2

The March

“Sometimes you just get a sense that the things you’re in at the time are going to be historic,” Joan Baez told me. “I remember looking out on Woodstock as I came down in a helicopter and knowing. And the march was kind of the same. As soon as you got there, you knew this was going to be a big one.”

From the early morning of August 28, 1963, the Mall started filling up. By 9:30 a.m. forty thousand people had assembled; at 11:00 a.m. the number had more than doubled. By the time the march headed off, it had doubled again, and then more people joined until the crowd finally reached a quarter of a million—more than twice as many as the organizers had first hoped for. “What made the march was that Black people voted that day with their feet,” said Bayard Rustin. “They came from every state, they came in jalopies, on trains, buses, anything they could get—some walked. There were about three hundred congressmen there, but none of them said a word. We had told them to come, but we wanted to talk with them; they were not to talk to us.”

White people made up around a fifth of the crowd, less than the organizers had expected. Clarence Jones was most impressed by the generational mix. “More surprising than the size of the crowd was its diversity in age. Naturally we had expected college students, even some high school students, but there were little children, septuagenarians, and everything in between. . . . That was an important key to the movement, out in the open but invisible to most who opposed us: it was never about me now, it was always about someone someday.”

They poured onto the Mall, some singing, others listening to the entertainers performing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Joan Baez (“We Shall Overcome” and “Oh Freedom”), Peter, Paul and Mary (“Blowin’ in the Wind”), and Bob Dylan (“Only a Pawn in Their Game”) kept the crowd entertained as it grew. By most accounts there was a raucous dignity to the occasion. Baez’s most striking memory is looking out “at all the church hats.” Writing in Esquire magazine, Norman Mailer recalled: “A deep blues went out from Washington in these hours: a revolutionary force existed in the land; it could move with violence, and it could move with discipline.” William Geoghegan, the assistant deputy attorney general, viewed the day on a television in the Pentagon’s war room, writes Euchner, and recalled: “When you see that crowd and the biracial content of it . . . I had to believe that it moved a lot of people and a lot of votes. It moved an awful lot of citizens who were very indifferent to realizing there’s something that has to be done. It had to have a powerful impact.” There was “an electricity in the air,” said Rustin. “Everyone who was there knew that the event was a landmark.”

The historical importance of epoch-defining events like the March on Washington is rarely fully apparent at the time. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that they emerge as emblematic. Yet there was a broad consensus that day that something fundamental and consequential had occurred. Whatever ramifications the march might have for legislation or the movement, the very fact it had taken place, passed without violent incident, and been witnessed by millions was enough. “We’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition,” King said in his speech. This was one act America was never going to forget.

Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history. But they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

So it was with the March on Washington, which was both bold in its conviction and old in its conception. Bold because national demonstrations in America’s capital were rare at the time. “Marches on Washington have become ritualized dramas, carefully scripted and with few surprises,” writes John D’Emilio in Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. “In the decades [since the 1960s] virtually every cause, every constituency, every identity group has descended on the nation’s capital, paraded through its streets, and assembled on the vast Mall to hear an array of speakers and entertainers. . . . This was not the case in 1963. Then the idea was . . . fresh and untried. No one had ever witnessed a mass descent on the nation’s capital.”

And it was old because the original idea for such a march had been hatched more than twenty years earlier, by the Black union and civil rights leader Asa Philip Randolph. In 1941 Randolph had called for a march on Washington against discrimination in the defense industry and segregation in the military. “The virtue and rightness of a cause are not alone the condition and cause of its progress and acceptance,” he had argued when announcing the protest. “Power and pressure are at the foundation of the march of social justice and reform. . . . Power and pressure do not reside in the few, and the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.” The march was to be Black only. “There are some things Negroes must do alone,” said Randolph. “This is our fight and we must see it through.”

In A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait, Jervis Anderson relates how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first tried to ignore Randolph’s initiative. When the idea gathered steam, he called on his wife and other allies to persuade Randolph to call off the march, as he feared racial revolt at home ahead of a likely military conflict abroad. Randolph refused. Roosevelt then offered personally to call the armaments plants and order them to hire Blacks if the march was abandoned. Again Randolph refused. “We want you to do more than that. We want something concrete something tangible, definite, positive and affirmative,” he insisted.

“Who the hell is this guy Randolph?” demanded Joseph Rauh, of the Office of Emergency Management, as Randolph rejected every draft he proposed on Roosevelt’s behalf. “What the hell has he got over the president of the United States?”

A week before the march was scheduled to take place, Roosevelt blinked, issuing Executive Order 8802, which established a Fair Employment Practices Committee and effectively desegregated the war industries. It was only then that Randolph finally agreed to cancel the march, arguing that its objectives had been reached. While some in the movement condemned him for demobilizing so many, his standing grew as a result of the victory. “Randolph now became, and would remain for almost a decade, the most popular and sought-after black political figure in America,” writes Anderson.

Now, in 1963, Randolph was at it again. While King may have been the most prominent civil rights leader at the time, Randolph, whom few Black people would have recognized by sight, was its most eminent. Born in Florida in 1889, Randolph became a union and civil rights leader, organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union for the overwhelmingly African American staff on Pullman trains. Tall, dapper, and most often seen in dark woolen three-piece suits with a matching Homburg hat, he was also affectionately referred to as “St. Philip of the Pullman Porters” and “Black Messiah.” “If he had been born in another time,” noted John Lewis, “in another place or in another race, A. Philip Randolph would have been a prime minister or a president or a king.” By the time of the March on Washington, he was seventy-four. This would be his last hurrah.

By his side, for both marches, was his long-standing ally and fellow socialist Bayard Rustin. twenty years his junior. Tall, eccentric, and intense, Rustin had salt-and-pepper hair that stood up in a short vertical mop, and his tie hung loose on his chest. Raised a Quaker, Rustin underwent a political development that would take him through pacifism, communism, and socialism and into the civil rights movement. In 1944, after refusing to fight in World War II, he had been jailed as a conscientious objector.

