EIGHTEEN 

THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

A. PHILIP RANDOLPH and his associates had been planning a march on Washington since late 1962. In late January 1963, Bayard Rustin, Norman Hill, and Tom Kahn gave Randolph a memo describing a “mass descent” on Washington for May 1963. They envisioned one hundred thousand people coming to Washington for two days of protests, including blocking all legislative business in Washington and presenting Congress and the president with a legislative agenda to draw attention to “the economic subordination of the American Negro” and the need for creating “more jobs for all Americans.”¹ Integrating schools, housing, transportation, lunch counters, and restaurants would be of little use, the document said, as long as “fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists.” The second day of the protest would be devoted to a mass rally.

Randolph approved the plan; target dates of June 13 and 14 were selected. Now the plans were to have one day of legislative lobbying and one day featuring a mass procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, ending at a rally at the Lincoln Memorial that the president would be invited to address. Randolph’s organization, the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), approved the plan on March 23. Randolph then approached Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League. Both were cool to the idea, and King expressed little interest—he was in the middle of the Birmingham campaign.

In early June 1963, given Kennedy’s inadequate leadership during the Birmingham crisis, King was ready to discuss the idea. The civil rights movement should sponsor an interracial March on Washington that could include sit-ins on Capitol Hill. On June 11, King’s New York representatives announced that a protest, using disruptive tactics, would be held later that summer if the federal government didn’t move quickly to help Black Americans. But given President Kennedy’s speech later that day embracing civil rights on national television, King decided that the march’s focus should be on Congress, not the president.

Representatives from SCLC, CORE, SNCC, and the NALC decided that the march would be held sometime between August 10 and 24, and that each organization should name one person to a coordinating committee to plan the details. At the suggestion of Steven Currier, a wealthy New York philanthropist, the civil rights leadership agreed to establish the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership to serve as a clearinghouse for soliciting and dividing large contributions.

Back in Birmingham on a weekly visit to monitor the agreement on June 20, 1963, King announced the March on Washington at a mass meeting. Kennedy had sent his civil rights bill to Congress the day before. “As soon as they start to filibuster,” King said, “I think we should march on Washington with a quarter of a million people.”² In New York City the next day, the march was formally announced. It would focus on jobs and Black unemployment, not just on the need for new civil rights laws.

Within hours, Kennedy had invited the civil rights leadership to a White House meeting the next day, June 21, 1963. The March on Washington might hurt more than it would help, the president claimed. “It seemed to me a great mistake to announce a March on Washington before the bill was even in committee,” the president said. “The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation—and this may give some members of Congress an out.”³ Vice President Johnson said the same thing: “We have to be careful not to do anything which would give those who are privately opposed a public excuse to appear as martyrs.”

James Farmer of CORE and King objected. The march was an alternative to violence, King argued. “It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed.”

“Including the Attorney General,” the president replied.⁴

THE FBI AND COMMUNISTS IN THE MOVEMENT

When the meeting broke up, Kennedy invited King into a private meeting in the White House Rose Garden. Once they were alone, the president repeated a warning King had already been given twice that day. Just before the civil rights leadership met with President Kennedy, Burke Marshall had taken King aside to warn him that two of his associates, Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levison, were agents of the Communist Party. Levison, Burke Marshall said, was a Communist Party functionary who had “planted” O’Dell inside SCLC to influence the civil rights movement. There must be some confusion, King said; there was a difference between a person who was sympathetic to Marxism and a Communist Party member. No, Marshall said. Stanley Levison was “a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus.” When King asked for proof, Marshall said security considerations prevented him from saying any more. Seeing that King was not convinced, Marshall gave way to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy repeated the charges, and again King asked for proof. Many people in the South thought Kennedy was a Communist, King argued; everyone in the movement had been called a Communist for years. Kennedy told King this was different; Levison was even more sinister than Kennedy was permitted to say. The information about him came from the highest ranks of American espionage.⁵

