
Clayton:
The planning was done independently and collectively, meaning there were some plans made here within the framework of the organization, SCLC, and the national planning was done by Mr. Bayard Rustin who did the legwork and worked out the mechanics of it all. That was done from Mr. A Philip Randolph’s office and then the plans were funneled down through all the civil rights organizations who were gonna participate.
Worrell:
One thing they discussed a lot during that period was jobs were leaving the United States and going overseas. So the main thing was to highlight that and bring jobs back to America and show the importance of the jobs needed here. That was the main focus: it was jobs, jobs, jobs, because they recognized that if you have jobs you could eliminate a lot of hunger and poverty and whatnot.
Lafayette:
There were some people who were reluctant to have the march because they didn’t want to have a poor showing. There were others who were fearful that the situation in Birmingham and the hostility that existed had riled people up to the point where they also were angry. These were black people, seeing what happened to their children and that kind of thing.
In fact some people said, ‘If we get up there and violence breaks out in the nation’s capitol, all these black folks up there, that’s gonna set the movement and the efforts that we’ve made back 50 years.’ So some people were very reluctant to going there. The thing that gave momentum in a very short period of time, like almost three weeks before this event took place, was the phone calls started coming in from different local community groups asking, ‘Where do we park our buses?’
THE DAY OF THE MARCH
Joseph E. Lowery, vice president and co-founder of SCLC:
We were surprised and excited because we hadn’t really tried a national march before. We weren’t sure how many to expect. I got there early because I had come down from Chicago and I got out [on the mall] and nobody was there. I got a little worried, but soon buses started pulling up and I could see the people were coming. And seeing all those people, black people, white people, everybody together, it was something.
CT Vivian, SCLC director of affiliates and liaison to Martin Luther King Jr.:
That morning there was about seven of us sitting up in front of the Washington monument and we were waiting to see whether this was gonna be a success…wondering would people really come. When people flooded in, we knew that this was going to be a major change in our relationships to the American public, the American white public in particular, and to the power decision makers in American action and thought.
Elizabeth Williams-Omilami, daughter of Hosea Williams, SCLC coordinator and executive board member:
I had been coming to civil rights marches all my life, but I just thought it was the biggest, most exciting event that I probably would ever go through in my life. I was with the staff, we were working on food for the marchers, water, where people were gonna sleep. And being a little girl watching all of that happen around me…I just really cried, because, you know, it was so beautiful. It was like what you think heaven would be like – black people, white people, Jewish people, Hispanic people, the singing, the songs, the music. It was like a civil rights Woodstock or something like that.
Clayton:
I remember I jokingly said ‘Oh boy, [the march is] gonna be met with great resistance. The White House and all the people in Washington do not want all you black people up there walking on the grass.’ I made kind of a joke about it, so you can imagine, as was everybody, I was very surprised when over 250,000 people decided they were gonna go.
Lowery:
We were only hoping for 50,000 people. If we got that we figured it’d be big. It ended up being around 300,000 people. At first they tried to say it was only 100,000 then they said 150,000 and then 200,000. Finally they got to 250,000.
George Mitchell, march participant and Howard University student:
We left Chicago in the afternoon. We rode there all night and got there in the morning…As I recalled we got there around 7:30, 8:00 in the morning. By the time we got there we couldn’t get very close to the actual podium, to the dais. We were about halfway back by the reflecting pool.
I knew there would be a lot of people, but I had no idea how big the crowd would be. When someone tells
you a quarter million people it’s hard to imagine that until you’re there then you say, ‘Holy moly, look at all these people here.’
John Lewis, chairman of SNCC and March on Washington speaker:
Many of us were coming fresh from the heart of the Deep South, some of us fresh from jails…Medgar Evers had been assassinated, we had been beaten on the Freedom Rides, beaten during the sit-ins, and Dr. King and Rev. Abernarthy and Fred Shuttlesworth had been arrested in Birmingham. So they came to Washington to petition the congress and the president. And to see that sea of humanity from all over the country, it was very, very moving.
Vivian:
We were trying to be heard in terms of making the nation realize that it had to make a change. And that’s what all of our organizations were doing. Remember, we were so shaky that we didn’t want John Lewis to even speak, because he represented [SNCC] and…he was too radical, we thought. It’s our group that was afraid of that, not just white people, because we didn’t want to shake white people’s belief that we were nice guys, good fellas.
Lewis:
[SNCC] brought a sense of urgency. Some people said we were too fiery, that we were too militant, they wanted me to cool down. I understood what people were saying, that we should be together and should be singing from the same book. Dr. King said, ‘Can we change [the speech]? It doesn’t represent you.’ A Philip Randolph said, ‘We’ve come so far together, Can we change that?’ I had so much affection and love for those two men, I couldn’t say no to Dr. King and I couldn’t say no to A. Philip Randolph.
Nan Grogan Orrock, march participant and Mary Washington College student:
People may not realize this 50 years later but Washington was in a turmoil. There was all this media coverage on press and radio about how people were leaving the city…and that people were gonna be armed sitting on their front porches because the black hordes were coming to town. The federal government shut down. Federal everything was closed, shut down, for that day.
Lewis:
They asked people to stay home. They closed all the liquor stores. But it was so orderly, it was so peaceful; not a single arrest. It was like going to a church camp meeting.
Lafayette:
[President John F. Kennedy] was supportive of the efforts we were making in the areas of civil rights, but he also was mindful of the fact that he was working on the international scene and he was touting the virtues of democracy and a public form of government as opposed to communism. This was an era in which we were trying to show the rest of the world that a U.S. form of democracy should be more desirable and more effective and fair and is the system that modeled others.