Rustin was also openly gay, an attribute that would mean that his contributions to a movement dominated by clerics were frequently marginalized. His position became particularly vulnerable following his arrest in Pasadena in 1953, when he was caught having sex with two men in a parked car. Charged with lewd vagrancy, he pled guilty to a lesser “morals charge.” He was sent to jail for sixty days. By the time the march was proposed, writes D’Emilio, “he had recently turned fifty. He was still waiting for his day in the limelight, though likely believing it would never come. Prejudice of another sort, still not named as such in midcentury America, had curtailed his opportunities and limited his effectiveness.”

And yet Rustin’s exceptional abilities meant that, however uncomfortable his sexual orientation made others in the leadership of the movement feel, he became the key organizing figure behind the march. Whose idea it was to revive plans for a march after more than twenty years is not quite clear. It came up in December 1962 in Randolph’s Harlem offices. But there was evidently less than a firm commitment to proceed at that time, since two months later Rustin took off to Dar es Salaam to work with the World Peace Brigade, promoting nonviolence in Africa’s liberation struggles.

It wasn’t until Rustin’s return that planning got under way. With Black unemployment and racial income disparities high, the original idea was to focus the demands of the march at least as much on issues of economics as on those of discrimination. Rustin initially envisaged a two-day event. On the first day there would be “a mass descent” on the Capitol with the intention of overwhelming representatives with such “a staggering series of labor, church, civil rights delegations from their own states that they would be unable to conduct business on the floor of Congress.” On the second day there would be “a mass protest rally [that] would project our concrete ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ to the nation.”

Initially the response was lukewarm. Whitney Young of the National Urban League declined to have anything to do with it, believing his participation might hamper his lobbying work and even imperil the nonprofit tax status of the league. Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, who considered legal and legislative pressure to be of greater value than direct action and civil disobedience, was too busy organizing a conference at which President Kennedy would be a keynote speaker. King was ambivalent. The previous year he had been keen to use 1963 to leverage the symbolic value of the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, when Lincoln decreed all slaves in the Confederacy free, but his appeals to Kennedy on that score had come to nothing.

Most supportive of the idea of the march were the organizations on the frontline of the struggle: the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Both had large activist bases North and South, including a significant proportion of youth. But even their enthusiasm was qualified. SNCC was more committed to bringing to the streets of the nation’s capital the dynamism of its direct action that had so effectively challenged segregation in the Deep South. “The feeling among most of the rank and file of SNCC was that if we did take part in this march, we should do it our way, which would be to turn this demonstration into a protest rather than a plea,” explains John Lewis, who was SNCC’s chair at the time. “Stage sit-ins all across Washington. Tie up traffic. Have ‘lie-ins’ on local airport runways. Invade the offices of southern congressmen and senators. Camp on the White House lawn. Cause mass arrests. Paralyze the city.”

Given the original reticence of the NACCP, the Urban League, and King regarding this kind of protest, the likelihood of the march’s turning out this way seemed improbable. Indeed, at this stage the entire enterprise was looking unlikely. Then along came Birmingham. The sight of children being bludgeoned, hosed, and hounded shifted both national awareness and the political calculus of what was both possible and necessary for the civil rights movement.

Signing on to a national demonstration now posed less of a risk to the credibility of Wilkins, Young, and their organizations than steering clear of it. The march was clearly going ahead whether they supported it or not. They could either put themselves at the head of it or be left trailing behind it. “Birmingham became the moment of truth,” declared Rustin. “Birmingham meant that ‘tokenism is finished.’”

By early June, King was sounding enthusiastic about the march—he had almost convinced himself that it was his own idea. “We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough and the greatest weapon is a mass demonstration,” he told his aides. “We are at the point where we can mobilize all this righteous indignation into a powerful mass movement.”

Rustin and Randolph had to move fast to capitalize on the opening Birmingham had provided. Randolph convened an emergency meeting of the main civil rights leaders: King, Young, Wilkins, Lewis, and James Farmer, the head of CORE. Meanwhile Rustin reoriented the demonstration to better reflect the demands of the new situation. It was now to be the March for Jobs and Freedom. The activity that had previously been planned to take place over two days, including a march, congressional lobbying, and demonstrations at the Capitol and the White House, was now to be compressed into one.

If the more conservative elements of the movement felt that post-Birmingham they had little choice but to be associated with the demonstration, the more moderate sectors of Washington’s political class felt they had little choice but to disown it and, if possible, prevent it from happening.

The Kennedy administration was jittery. “Everyone started getting panicky,” recalled Burke Marshall. “People down on the Hill particularly thought it was going to be terrible.” The fear was partly about the possibility of violence. To the political elite, convinced that power resided only within their hallowed walls, a march was not so much an act of protest as acting out. Charles Diggs, a Black congressman from Detroit, told King about his “increasing concern” regarding a march. “I am sure a graceful withdrawal could be conceived,” he urged.

But popular consciousness was moving faster than conventional wisdom could fathom. Politics, any gradualist, reformer, or career politician will inform you, is “the art of the possible.” That’s as true as it is axiomatic. But politics is also about having the courage to imagine new possibilities and developing the wherewithal to make them materialize. “What can we do today so that we can do tomorrow what we cannot do today?”—as the socialist educator Paulo Freire once put it. In the spring and summer of 1963 each day brought new possibilities that made feasible tomorrow what had been unthinkable only yesterday. Such was the momentum that elevated the march from a political orphan to the child of many parents.

§ § §

While the White House was slow to grasp the depth of the crisis, and consequently unable to acknowledge the potential magnitude of the march, by midsummer it was forced to face the march’s impending arrival head on. The president’s televised address on June 11, when he had pledged to introduce legislation, meant his administration was caught up in this fight regardless. On June 22 Kennedy finally met with civil rights leaders to discuss the march.

Before the meeting Kennedy invited King for a private conversation in the Rose Garden, where he insisted that King purge “communists” that the president insisted, were secretly working in the movement on behalf of a foreign power. King protested, Kennedy insisted, and then they headed for the Cabinet Room, where they were joined by Randolph, Wilkins, Farmer, Lewis, and Young, among others.