Now the president of the United States walked King through the Rose Garden, as if he himself was afraid of secret surveillance. O’Dell and Levison were Communists, the president told King. O’Dell was a ranking member of the American Communist Party. Stanley Levison’s position was so highly classified that it could not be revealed to a man outside the secret world. Levison was O’Dell’s “handler,” the president said. O’Dell was “the number five Communist in the United States.” “I don’t know if he’s got time to do that,” King said, trying to make a joke. “He’s got two jobs with me!” Kennedy didn’t think that was funny. “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too,” Kennedy said. “So we’re asking you to be careful.”⁶

Three nights later, on June 24, King met with Jack O’Dell, Andrew Young, and others in a New York hotel room. Stanley Levison could not join them; he was on vacation. Some of them joked about the Communist agent being absent, just when the masses had the capitalists on the run. O’Dell was almost too angry to talk. The issue here, he said, wasn’t himself. He was proud of his associations with Communists; most of the people in the room knew them. They were important people to the movement. O’Dell had never done anything to hurt the movement. “J. Edgar Hoover can kiss my ass,” he said.⁷

Others agreed. This was a purge that started with Levison and O’Dell; who knew where it might end? The movement couldn’t allow a witch hunt—it would self-destruct, bit by bit. King agreed. The government wanted them to sacrifice one set of principles—freedom of association and loyalty—to achieve another—the civil rights bill. “You know,” King said, “it’s one thing to have the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department come down on you. I can handle that. And even the Attorney General. But when Burke Marshall, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States all come down on you in one day, you have to consider that. You have to give it some weight.”⁸

The information about Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levison came, of course, from J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI since 1924. Hoover had long made it his business to stay informed about what he called “racial matters.” During the Montgomery bus boycott, the Mobile FBI office had gathered a few bits of information about King and the Montgomery Improvement Association, but the FBI’s interest in Black America dated to 1917. For the FBI, Blacks were second-class citizens who naturally had second-class loyalties. By 1919, FBI offices across the country regularly solicited information about “the Negro question,” recruiting “reliable” informants who reported on anyone who preached “social equality” or “equal rights.” They infiltrated groups as moderate as the NAACP and as radical as the African Blood Brotherhood, an organization founded in 1919 that advocated armed self-defense against white attacks and coalesced with the Communist Party USA.⁹

As the twenty-four-year-old director of the FBI’s General Intelligence Division, Hoover had concluded that “the Reds have done a vast amount of evil damage by carrying doctrines of race revolt and the poison of Bolshevism to the Negroes.”¹⁰ A life-long bachelor, Hoover’s sexual anxieties were reflected in the special interest he developed in the sex lives of those he investigated; he thought oversexed Black men posed a special threat to white women. He used four Black men to infiltrate Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), accusing Garvey of “pro-Negroism.” He investigated the Black press for promoting “sex equality” and unsafe ideas about “the Negro’s fitness for self-government.” When Hoover became FBI director, he weeded out all but two of the handful of Black agents in the FBI; there were never more than a handful of Black agents until after he died in 1972.

Hoover’s FBI, encouraged by President Roosevelt, gathered intelligence reports on radicals, including Communists and Nazis; information on Blacks was collected under special categories called “Negroes” and “Negro trends.” In 1942, Hoover launched his most aggressive “Negro Question” investigation, asking his agents to discover “why particularly Negroes or groups of Negroes . . . evidenced sentiments for other ‘dark races’ (mainly Japanese).”¹¹ He investigated Black-owned newspapers, recruited Black informants, wiretapped the offices of civil rights groups, and sent derogatory information about the NAACP and Urban League to their contributors. He was particularly interested in rumors about Black domestic servants joining “Eleanor Clubs,” named after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; the rumor reported that their slogan was “A White Woman in the Kitchen by Christmas.”¹²

During the 1943 riots that swept Detroit and other cities, Hoover’s FBI probed unsuccessfully for proof that Communists had incited the riots. His men did find that Black attitudes were shifting. The Richmond, Virginia, office reported “a definite change in the attitude of some Negroes,” saying, “A number of them appear to have become more disrespectful, more assertive of their rights and more discontented with their station in life.”¹³

In 1939, the FBI’s ability to protect the civil rights of Black Americans was expanded when the Civil Liberties Unit was established in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The FBI would serve as investigators of civil rights complaints, but Hoover was reluctant to enter into aggressive civil rights investigations, especially of police brutality complaints, where his men would have to investigate the police officers they worked closely with in other cases; the Justice Department waxed and waned in its enthusiasm.