And what JFK was concerned about is that these demonstrations and these marches showed discontent with the system. It made it a little more difficult for him to try to tell the rest of the world to look at us as a model when you had people complaining and protesting that they were not treated as equal citizens. In spite of that, we felt that we had been waiting too long.
Orrock:
I had actually had the luxury as a white person in the South to not truly understand the depths of racial oppression and what it meant for people in their lives and how compelled people were to fight against it. The oppression of people of color was not being taught to white kids in the South, you can believe. I knew that whole chapters of America’s history and the American reality were not being shared with people of my skin color. So [the march] was a real eye opener for me.
DR. KING’S “I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH
Vivian:
The thing that hit me was here we’re sitting there and WEB DuBois had just died the morning before in Ghana. Here was the great genius, the African-American genius, one of the great geniuses of American life who had died…and here that afternoon we were gonna see the rise of Martin King, the great spiritual genius of African-American life who was, in fact, to be the spiritual leader for a generation of people.
Clayton:
We were in the hotel where Dr. King was staying and people were calling him periodically going, ‘Another bus has come up from South Carolina so we’ve got a few more people here. We just saw a train come in from the West Coast, so we’ve got more people.’ They kept feeding him this info about how many people were coming, never knowing until morning, cause this was about 4 a.m. when we finally finished everything.
Dr. King, although he had stayed up all night working on that speech, that’s not the speech that he prepared. He got there and was so mesmerized and so impacted by the number of people, because as far as you could see [there was] nothing but a sea of people. He changed his speech and that’s when the ‘I have a dream’ came, but that was not included initially. He changed some context of his speech after he was just so taken back by this crowd.
Bernice King, youngest child of SCLC President Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King:
My mother felt like it was a very significant day, a turning point for the movement. She felt that my father was at his best. The point in which he started reciting the ‘I have a dream’ portion, he went away from the paper and she said it was as if heaven had come to earth in that moment, like the Kingdom of God had descended on the Lincoln Memorial right there in our midst.
Worrell:
It was just amazing. The atmosphere was at such a high pitch and love and excitement. And then after Martin’s speech, it took it to another level. You never thought you would reach a level like that.
People were just speechless and you really didn’t grasp the whole speech and where he was going. [It wasn’t] until after you got on the buses and you start talking with each other that you realize the powerful speech that was made, the commitment that he had and the road that he wanted us to travel.
Mitchell:
At that point, I don’t think I had any concept of how important and significant his speech was. You hear the words, not only from him, but from others who were speaking there too, but I didn’t really have any concept at that time of how significant that was. To me, the significance of that event was that there were people gathered there in search of jobs, economic opportunity and civil rights. But Dr. King’s speech kind of focused everyone on what the real objective was and that is fair treatment and wanting to be viewed by what you are and what you do, not by the color of your skin.
King:
It was a really good feeling when they left. It was a feeling that they were going to be able to get that legislation, the Civil Rights Act, passed. So that was a pivotal moment in our nation’s history and I think everybody felt a sense of inspiration and hopefulness and excitement because when they were coming out of Birmingham, which was a very tough period.
Williams-Omilami:
I remember going back to school with kids that had not gone to the march and sort of feeling different than them. You felt like you were special, like you had been a part of something really special that they hadn’t gotten a chance to witness, and you just hoped that it wouldn’t stop, that feeling wouldn’t stop and go back to that feeling of fear before of people burning crosses in our yard and threatening phone calls and being afraid that something bad was going to happen. All that left me and I just felt hope and freedom.
MOVING FORWARD
Lewis:
There was fear in 1963, now the fear is gone. People feel freer and the march helped libera
te and free not just a people, but a nation.
King:
I was only five months of age when this took place in 1963, so I’m excited to be a part of the [50th anniversary march]. And it means a great deal to know that my father’s life, and death, was not in vain. Fifty years later, perhaps things are just as bad in some regards. For the masses of people in the African-American communities, we still have great disparities. So it’s almost like on the one hand there’s a sense of excitement, but there’s still a sense of sadness as well that we have not progressed as far as we probably should have.
But I feel excited about it, I feel it’s an opportunity for us to really begin again, to get it right and I’m just glad to be alive at this point in the history of our nation
Bernard Lafayette is the executive board chairman of SCLC and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.
Xernona Clayton is the creator and founder of the Trumpet Awards, an organization honoring African American achievement, and creator of the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.
Ralph Worrell is a leading advocate for the SCLC and works at the organization’s Atlanta headquarters.
Joseph E. Lowery is a Methodist minister known as the “dean of the civil rights movement.” He is a 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree and the founder of the Joseph E. Lowery Institute at Clark Atlanta University.
CT Vivian serves as the president of SCLC. He is the founder of the CT Vivian Leadership Institute and a 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree.
Elizabeth Williams-Omilami is the CEO of Hosea Feed the Hungry, a nonprofit organization started by her father, and an actress and human rights activist.
George Mitchell is President of the Illinois State NAACP.
John Lewis is the U.S. Rep. for Georgia’s 5th congressional district, serving since 1987. He is Senior Chief Deputy Whip of the House and a 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree.
Nan Grogan Orrock is a Georgia State Senator representing district 36. She served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1987 to 2006 and was the first woman elected House Majority Whip.
Bernice King is the CEO of the King Center. She has a master’s degree in Divinity from the Candler School of Theology and a Juris Doctor in law from Emory University.