The president’s brother Bobby sat silently in a corner of the room, a daughter on his knee, as Kennedy shook hands briskly with each of the leaders before explaining his political vulnerabilities. Since his civil rights address, his favorability ratings had plummeted from 60 to 47 percent. “I may lose the next election because of this,” he said.

Wilkins expressed the group’s support for Kennedy’s civil rights bill before Young asked him directly whether he backed the march. Kennedy said he didn’t. “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us. I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say, ‘Yes, I’m for the bill, but I’m damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’ It seemed to me a great mistake to announce a march on Washington before the bill was even in committee. The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation—and this may give some members of Congress an out.”

Randolph had been through this before, with FDR, and was not about to let the opportunity of a huge protest slip away for the vague promise of incremental gain. In any case, as he explained to Kennedy, those assembled in the Cabinet Room weren’t leading, they were following. “The Negroes are already in the streets, and it is very likely impossible to get them off,” he said. “If they are bound to be in the streets in any case, is it not better that they be led by organizations dedicated to civil rights and disciplined by struggle rather than to leave them to other leaders who care neither about civil rights nor about nonviolence? If the civil rights leadership were to call the Negroes off the streets, it is problematic whether they would come.”

It was a telling exchange. The Kennedys feared violence if the march took place; Randolph feared violence if it didn’t. But both the White House and the civil rights leaders effectively conceded that they were not fully in control of events and were now discussing their respective responsibilities for managing the frustrations that were percolating through Black America.

While Kennedy had made it clear that he preferred no march at all, he was aware that if it was going ahead anyway it would be better for him if it passed peacefully and was not centered on demands that were incompatible with his legislative efforts. Most of the civil rights leaders were eager for his support and, for their own credibility, needed the march to be nonviolent. To that extent the two sides had a shared interest.

King, who had hitherto deferred to Randolph’s age, experience, and stature during the White House meeting, chimed in toward the end with a précis of the letter he had written from his Birmingham prison cell. “It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in a direct-action movement that did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham was ill-timed.”

“Including the attorney general,” joked the president. “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor,” he continued lightheartedly. “After all, he has done more for civil rights than almost anybody else.”

Lewis recalls, “The talk went back and forth in a generally pleasant way. . . . When Wilkins noted that we would have problems with our own organizations and memberships if we did not march, the president stood up, sighed, and said, ‘Well, we all have our problems. You have your problems. I have my problems.’” With that he rushed off to his final briefing for his impending trip to Europe, leaving the impression that he would not publicly oppose the march even if he thought it unwise.

§ § §

Ten days later the six main civil rights leaders, Young, Wilkins, Farmer, King, Lewis, and Randolph, met again, this time at the Roosevelt Hotel in Harlem. The purpose of this meeting was to hammer out the ground rules under which they would work together. The atmosphere was cordial until Wilkins arrived. “Wilkins was really asserting himself,” Lewis writes. “The moment [he] entered the room he came across to me as some sort of New Yorker who thought he was smarter than the rest of the group. He seemed to feel that King was basically a careless, unsophisticated country preacher and to envy the power and position Dr. King had attained.” Unhappy with the large entourages some leaders had brought with them, Wilkins cavalierly winnowed the meeting’s attendees down to the bare minimum, tapping people on the shoulder and declaring: “This one goes, this one stays, this one goes.”

His main issue that day was Rustin, whose political and sexual transgressions, argued Wilkins, made him a liability. “I don’t want you leading that march on Washington, because you know I don’t give a damn about what they say, but publicly I don’t want to have to defend the draft dodging,” he said. “I know you’re a Quaker, but that’s not what I’ll have to defend. I’ll have to defend draft dodging. I’ll have to defend promiscuity. The question is never going to be homosexuality, it’s going to be promiscuity and I can’t defend that. And the fact is that you were a member of the Young Communist League. And I don’t care what you say, I can’t defend that.”

While Wilkins’s manner may have been abrasive, his concerns were standard at the time. Farmer, shortly before he died, explained to me how he vetted people for the Freedom Rides in 1961. “We had to screen them very carefully because we knew that if they found anything to throw at us, they would throw it. We checked for communists, homosexuals, drug addicts. . . . I personally interviewed people and then would talk to their friends.”

Not much had changed in the intervening years. Rustin was indeed vulnerable on many counts, but he had many strengths too. He had built strong relationships with most of those in the room, and they knew his organizational talents to be beyond doubt. With a mere two months before the demonstration was to take place, his personal vulnerabilities were not the sole pragmatic concern.

Randolph technically agreed to Wilkins’s demand, only to then outmaneuver him. “I will take on [being leader] of the March under one circumstance,” he told the group. “And that is that I will be free to choose my own deputy, and my deputy is going to be Bayard Rustin.”

Wilkins grudgingly conceded. “You can take that on if you want. But don’t expect me to do anything about it when the trouble starts.”

The following eight weeks, writes D’Emilio,

were the busiest in Rustin’s life. He had to build an organization out of nothing. He had to assemble a staff and shape them into a team able to perform under intense pressure. He had to craft a coalition that would hang together despite organizational competition, personal animosities, and often antagonistic politics. He had to maneuver through the minefield of an opposition that ranged from liberals who were counseling moderation to segregationists out to sabotage the event. And he had to do all of this while staying enough out of the public eye so that the liabilities he carried would not undermine his work.

The headquarters for this extraordinary endeavor was a rented run-down former church on West 130th and Lenox in Harlem. A banner was draped above its entrance declaring, “National Headquarters: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Wed, aug 28th.” The building soon resembled a cross between a student union in occupation and a military headquarters on high alert.

“It was very exciting and frenetic,” Rachelle Horowitz, the march’s transport chief, who was also Rustin’s longtime assistant, told me. “It ran on adrenaline and excitement with everybody working from early in the morning till late into the night. It was very collegial, very primitive, and very egalitarian.”