In 1947, the bureau had three Black agents: one worked in Hoover’s office, taking hats and coats from visitors, and one wore a chauffeur’s cap and drove the director around. Hoover appointed these two special agents to keep them from being drafted and exempted them from civil service protection. The third, who had helped to investigate Marcus Garvey, supervised the weapons in the New York office.

When President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights called Hoover to testify, Hoover secretly investigated the committee. During the Eisenhower presidency, Hoover managed to rescind a Truman-era directive allowing the FBI to investigate civil rights complaints on its own; now the FBI would have to be ordered to do so by the attorney general.

In 1956, Hoover developed a counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. It conducted burglaries and break-ins in a widespread program of illegal harassment of Communists and any others that Hoover thought were subversive. By 1959, there were four hundred agents in New York assigned to monitor subversive activities; four were assigned to organized crime.

Hoover called the killing of Emmett Till an “alleged lynching,” began wiretapping the Nation of Islam in 1957, briefed Eisenhower and Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren on the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, maintained secret dossiers on thousands, and secretly supplied information on the private lives and political associations of thousands of Americans to presidents, sympathetic members of Congress, and dozens of newspaper columnists and writers. Hoover’s agents tried to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide. The list of lives destroyed and careers ruined by Hoover and the FBI will never be fully known.

Interest in Martin Luther King had increased when the New York FBI office opened a King file in 1958. In October 1960, an informant reported on that year’s SCLC convention. In December 1960, federal judge Irving Kaufman told the New York bureau that King and the NAACP were supporting the Committee for Secure Justice for Morton Sobell, who had been convicted of espionage. But when, in a February 1961 article in The Nation, King called for more Blacks in federal employment, including the FBI, bureau interest increased.¹⁴

The Freedom Rides in 1961 quickened the FBI’s interest. Hoover asked for information on King and other leaders of the rides. The report he received said King had contact with “subversive” groups, going back as far as 1948 when young Martin Luther King attended a Progressive Party meeting at Morehouse College.

Little other information was reported about King or SCLC until January 8, 1962, when Hoover wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that Stanley Levison, “a member of the Communist Party, USA,” was “allegedly a close advisor to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.”¹⁵ Hoover said that an FBI informant within the Communist Party had reported that Levison had written a speech King had delivered to an AFL-CIO conference in Miami in December 1961.

Levison and King had actually known each other for more than two years. They had been introduced in December 1956 by Bayard Rustin. With Rustin, Randolph, and Ella Baker, Levison had formed a New York group called In Friendship, to raise money for the victims of Southern vigilantes. It sponsored a May 1956 rally at Madison Square Garden to raise funds for the Montgomery Improvement Association.

Levison was a lawyer and businessman. Born in 1912 in New York, he was a University of Michigan graduate who had received a law degree from St. John’s University Law School in 1939. Levison had made his money from real estate investments and a car dealership. He had been active in the American Jewish Congress and had raised money for a variety of liberal and progressive causes.

He became inactive in the Communist Party in 1955. He wanted to use his skills to help King where King was weak—in complicated financial and legal matters, and in writing and editing his books and speeches. He had helped Rustin prepare the working papers for the meeting in 1957 that created SCLC. He helped King draft and edit his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, and helped to negotiate the contract with the publisher. He met Coretta at the airport after King was stabbed in New York. He helped SCLC set up formal fund-raising procedures, and he advised King on SCLC’s staff and personnel, interviewing Wyatt Tee Walker for the executive director’s job and a young man—King couldn’t remember his name—for the job of citizenship director. The young man’s name was Andrew J. Young.

The FBI had long thought Levison was still an active member of the Communist Party. In 1959, following the second Youth March on Washington, Hoover noticed that A. Philip Randolph thanked Stanley Levison for helping arrange the demonstration. Documents at the FBI noted that Levison was close to King; Hoover concluded that Levison had been placed by the CPUSA to influence King and the civil rights movement.

The FBI had followed Levison and wiretapped his telephone since 1954 and had broken into his office in New York twenty-nine times between 1954 and 1964. In 1961, an FBI informant reported that Levison was writing speeches for King and advising him. Robert Kennedy authorized a legal wiretap on Levison’s telephone, and members of the administration who knew King—Burke Marshall, John Seigenthaler, the attorney general himself, and Harris Wofford, who knew both men—would be asked to warn King about Levison and Jack O’Dell, who had formerly been a party member too.¹⁶

On several occasions, King was warned by administration officials about both men; on each occasion, he asked for proof and said Levison’s service and friendship bound them together. After receiving warnings from Seigenthaler and Wofford, King and other SCLC officials met with Robert Kennedy at a Washington hotel to discuss voter registration. Wofford asked Kennedy if he knew the name of the man who had sat beside him. “That was Stanley Levison,” Wofford said.

In June 1961, those privy to the wiretap heard King tell Levison he wanted to hire Jack O’Dell as an administrative aide; Levison warned that O’Dell’s past might hurt King. King said his past didn’t matter; if he would say his party membership was in the past, that was all King required. O’Dell stayed in the New York office, but the FBI reported to Kennedy that O’Dell remained in the party. He had, they said, been elected to the party’s national committee under a false name three years earlier. O’Dell had been an organizer for the Communist Party USA in the late 1940s and early 1950s in New Orleans. In 1963, pressure from the administration about O’Dell and Levison continued on King. Meanwhile, Levison met with party members in March to tell them he was formally ending his ties with the party.

The information about Stanley Levison came largely from two brothers, Jack and Morris Childs, party members and FBI informants since 1952. The Childs brothers were conduits for money from the Soviet Union to the Communist Party USA. Morris also traveled around the world, meeting with top figures in the world Communist movement, as a representative of the American party. He and his brothers were prizes for the FBI; their code name was SOLO. Each of the presidents from Kennedy through Carter knew about SOLO.

Hoover, who loved to curry favor with power, mentioned the FBI’s interest in Levison to Senator Eastland; Eastland subpoenaed Levison to appear before the Senate Internal Security Committee on April 30, 1962. Represented by William Kunstler, Levison denied that he was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party and took the Fifth Amendment in response to all other questions. To his great surprise, King’s name never came up. On the same day the subpoena had been issued, the Atlanta FBI office sent a thirty-seven-page report to FBI headquarters stating that no significant Communist influence was exerted on King or SCLC. Headquarters told Atlanta the statement was incorrect; they were ordered to produce a revised report.

At the same time the FBI ordered its New York office to increase surveillance on Levison and O’Dell, King’s name was added to the second rank of the FBI’s enemies list—one step below the top, where Levison was listed. There were twelve thousand names in Levison’s group—all supposedly members of the CPUSA or similar groups. King’s listing was for lesser offenders. Both lists were intended to make it easier to detain and arrest those listed in case of a presidentially declared national emergency. The Atlanta office was told to add King to the pickup list. In June 1962, information from the New York office on O’Dell and Levison was sent to Atlanta; they were told to reevaluate their earlier report clearing King and SCLC of Communist influence.

After repeated prodding from the New York and Washington FBI offices, the Atlanta office produced a ten-page report detailing all of the possible Communist influences on King and SCLC. The office advised that a COMINFIL—”Communist infiltration”—investigation of King be undertaken. Under the COINTELPRO program, the FBI sent stories to newspapers in New Orleans, Augusta, Birmingham, St. Louis, and Long Island about O’Dell’s background and association with SCLC. On November 1, 1962, King issued a statement attacking the stories and defending O’Dell but announcing that O’Dell would resign. The resignation was purely cosmetic. He continued his work in the New York office.