“Visitors,” writes Anderson, “found it hard to believe that an enterprise of such proportions was being planned amid such humble appointments in an office furnished with nothing more than a water cooler, a few scabrous and creaky old desks and chairs, and a small bank of temporary telephones. Assisted by a handful of Black and white volunteers, Rustin prepared thousands of letters, instruction manuals and newsletters.”

“I think the mood could best be described . . . as one of gaiety,” wrote Harvey Swados in The Nation magazine. “This élan, this sense of participation in something that grew even as they planned for it, as with parents who discuss the future of their child while he sleeps.”

It was a tribute to Rustin’s eccentric, hyperactive, and efficient personality. He was in constant motion, interrupting conversations to answer phones even as he passed notes to staff, doodled, and chain-smoked. “I had had many differences with Bayard in the past and was destined to have more differences with him in the future,” recalled Farmer. “But I must say that I have never seen such a difficult task of coordination performed with more skill and deftness.”

“He wanted us to live that couple of months as if every single day might be the last day of your life,” recalls Norman Hill, a CORE field director who had been seconded to help organize the march. “You had to accomplish as much as possible every day.”

The entire time Rustin, a compulsive list maker, would be writing down tasks, crossing them off, and writing down more. He worked on the principle that anything that could go wrong would. Euchner describes how before people left for home each day, a staff meeting was held where everyone would relate what had they’d achieved. Rustin had once been a professional singer. “Sometimes, like a herald from the past, Rustin suddenly interrupted the chatter with an old spiritual, his voice sweet and high pitched: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / A long ways from home / A true believer.”

The planning was both meticulous and basic. “We wanted to get everybody from the whole country into Washington by nine o’clock in the morning and out of Washington by sundown,” said Rustin. “This required all kinds of things that you had to think through. We planned out precisely the number of toilets that would be needed for a quarter of a million people, how many blankets we would need for the people who were coming in early, . . . how many doctors, how many first aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches. . . . We had of course to have fantastic planning of all the parking lots for the thousands of buses and automobiles. We anticipated all problems.” They advised people not to put mayonnaise in their sandwiches, for example, because it spoils easily in the sun and can cause diarrhea.

The blend of functionality and ambition was exemplified in Rustin’s demands for a sound system. When ordering the system, he told engineers: “The Lincoln Memorial is here, the Washington Monument is there. I want one square mile where anyone can hear.” As he explained later: “In my view it was a classic resolution of the problem of how can you keep a crowd from becoming something else. Transform it into an audience.” The system he decided was needed cost ten times as much as his meager budget permitted. But with the help of union donations, he got it anyway.

By the end of July the hard work was clearly paying off. The civil rights establishment was on board and mobilizing its supporters, giving Randolph both the confidence and the authority to broaden the coalition by inviting religious groups. Trade unions were central to the effort. Unions representing those working in the electrical, fur, auto, packing, garment, transport, municipal, and retail sectors were all represented, as were those of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant faiths. By the end of July, Catholic activists were galvanizing the flock, unions were booking buses, and, Hollywood to New York, celebrities were signing up to attend.

In these last few weeks, the march organizers felt they were on the brink of something huge. “Caution turned to excitement,” writes D’Emilio, “worry to anticipation, as evidence accumulated that the size of the march was likely to surpass anyone’s wildest dreams.”

When Rustin had written to every member of Congress earlier in the summer, many had made excuses. Now, sensing the shifting mood, they too started attaching themselves to the event. Rustin later recalled: “As we got closer [and they] saw it was going to be bigger and more important, the relatives became less important, the trips home became less important, the going to Europe became less important.”

In their caution politicians were merely channeling the broader electorate’s division and discomfort. For while the march now promised to be big, it was by no means popular. A Gallup poll just a few weeks before it took place revealed that 71 percent of Americans were familiar with “the proposed mass civil rights rally to be held in Washington, D.C., on August 28.” And of those who were familiar, 23 percent had a favorable view, 42 percent had an unfavorable view, 18 percent thought it wouldn’t accomplish anything, and 7 percent predicted that there would be violence.

“Some of the civil rights leaders were worried at first, because many sympathetic people in Congress and the White House worried that if violence broke out at the march, it could hold back civil rights legislation,” explains Horowitz. “So their friends were saying: ‘Don’t do this. It could cause more problems than it will help.’ It took time to galvanize all these forces to say ‘We’ll do it.’”

As the coalition supporting the march grew, so the leaders’ appetite for more militant proposals for the event, like disrupting traffic and mass civil disobedience, diminished. Among other things, they abandoned plans to give a prominent speaker’s slot to an unemployed worker and to march around the White House.

Back in Harlem, each time Rustin announced that yet another radical element had been dropped, his young staff would berate him, part in jest, part in frustration. “We’d shout: ‘Oh Bayard, you’re turning it into a circus!’” Horowitz told me with a laugh. Vincent Harding, an activist and close friend of King’s at the time, did not make the trip. “There was a certain hard-headedness among some of us at the time,” he explained to me. “We were interested in a March on Washington. When it became a March in Washington, we lost interest.” Andrew Young, one of King’s closest aides, told me he had not intended to go because he assumed it would be “a huge picnic.” “Many of us who had been active that year thought it was an opportunity to rest.” He only attended after King called and persuaded him that he “didn’t want to miss this one.”

Ever the coalition builder, Rustin explained: “What you have to understand is that the march will succeed if it gets a hundred thousand people—or 150,000 or 200,000 or more—to show up in Washington. It will be the biggest rally in history. It will show the Black community united as never before—united also with whites from labor and the churches, from all over the country.”

The principal reason that most of the more militant tactics were dropped was security. From the moment the march was announced, this was always the primary concern of the administration and a considerable worry for the organizers. These concerns were partly rooted in logistics. A march of this size was unprecedented in Washington, a southern and deeply segregated city. Furthermore, it was being brought together quickly and on a tight budget.