Then an incident occurred that stirred J. Edgar Hoover into retribution against Martin Luther King. The Southern Regional Council had published a report on the Albany Movement, critical of the federal government, written by Spelman College professor Howard Zinn. King was asked if he agreed with it; he said he did and charged that the FBI’s Southern agents were white Southerners who favored segregation. Hoover was irate. He issued a statement correcting King—four of the five agents in Albany were from outside the South. Only one was a native Southerner—Marion Cheeks. Other agents agreed Cheeks was a racist. He had instructed other agents to ignore Blacks’ complaints; he edited reports of complaints against local policemen to water them down.

The FBI asked Kennedy to approve a wiretap on Levison’s home; he gave permission on November 20, 1962. In late December 1962, final reports from the Atlanta and New York offices were complete. The Atlanta office described SCLC as harmless; the New York report said Communists have “infiltrated SCLC.” Hoover ordered New York to take over the COMINFIL investigation.

During the spring of 1963, the FBI kept Attorney General Kennedy informed about conversations between King and Levison they overheard on the Levison wiretaps. With the administration preparing its civil rights bill, Robert Kennedy wanted to know as much as he could about what King was thinking and what kind of advice he was receiving from the “Soviet agent” Levison. Hoover’s fixation with Communism and his certain conviction that Communists were everywhere helped fuel a massive American anti-Communist movement, and the movement fed Hoover’s fixation.

King had tried to hide his association with O’Dell, and the FBI had twice exposed him as a liar with planted newspaper stories. Now Stanley Levison took steps to break his relationship with King before the FBI could launch a further attack, telling King in July 1963 that they should end their interaction.

In mid-July, Clarence Jones, a young lawyer who’d helped King fight his income tax evasion case in Alabama and served as manager of the Gandhi Society, was sent by King to the Justice Department to talk to Burke Marshall. He told Marshall that King was afraid to talk to Stanley Levison on the telephone, apparently referring to a possible tap on the phone. King, he said, would stop talking to Levison to protect the administration from having King and Levison linked. He would talk to him through Jones. Jones was asking Marshall—and the federal government—to conspire with him to deceive the FBI.

On July 22, Robert Kennedy ordered wiretaps on King’s and Clarence Jones’s home and office telephones. He backed off the King wiretaps, but the Jones wiretaps were installed. King and his family stayed with the Jones family in suburban New York in early August; the wiretaps soon gave the FBI their first information that Jones would be a conduit to Levison. They also began to hear of King’s private life, information that was quickly sent to Robert Kennedy, who passed it to the president. Soon afterward, Hoover approached Robert Kennedy with another request to wiretap King; this time Kennedy felt increasing pressure to say yes. A Senate investigation into corruption in the majority leader’s office threatened to reveal that President Kennedy had an affair with a German woman married to an American military man. Robert Kennedy had the woman deported. Hoover knew all about the affair. He had long kept private files on the private lives of important people; presidents were no exception. Hoover’s latest request for wiretap authority came at a time when Kennedy needed Hoover to suppress news of the president’s affair. The March on Washington had also shown King’s influence and reach; the FBI described him as “demagogic” and “the most dangerous . . . to the Nation . . . from the standpoint . . . of national security.”¹⁷ Attorney General Kennedy agreed that the FBI could wiretap Martin Luther King’s telephone—at any “address” where King happened to be—his home, office, or hotel room.

THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

On July 2, 1963, the heads of the sponsoring organizations gathered in New York to discuss the March on Washington—Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Farmer of CORE, John Lewis of SNCC (who had succeeded Charles McDew), and Whitney Young of the Urban League. After arguing whether Rustin’s sexuality and politics made him a potential source of danger, they agreed that Randolph would be the march’s official leader; Rustin, its organizer. They announced that no sit-ins or civil disobedience would be a part of the march; it had already begun to lose the militant edge Rustin had first envisioned.