The anxieties were also shaped by strategic considerations. The march was coming at the end of a tumultuous summer of violent racial conflict, during which frustration with the slow pace of change had exhausted the patience of many Black Americans. Scenes in Birmingham and elsewhere had shown that the tenets of nonviolence on which the civil rights movement had been built were not shared by all of its followers, particularly when they were provoked by racists, in or out of uniform. There was a risk, in short, that the sort of chaos and bloodshed experienced in the South might be imported to the capital, but on a far bigger scale.

But the overwhelming cause of worries about violence was grounded in racism. The way the media and politicians described it, hundreds of thousands of angry Black people bringing their base ways, impulsive manners, and uncivilized mores to confront power could only end in chaos and calamity. No hyperbole, it seemed, was too inflated.

On the Monday before the march, South Carolina representative William Dorn warned that it imperiled nothing less than the future of democracy and the security of the republic: “Mr. Speaker, . . . the march on Washington this week will set a dangerous precedent. It is reminiscent of the Mussolini Fascist blackshirt march on Rome in 1922. It is reminiscent of the Socialist Hitler’s government-sponsored rallies in Nuremberg.” One newspaper cartoon depicted African Americans marching toward a powder keg marked “Washington D.C.”

§ § §

Panic measures were in full force. It was as though the city were under siege. All elective surgeries were canceled; sales of alcohol in the capital were banned; the Washington Senators, the local baseball team, postponed their games; senators told their female staff to stay home; Chief Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. of the District of Columbia Court of General Sessions warned his fifteen colleagues to be prepared for criminal hearings to run through the night.

Fearing incitement from the podium, the Justice Department secretly inserted a cutoff switch in the sound system so they could turn off the speakers if an insurgent group hijacked the microphone. In such an eventuality, the plan was to play a recording of Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” in order to calm down the crowd. Life magazine reported: “Merely contemplating the possibilities for trouble and the logistics of the demonstration has given Washington officialdom its worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run.”

Between them the Pentagon, the White House, the Justice Department, and the DC police force turned the policing of the march into a military operation. It was codenamed Operation Steep Hill. Euchner details how one thousand troops and thirty helicopters were deployed in the DC area. The Pentagon put nineteen thousand troops on standby. The Eighty-Second Airborne Division, based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, stood by with C-82 “flying boxcars” loaded with guns, ammunition, and food, ready at a moment’s notice to make the 320-mile trip to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, from which soldiers would be dispatched to the Mall by helicopter to quell riots. Around six thousand law-enforcement officers of different kinds would be deployed that day (with another four thousand in the vicinity awaiting orders), all armed with guns, clubs, and tear gas. The one concession to civil rights sensitivities was that there would be no dogs.

Given the nature of previous social disturbances connected with the civil rights movement, these measures were both overblown and counterintuitive. As Rustin pointed out at a meeting with Justice Department officials in mid-July, Black people had rarely been the source of violent unrest. “Historically groups of Negroes have no history of creating violence in their demonstrations,” he told them. “Violence usually has been created by agents outside the Negro protest and very often in the South by police.”

As far as the state was concerned, the only public-safety issue that merited attention was Black unrest. Rustin asked the Justice Department whether marchers coming from around the country could expect protection against racists. “Suppose Negroes from Mississippi are coming in a busload, and the buses are attacked and burned—say, the night before the march. Then the meeting will take place in an entirely different psychological atmosphere.” The Justice Department declined to take action to prevent attacks of this kind.

It was at this point that the contradictions inherent in the collaboration between the government, the state, and the march organizers became bizarre. They were working together, but not as equals. And they were working against each other, but rarely openly. The FBI was tapping the phones of King and his most trusted aides. The government helped Rustin procure a speaker system at the last minute, after the one he got was sabotaged, but did not disclose the breaker switch it had inserted. Rustin allowed a Justice Department official to assist the organizing committee, only to complain afterward that he “almost smothered us. We had to keep raising our demands to keep him from getting ahead of us.” In one particularly comic example, Euchner points out, a civil rights worker trained volunteers in how to manage conflict and emphasized the possibility of agents provocateurs from the FBI. It later turned out that he himself was a paid informant for the FBI.

The movement itself had a much more nuanced approach to security matters than the government and police force. Fearing that troops of armed white police flanking a mostly Black march would send the wrong signal, Rustin decided that the demonstration should be, first and foremost, self-policed. He recruited William Johnson, a retired police officer, to bring together more than a thousand active and retired policemen to form the Guardians. The aim was to keep discipline in the march with a light touch. If tensions mounted, they were instructed to lead the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome.”

In the meantime, the veracity of Rustin’s maxim that anything that could go wrong would go wrong was repeatedly proved. Segregationist senator Strom Thurmond took to the Senate floor to brand Rustin a “Communist, draft-dodger and homosexual,” entering into the congressional record a picture of Rustin talking to King while King was in a bathtub. But the attack came too late and from too poisoned a well to have any impact beyond rallying support for Rustin. “I’m sure there were some homophobes in the movement,” said activist Eleanor Holmes. “But you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked.”

Meanwhile, the chauvinism of a movement dominated by males while supported by many women in its ranks was challenged after it transpired that not a single woman would be allowed to take the microphone on the day unless she was singing. Some of the movement’s central figures, including Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates, and Diane Nash, were not allowed to march alongside the men. Coretta Scott King and other wives were also diverted to a separate procession on Independence Avenue.

Black activist and educator Anna Hedgeman was particularly incensed and challenged the march organizers over the gender imbalance on the platform. She confronted Horowitz in the lobby of the Statler Hotel. “What are you going to do about the women?” she asked. “You are betraying the cause of women if you go along with this.”

Eleanor Holmes, also Black, walked by. “Philip Randolph represents me,” she said.

“You too have betrayed me and all womanhood,” insisted Hedgeman.

To crown this catalog of calamities, it turned out that James Farmer, one of the march’s key organizers, was stuck in jail in Louisiana. A week earlier Farmer had led a march in downtown Plaquemine protesting police brutality. He was arrested, along with local leaders and more than two hundred activists. Bail was set at five hundred dollars, and with the jails in Plaquemine full, Farmer was transferred, along with some others, to nearby Donaldsonville.