In August 1963, the six-member Black leadership team of the march was joined by four whites: Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers; Protestant clergyman Eugene Carson Blake; Rabbi Joachim Prinz; and Catholic layman Mathew Ahmann. Randolph emphasized that whites were welcome. An organizing manual for the march, written by Rustin, emphasized that “totalitarian or subversive” groups were not welcome.¹⁸ Across the country, labor unions, church groups, and civil rights organizations mobilized their membership and supporters for the march.

Within SNCC, support for the march was mixed. Most community organizers—SNCC’s field workers—thought the march was a diversion from their work. Others, like chairman Lewis, thought it would apply the necessary pressure to Congress to pass civil rights legislation, even though the president’s bill was unsatisfactory.

Back in Southwest Georgia, the federal government took sides against the civil rights movement for a second time. On August 9, a federal grand jury had indicted nine members of the Albany Movement for perjury and conspiring to injure a juror. On August 8, SNCC workers in Americus became involved in a demonstration that resulted in the indictments—on capital charges—of four civil rights workers. The federal government refused to intervene. The August 8 demonstration followed sit-in protests by local teenagers throughout July; over one hundred were in jail. A mass meeting on August 8 became a march of two hundred people that was attacked by local police. Seven policemen and twenty-eight demonstrators were wounded; one protester’s leg was broken and another was shot in the back and killed. Seventy-seven went to jail. The local prosecutor brought sedition charges against three SNCC workers and a CORE field secretary. The charge carried the death penalty, and on August 13, Attorney General Robert Kennedy announced that his office had found no evidence of police brutality. The federal government would not intervene in the prosecutions of the four civil rights workers. They remained in jail under high bail until mid-November.

The Albany Nine indictments and the government’s refusal to aid the workers facing the death penalty heightened SNCC’s hostility toward the government and the Kennedy administration. That hostility appeared in John Lewis’s March on Washington speech and created conflicts between SNCC and the other, more moderate groups cosponsoring the march.

THE MARCH SCHEDULE called for all of the speakers to have advance copies of their remarks for press distribution the day before. King didn’t but SNCC chairman John Lewis did, and what he’d prepared raised objections from Robert Kennedy. The original text said SNCC could not support the administration’s civil rights bill. “It is too little and too late,” Lewis planned to say. His language was objectionable to some other march leaders as well.

We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. . . . The nonviolent revolution is saying, “We will not wait. . . . we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” . . . We all recognize . . . that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about. . . . We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own “scorched earth” policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—non-violently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.¹⁹

Lewis attacked the Albany indictments and compared them with the government’s failure to protect civil rights workers. He attacked the administration’s appointing “racist judges.” “Which side,” he asked, “is the federal government on?”

Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall spoke to Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, the archbishop of Washington, who was to deliver the march’s invocation. Boyle, acting for the administration, raised objections to Lewis’s speech among other leaders of the march. At a meeting late on the night before the march, Lewis refused to change a word. The controversy continued on to the Lincoln Memorial the next day; Boyle threatened to boycott the march, saying he would not appear unless he had Lewis’s changed speech in his hands ten minutes before the program began. After hasty consultations in a room behind Lincoln’s statue and a personal appeal by Randolph, Lewis agreed to the changes.

I was the junior member of the public relation corps assembled from the civil rights groups; the NAACP’s PR director Henry Lee Moon was the senior. His contribution seemed to me to be walking around making pronouncements. My main job consisted of fetching Coca-Colas for the movie stars. I had already distributed copies of Lewis’s original text to the packs of journalists gathered in front of the speaker’s platform. As I did so, I asked them to note the differences between what was written and what Lewis would actually say. Lewis was the only speaker that day to say “Black people” instead of “Negroes,” but Lewis had to remove criticisms of Kennedy’s civil rights bill as “too little and too late,” the word “revolution,” and the question “Which side is the federal government on?”