CORE did not have enough money to bail out everybody, and with the march approaching the organization’s leaders had to come to a decision: Should they arrange the release of their leader so that he could address the biggest march in civil rights history and reach a global audience? Or should they maintain a principled position of keeping close to their base and leave Farmer in jail along with the rank-and-file members of the movement?

They decided to resist significant pressure from the march organizers and keep Farmer where he was. “We decided at CORE that we would make a better statement with Jim in jail than at the March on Washington,” Lolis Edward Elie, the group’s lawyer, told Charles Euchner. “Anybody with an ounce of ego would want to be in Washington. . . . [Jim] wanted to be there. But the group made that decision not to be there.” Rudy Lombard, leader of CORE’s Louisiana campaign, added: “We would not ask the local people to do anything that the CORE representatives would not do. That would apply to all of us, including Jim. We didn’t think that going to Washington and participating in the march was any more important than staying involved with the community.”

§ § §

On the eve of the march, a sticking point emerged that threatened to derail the entire event. It would run like an open sore into the next day, even as the demonstration was under way. Lewis arrived back to his hotel room at around 2:00 that morning to find a handwritten note under his door.

“John. Come downstairs. Must see you at once. Bayard.”

No sooner had he read it than the phone rang.

“We’ve got a problem,” said Rustin.

“A problem. What problem?” said Lewis

“It’s your speech. Some people are very concerned about some of the things you’re going to say in your speech. You need to get down here. We need to talk.”

Lewis’ speech was, if nothing else, faithful to the spirit of militancy and frustration that was taking over the movement. It reflected the mood that the established civil rights organizations were struggling to keep up with. That, in no small part, was why it attracted so much hostility from the other leaders. The speech described Kennedy’s civil rights bill as “too little and too late.” Echoing King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Lewis derided the call for patience. “We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now.” And in his most inflammatory metaphor, envoking General Sherman’s Civil War march to the sea, which left much of the former Confederacy destroyed, he planned to say, “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—nonviolently.”

The day before, a SNCC staffer had seen copies of other speeches on a table in the foyer of the Statler Hotel and, fearing that coverage of SNCC’s contribution to the march would be eclipsed, ordered Lewis’s speech to be placed on the table as well.

Copies circulated quickly, and so did the controversy. When the speech was seen by Walter Reuther, the leader of the United Automobile Workers, a major backer of the march, he was immediately alarmed and called Wilkins. He said he’d seen it too and agreed it was a problem. Reuther then took it to King, who was also deeply concerned. “Well, John Lewis can’t make that speech,” King said. “This is completely contrary to everything we are doing.”

The person most incensed was Washington’s Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle, who was scheduled to deliver the march’s invocation. He called the White House to complain and then rang Rustin to warn him that he would pull out of the event if Lewis was allowed to deliver his prepared text.

In his autobiography Lewis recalls that when he arrived at Rustin’s room, Rustin seemed calm. The main sticking point for O’Boyle, Rustin told him, was Lewis’s eschewing of patience.

“This is offensive to the Catholic Church,” explained Rustin.

“Why?”

“Payyyy . . . . tience . . . Catholics believe in the word ‘patience.’”

Rustin warned this wasn’t the last complaint Lewis would hear about the proposed speech but suggested they postponed further discussions so they could all get some sleep. “We had a big day ahead of us,” he told Lewis.

“By the time I got back to my room I was incensed,” wrote Lewis. “This was a good speech. Maybe a great one. That’s how everyone who had seen it felt—everyone with SNCC. . . . I had told Bayard I would listen to the others the next day, but I made no promises. And the more I thought about it as I fell asleep that night . . . the less inclined I was to change one word.”

At breakfast the following morning, none of the leaders made reference to Lewis’s speech. But as the day progressed, negotiations over the metaphors within it themselves became metaphors for the deeper divisions within the movement.

Rustin saw some parts of the speech as at odds with one of the march’s principal aims: building critical support for Kennedy’s bill. O’Boyle was worried about more conservative members of the church and his relationship with the Kennedys. SNCC, meanwhile, was concerned about maintaining its credibility with its base in the Deep South.

§ § §

Euchner describes how for several days people had been making their way to Washington however they could. Buses left California to travel several thousand miles. The night before in Savannah, a chartered train left with its passengers singing “We Shall Overcome.” Ledger Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old truck driver, roller-skated seven hundred miles from Chicago wearing a sash saying “freedom”; an eighty-two-year-old cycled from Ohio; a young man cycled from North Dakota. Horowitz persuaded New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority to keep the subways running overnight on a rush-hour schedule so New Yorkers could get to their buses, while bridge and tunnel authorities handed out leaflets from their booths containing information about the march.

Few had made it to the Mall shortly after dawn, leading some news reporters to predict the whole enterprise would be a flop. But as the morning progressed, evidence that the weeks of organizing had borne fruit began to emerge on the streets of DC. “By 9:00 or 10:00 that morning we knew it would be a great success,” says Horowitz. Twenty-one charter trains came into Union Station along with many scheduled services carrying mainly protesters. A human deluge poured into the city from every part of the country. By midday roughly forty charters had brought in twenty thousand riders, who were then taken to the Washington Monument by shuttle.

Media interest in the march was intense. “The Metropolitan Police Department handled more press requests than it ever had,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation. “By 1963 standards the coverage was saturation. On NBC the Today Show devoted more than thirty minutes to the march. The network then aired eleven special reports during the day, totaling more than three hours of coverage. . . . One special report on Martin Luther King’s appearance went for an hour. The network ended with a forty-five-minute show late that night. ABC also inserted special reports throughout the day.”