The sole woman on the march coordinating committee was longtime Black activist Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Hedgeman had worked for the FEPC, served as dean at Howard University, and then was hired to work with the Commission of Race and Religion for the National Council of Churches. Through her job with the National Council of Churches, Hedgeman helped bring many white Christians, including white clergy, into the civil rights struggle and to the march. Hedgeman also facilitated many of the day’s logistics, including Operation Sandwich, in which she commanded a huge volunteer group to produce eighty thousand box lunches for the marchers.²⁰

Hedgeman objected to the lack of women on the march program except as entertainers. Black lawyer Pauli Murray did too. Facing criticisms, Randolph agreed to a compromise. He would present a “Tribute to Women”—Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Gloria Richardson, and others were recognized, stood, and received applause.²¹ Joan Baez sang as the march was beginning; Mahalia Jackson sang just before King spoke.

When King was introduced, ABC and NBC joined the live coverage by CBS. For the first time, Americans who had never known what it was to sit in a hot, cramped church in the middle of a campaign for lunch counter integration or the right to vote would have—through television—some small notion of that feeling. The closing moments of his speech—the “I have a dream” passages—had been used by King often before, but almost none of the people watching had heard more than a few seconds’ sound bite from Martin Luther King or any other Black person.

King began by laying out how America had given Black people a “bad check” and how the country had “defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” They had come to Washington that day because “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. . . . And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

He answered critics of the movement who claimed that Black people would never be satisfied:

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

And he ended with a call for hope in the face of the “valley of despair. . . . I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’“

King’s Black critics seized on the “dream” sequences; while King dreamed, Black America had nightmares, they said. Malcolm X said of the march in a speech in Detroit two months later: “Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms . . . singing ‘We Shall Overcome’? . . . You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging!” He called the march “a picnic” and “a circus” with “white clowns and black clowns”; it was “a sellout . . . a takeover”; “they controlled it so tight—they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out town by sundown. And every one of those Toms was out of town by sundown.”²²

In preparation for the potential riots and disasters federal officials feared from the march, all elective surgery in the area’s hospitals was canceled, freeing 350 beds for riot-related emergencies; 1,900 of Washington’s 2,900 police officers worked eighteen-hour overtime shifts, instead of their normal eight hours. Police plotted seventy-two potential disaster scenarios and planned a response to each one.

In the event of a riot, a policeman or National Guardsman would be stationed on every street corner in downtown Washington’s business district to guard against looters. They deployed two hundred scout cars, eighty-six motorcycles, twenty jeeps, several police helicopters, and twenty-three cranes to move broken down or disabled buses. Local judges were placed on round-the-clock standby, and 350 inmates were evacuated from DC jails to create space for disruptive protesters. Twenty-four hundred National Guardsmen were sworn in as “special officers” and given temporary arrest powers. The National Guard made over one hundred doctors and nurses available. Government offices were shut down. Liquor sales were banned for the first time since Prohibition.

On the day of the march, the District of Columbia was placed under virtual martial law. President Kennedy ordered the biggest peacetime military buildup in American history. Five military bases on the capital’s outskirts were bursting with activity—and a heavily armed, four-thousand-strong task force prepared for deployment. At Fort Meyer, Fort Belvoir, Fort Meade, Quantico Marine Base, and the Anacostia Naval Station, thirty helicopters were flown in to provide airlift capacity. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, fifteen thousand Special Forces troops were placed on stand-by. One hundred fifty FBI agents were assigned to mingle with the crowds.²³

Missing from this human and mechanical arsenal were police dogs. Washington’s sixty-nine police dogs remained in their kennels on the orders of Robert Kennedy to avoid a repetition of the ugly images of Birmingham. Washington also canceled its long-standing policy of allowing white officers to bar Black policemen from their squad cars.

And the administration stationed an official just at the right of the Lincoln Memorial with a cutoff switch and a record turntable—if militant protesters overran the speakers’ platform, the sound feed to the loudspeakers would be cut off and replaced by a recording of Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

Sitting in the White House watching the march on television, President Kennedy said of Martin Luther King’s speech: “He’s damn good!” When Kennedy met with the march’s male leadership after the march, the discussions focused on making the president’s civil rights bill stronger. He made no promises.²⁴

WHAT DID THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON MEAN?

For most Americans, and probably for most marchers in the March for Jobs and Freedom, “freedom” came first, and “jobs,” if considered at all, lacked the symbolic status supplied by brave Southern protesters and stereotypical Southern sheriffs. Although the movement’s leadership had long linked racism’s economic and psychological dimensions, blatant forms of petty apartheid seemed more immediate, and also seemed more immediately susceptible to a solution. The demands of the Birmingham movement earlier in 1963, for integration of lunch counters and changing rooms had been linked to Black employment in downtown stores. In 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott had from the first asked for integrating the pool of bus drivers. But Bayard Rustin’s desire to have the movement sharpen its economic focus was lost at the March on Washington.

The march demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of Americans, white and Black, supported civil rights. The leaders—and the thousands who had joined them in Washington—now had to find ways to intensify and enlarge that support. The march was the crowning moment of a summer-long national preoccupation with racial justice, during which demonstrations seemed to happen constantly in some new place. The march gave the civil rights movement the appearance of unity and responsibility. After all, at least 250,000 people, most of them Black, had gathered in Washington without violence. The presence of whites and the march’s integrated leadership showed the nation that civil rights was everyone’s concern. The march showed the nation how determined the movement was—some of the people in attendance, obviously poor, had come from great distances, at great sacrifices. These were a people not easily discouraged. Bayard Rustin said the march was “not a climax but a new beginning.”²⁵

Author James Baldwin wrote: “That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the Kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony.”²⁶

King’s speech made the movement more understandable and more palatable to white Americans, but it did little to advance Kennedy’s bill. King’s vision of a movement rooted in American justice forced the public and media to accept the rationale for the march and the movement that produced it. The speech strengthened the biracial coalition that the march’s Black leadership believed was required if the movement was to succeed. King’s speech not only said non-Blacks were welcome; it said racial justice was both a religious and secular concern and therefore the participation of whites was their obligation.

The speech was crucial for the Kennedy administration. JFK had done all he could, short of a direct appeal to cancel the march, to get it called off. He did not give it his cautious endorsement until early August, ensuring that the march’s targets would be opponents of his civil rights bill and not the president himself. King’s speech redeemed this strategy, and the peacefulness of the occasion reaffirmed the wisdom of the president’s choice. But the speech also helpfully obscured, at least for a moment, divisions among the march’s leadership and organizational disputes.

Women had little public visibility in the March on Washington’s program, except as entertainers—though many worked behind the scenes to ensure the day’s success. Even in the movement that one feminist scholar called “strikingly egalitarian,” the absence of women in leadership roles was noticeable.²⁷ No woman was part of the delegation of civil rights leaders that met Kennedy after the march. But for the second time in American history the struggle against white supremacy would be midwife to a feminist movement. In the abolitionist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, women working for racial equality began to migrate from individual expressions of discontent toward a social movement on their own behalf. In the 1960s, the movement for racial justice again gave women experience in organizing and collective action and instructed them in an ideology that condemned an oppression similar to their own—a belief in human rights they could also claim for themselves.

LESS THAN THREE WEEKS after the March on Washington, on September 15, 1963, Klansmen planted a dynamite bomb that exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black Sunday School students, all girls. This was the twenty-ninth bombing of Black property in Birmingham stretching back to 1947; the previous twenty-eight were all unsolved.²⁸

I flew to Birmingham with John Lewis that afternoon and stood outside the bombed church.²⁹ For many in the movement, the Birmingham church bombing exploded whatever idealism they had maintained over the years. The deaths of four children seemed a last straw. Few movement activists had ever been committed pacifists. The bombing confirmed the ineffectiveness of nonviolence for many and relegated it to tactical use alone for many more, rather than a way of life. And it underscored the need for political power.

But even the church bombing did not strengthen Kennedy’s lukewarm acceptance of the movement’s goals. In a meeting with Birmingham’s white businessmen a week later, he revealed how sympathetic he was to white objections to integration of lower schools and compared the hypocrisy of his liberal critics with their own actions.

Two months and seven days after the Birmingham bombing, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. When it was announced that Kennedy was dead, King told his wife, “This is what is going to happen to me. This is such a sick society.”³⁰