The Mall was awash with Hollywood celebrities, many convened by Ossie Davis. They flew in from Los Angeles in two chartered planes. Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Sammy Davis Jr., Burt Lancaster, James Garner, and Harry Belafonte were there. Marlon Brando wandered around brandishing an electric cattle prod, a symbol of police brutality. Josephine Baker made it over from France; Paul Newman abandoned the celebrity section to mix with the crowd. Julian Bond, a young SNCC activist who would one day become the chairman of the NAACP, was charged with plying the stars with Coca-Cola.

Many of the celebrities had received calls from FBI agents the night before or that morning urging them to remain in their hotels to avoid the violence they claimed was bound to occur. George Rockwell, leader of the US Nazi Party, had vowed to bring ten thousand white supremacists to protest the march. Just over seventy showed up.

That morning the civil rights leaders met with congressional representatives to discuss the issues raised by the demonstration. Lewis described the meetings as “quick cordial sessions. Nothing substantial, simply courtesy calls arranged early in the morning so we would have plenty of time to make it over to the Lincoln Memorial for the beginning of the event.”

The restless and excited crowd, however, proved irrepressible. While the leaders were chatting with the politicians, the masses started the march without them. The symbolism was not lost on Rustin.

“My God, they’re going. We’re supposed to be leading them,” he said.

Loudspeakers called for them to stop, but no one listened.

“My first impulse was to try and stop it and wait for the leaders,” said Rustin. “But I figured I was going to get run over. I’d better get the hell out of there, and I left.”

The marchers had left early. When the leaders came out of the meetings, they jumped into waiting black limousines and tried to catch up. But they got stuck in traffic—the traffic created by the march. Abandoning the cars, they leaped out on Constitution Avenue, locked arms, and waded into the middle of the procession.

“Photos ran in newspapers the next day as if we were in front of the march,” wrote Lewis. “But we couldn’t even see the front. As people turned and recognized us, they began clearing the way and sweeping us along from behind, and that’s how we came to the Lincoln Memorial, the leaders being pushed along by the people—as it should be.”

Meanwhile the dispute over Lewis’s speech was intensifying. Reuther called O’Boyle, who said he had a statement signed by thirteen bishops dissociating themselves from the march. Reuther asked him to hold back the statement for half an hour so that he could present an ultimatum to the coalition. “Look, we have got a decision to make real quick, and there is no use debating it because we haven’t got time. . . . If John Lewis feels strongly that he wants to make this speech, he can go someplace else and make it, but he has no right to make it here because if he tries to make it he destroys the integrity of our coalition and he drives people out of the coalition who agree to the principles. . . . This is just immoral and he has no right to do it, and I demand a vote right now because I have got to call the archbishop.”

Reuther got his way. Rustin convened an impromptu committee comprising King, Randolph, Rustin, Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches, and Lewis to find a solution. They met in a security guard’s office beneath Lincoln’s statue. Reuther called O’Boyle: “Your Excellency, I think we have solved your problem and ours too. We have set up this subcommittee. If they agree that the speech complies, then John Lewis will make the speech. If they agree that it doesn’t, he will be denied the floor.” Then Randolph and Blake confirmed to O’Boyle that they had agreed to the arrangement.

The music was winding up; the speeches were about to begin. After Marian Anderson sang the national anthem, Boyle gave the invocation on the basis of Reuther’s promise. That meant a resolution had to be reached. The exclusion of Lewis would be a problem for SNCC. But given SNCC’s grassroots credentials and leadership on the frontline, not to mention Farmer’s absence, it would also be a problem for the march.

The controversy was becoming increasingly bitter. Wilkins accused Lewis of “double-crossing the people who had gathered to support this bill.”

Lewis retorted: “I’m speaking for my colleagues in SNCC and for the people in the Delta and in the Black Belt. You haven’t been there, Mr. Wilkins. You don’t understand.”

Up on stage Rustin delivered a tribute to “Negro women fighters for freedom.” Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Prince E. Lee, Diane Nash, and Gloria Richardson were called on to take a bow and say not a word. Nash, listening to the event on the radio (she had decided to rest rather than attend the march), was surprised to hear her name called.

Back below the monument the debate over Lewis’s speech continued unabated. Lewis was next on the podium. King expressed avuncular disappointment at his reference to Sherman. “I know you, John,” he said, “and that doesn’t sound like you.”

“It looked as if no one was going to budge,” wrote Lewis. “Then Randolph stepped in. He looked beaten down and very tired.”

“I have waited twenty-two years for this,” said Randolph. “I’ve waited all my life for this opportunity. Please don’t ruin it. John, we’ve come this far together. Let us stay together.”

His entreaty melted Lewis’s resolve. “He looked as if he might cry. This was as close to a plea as a man as dignified as he could come. How could I say no? It would be like saying no to Mother Teresa. I said I would fix it.”

Lewis’s speech had openly questioned Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights and lambasted the legislation he was proposing in particular and the political class in general. Line by line, some of his most scathing criticisms and inflammatory metaphors were stripped away. Lewis took out the parts about the bill being “too little and too late” and “[marching] through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did.” The question “Which side is the federal government on?” was also deleted, as was the word “cheap” to describe some political leaders. “I was angry,” said Lewis. “But when we were done, I was satisfied. . . . The speech still had fire. It still had bite. . . . It still had an edge.”

§ § §

Of all the speeches that day, Lewis’s did indeed stand out. Randolph had opened the program with the words: “Fellow Americans, we are gathered here in the largest demonstration in the history of this nation. Let the nation and the world know the meaning of our numbers. We are not a pressure group, we are not an organization or a group of organizations, we are not a mob. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

On the morning of the march, news had arrived from Africa that one of the country’s great Black intellectuals and activists, W. E. B. Du Bois, had died. Du Bois had been living in Ghana, where he had vowed to play his part in building a new continent. His passing was announced by Wilkins from the podium. “If you want to read something that applies to 1963, go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903,” he said. The opening line of the second chapter states: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

Reverend Blake spoke to the whites in the crowd: “We come—late, late we come—in the reconciling and repentant spirit” of Lincoln.

Reuther spoke without a script. Referring to Kennedy’s recent appearance at the Brandenburg Gate, he said: “We cannot defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham.”

Recalling his time as a rabbi in Berlin under Hitler, Rabbi Joachim Prinz said: “A great people who had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality, and in the face of mass murder. . . . America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent.”

Whitney Young called for a domestic Marshall Plan: “They must march from the rat-infested overcrowded ghettos to decent, wholesome, unrestricted residential areas dispersed throughout our city.”

Wilkins demanded pressure on the president to toughen the proposed civil rights legislation: “The president’s proposals represent so moderate an approach that if any part is weakened or eliminated the remainder will be little more than sugar water.”

All were competent and pertinent. But Lewis most faithfully articulated the urgency of the time. “Right away it was clear to the crowd that John Lewis did not sound like any of the other speakers they had heard,” writes Drew Hansen in The Dream. When Lewis finished, the clapping was louder than it had been for anyone else. “On the speaker’s platform every black speaker rushed up to Lewis to shake his hand and pound him on the back. Every white speaker stayed seated and stared into the distance.”

§ § §

Though the march started early, the speeches ran late—each one taking longer than its allotted time. D’Army Bailey, then a young activist, had hoped for more. “We were tired of the humdrum rhetoric, so we left. We were aware of how the march had been compromised,” he told Euchner. “We were not in tune with being led like sheep, and we walked back to the car and drove back to the townhouse.”

As the speeches rolled on, a few in the crowd fainted. It had reached 87 degrees by noon. All told, thirty-five Red Cross stations treated 1,355 people. One man died of a heart attack. There was no violence. There were only three arrests—all of them white. Later in Esquire, Mailer asked: “Could one dream of bringing together 200,000 whites steaming with bitterness and a hot heart of injustice on a hot summer day with no riot breaking forth?”

After much negotiation, it was decided that King’s speech would come at the end. By the time he reached the podium, the sun had baked much of the energy from the day, and some, like Bailey, had already peeled off. As King edged his way toward the microphone, he said to Harry Belafonte, with a smile: “I wonder if the president will really understand what this day is all about, if he will really see its significance.”

Meanwhile, 1,150 miles away in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, residents of nearby Plaquemine had brought a small black-and-white television to the jail, where officials let Farmer watch the march in his cell. “The awesome spectacle of over 250,000 persons—black and white, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, young and old, northern and southern, infirm and healthy—erased all doubts as to its worthwhileness,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Several years later, Farmer told me he deeply regretted not being there. “The worst decision I ever made was staying in jail during the March on Washington,” he said. “I should have bailed myself out. I missed an opportunity to speak in front of a worldwide audience—TV, radio, print media. Such an opportunity had never come before and would never come again.”

As King wound up his oration with the words “Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last,” Farmer jokingly retorted from his jail cell: “OK, Martin, give me the key. Give me the key.”

Against the backdrop of the dispersing crowd, Rustin spied Randolph alone, at the edge of the dais, taking in the scene. “I could see he was tired,” he recalled, as he made his way toward his mentor and put his arm around Randolph’s shoulders. “Mr. Randolph, it looks like your dream has come true,” he said. “And when I looked into his eyes, tears were streaming down his cheeks. It is the one time I recall that he could not hold back his feelings.”

“King’s was the poetry that made the march immortal,” says Horowitz. “He capped off the day perfectly. He did what everybody wanted him to do and expected him to do. But I don’t think anybody predicted at the time that the speech would do what it has done since.”

§ § §

A cavalcade of limousines came to pick up the main players and take them to the White House. With the event having mobilized so many and passed so peacefully, Kennedy was now keen to be associated with it. He had watched the march on television not long after a meeting about whether to support a coup in South Vietnam. Now, over coffee and orange juice, he posed for pictures with the leaders. They encouraged him to bolster the civil rights bill and turn his attention to disaffection among urban Black youth.

“I may suggest to you that they present almost an alarming problem because they have no faith in anybody white,” Randolph told Bobby Kennedy. “They have no faith in the Negro leadership. They have no faith in God. They have no faith in government. In other words, they believe the hand of the society is against them.”

The president countered with a plea for those assembled to stress personal responsibility. “It seems to me with all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community, that we could emphasize . . . , which I think the Jewish community has done, on educating their children, on making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.”

As for the prospects regarding legislation? The party of Lincoln, explained Kennedy, had its eye on the Confederacy. “The Republicans are trying to play to the South—with some success these days.” The meeting ended cordially, with Kennedy going back to discuss Vietnam with his strategists.

§ § §

To those whose understanding of politics is limited to what happens in legislatures, the March on Washington achieved little. The New York Times observed that the demonstration “appeared to have left much of Congress untouched—physically, emotionally and politically.”

In May 1964, a Gallup poll asked, “Do you think mass demonstrations by Negroes are more likely to help or more likely to hurt the Negro’s cause for racial equality?” Only 16 percent of Americans—including just 10 percent of whites but 55 percent of nonwhites—said they would help.

This ambivalence was echoed within Black politics. The movement was divided, and those among the leadership who thought direct action and mass mobilizations were the best ways to bring an end to segregation were a minority. But the march had shown them, and the rest of the country, that those active in the struggle were not as divided and isolated as they had previously thought. This, in itself, was of enormous value. Through the march Black people got to be subjects calling for a world they wanted to live in, rather than objects opposing the world that had been imposed on them.

As such, it marked a tipping point in the progress of the movement. “The rhetoricians and the activists are correct when they say there was no major accomplishment because of the march,” says onetime SNCC organizer Ivanhoe Donaldson in Voices of Freedom. “But at the same time, it does represent a continuum in the struggle, and the need from time to time to create exclamation points and question marks and commas, so that people can define themselves in some time frame, which is also important to an organizer to bring something to a culmination, to take people to a next step.”

The march was an expression of confidence, unity, and discipline that reached beyond the South. It demanded national attention and won a global audience. “That day for a moment it almost seemed that we stood on a height and could see our inheritance,” wrote James Baldwin in No Name in the Street; “perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony.”