Remembering the Great 1963 March

(Martha’s Vineyard Men’s Group, July 1, 2013)

august 28, 2013, wIll Be the fIftIeth annIversary of the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For me the anniversary recalls vivid memories of a very hot day in Washington when, as one of many Washingtonians, I worked as an organizer of the March. We had been preparing for weeks for the arrival by bus, car, plane, and foot of tens of thousands of Americans who were responding to the call by the collective leadership of the civil rights movement to journey to the nation’s capital to protest to our nation’s leaders about the terrible injustices of racism in employment, voting, public accommodations, housing, and education that afflicted our Black brothers and sisters.

At the time of the March, I was working as a lawyer in the legal department of the million-and-one-half-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, then under the leadership of its president, James R. Hoffa. However, my involvement in the civil rights movement went back to my Brandeis days when, in my second year,

in 1954, I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak on campus to a packed audience of students and faculty during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which he led. In my youthful innocence, I thought: “Where will all this preaching get him?” How wrong I was!

During the ensuing years, through my involvement while at law school at the University of Chicago in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL, known affectionately by some as the Yipsels), I engaged in support activities for the sit-ins that broke out across the South early in 1960; a campaign during the summer of 1960 to integrate a Jim Crow swimming pool at Glen Echo Park in suburban Maryland; with Stokely Carmichael, achieving the integration of a men’s shirt factory in Albany, Georgia, that had employed only white women; and with the Teamsters Union’s help, sponsoring a fundraiser for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Teamsters headquarters, at which a very young Bill Cosby kept us all laughing. So for me the March was the culmination of many years of civil rights activity.

The March had been initiated by A. Philip Randolph, the venerable leader of the ten-thousand-member Sleeping Car Porters Union. Randolph’s calls for a similar march in 1941 had caused President Franklin D. Roosevelt to integrate the defense industries, and for another in 1947 had caused President Harry S. Truman to integrate the American military. As a result, Randolph had called off those marches.

But late in 1962, at age 74, Randolph concluded that it was finally the time to march. He believed that the moment was right for a major civil rights protest in Washington to continue the momentum that had developed from the sit-ins, freedom rides, and other civil rights struggles then occurring. The NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and SNCC agreed. Civil rights leader and socialist Bayard Rustin, whom I knew from my Chicago days, was appointed coordinator by Randolph. Working closely with Bayard in

New York at that time were our YPSL stalwarts Rachelle Horowitz and Tom Kahn, so we YPSL members saw ourselves playing a special role in organizing the March (I still have copies of the initial leaflets and instructions that were issued from March headquarters in Harlem).

The preeminent militant civil-rights leader in D.C. at the time was Julius Hobson. He had played a major role in desegregating Washington’s schools, and much else. He assumed responsibility for the logistics in Washington, and he conducted endless meetings at which we dealt with housing, transportation, health, security, legal, and other issues.

I was assigned responsibility for a section of the Mall in order to avoid disruptions and to respond to emergencies. For this, I was issued a huge “walkie-talkie” from which I could contact March leaders, the police, and others as needed.

As the day of the March approached, fears of violence mounted. Editorials in major newspapers like The New York Times and the Washington Post urged the March leaders to call it off for fear of disruptions that they thought would hurt the cause of civil rights. President Kennedy’s White House also sought to stop the March.

It should be remembered that August 28, 1963, predated the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the huge anti-war protest marches opposing it that came later during President Johnson’s administration. So the violence that had accompanied some of the sit-ins in the South was seen as possible for the March. Bayard and the other leaders were undeterred, and arrangements to bring thousands to Washington continued.

I was on the Mall in Washington, D.C., by 5:30 a.m. on August 28, and as the dawn came up, all was quiet. As Bayard said in his film biography,116 he, too, saw nothing and worried about the outcome. But soon buses and people began to arrive in droves and assemble

116. Brother Outsider, the Life of Bayard Rustin.

around the Washington Monument, where Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta, and dozens of others sang out for several hours with the heat of the sun beating down upon us as the morning passed and thousands of marchers continued to arrive.

At a certain point, the huge throng marched down the Mall and Constitution Avenue arm in arm and assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where speeches would be delivered. There were people from all over the country carrying banners and signs, representing mostly churches, synagogues, NAACP chapters, and unions. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang “I’ve Been ’Buked, and I’ve Been Scorned,” and then Dr. King delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech. It was followed by Bayard’s reading of the March’s demands. Listening to Bayard, I thought to myself that it was he who was dreaming rather than Dr. King. Once again, I happily was proven wrong! Within two years of the March, with President Johnson at the helm, Congress enacted voting rights, employment, housing, and public accommodations and other antidiscrimination laws.

The March must have ended by about 5:00 p.m., with the estimate of attendees numbering some 250,000. The marchers returned to their buses, trains, planes, and homes after a most inspiring and glorious day.

As for me, I dutifully manned my post to the end in the ninetyplus-degree heat, helping with lost children and heat-stricken marchers, and whatever else came my way. Remarkably, I ran into Larry Kane, a Brandeis classmate of mine, who had taken his daughter Mary to the March. He took my photo with Mary, while I was on my “walkie-talkie.” At the time, Larry was the Brandeis public relations director, so he used the photo in an alumni publication. I have the image blown up and framed at home.

That evening, the many YPSLers at the March gathered for a celebration at a run-down Washington hotel where our many comrades who had come from all over the country gathered. We

even had some left-wing celebrities such as Joan Baez in attendance, dancing and whooping it up. Over the next two days, we held a conference at which Bayard, Randolph, Norman Thomas, James Farmer, Eleanor Holmes (later Norton), and others spoke about what the March had accomplished and what still needed to be done as the civil rights movement inched forward.

On August 28 of this year, there will be anniversary celebrations in Washington, D.C., and across the country, recalling the March and its achievements. But for many of us, the full promise of the March remains unfulfilled. The dream of equality has been undermined by the increasing economic divide in the country.

As for jobs, a central demand of the March was reducing unemployment. But in 1963 it was 5.4 percent, as against 7.5 percent in April 2013. And Black unemployment was then about 11 percent, while today it is close to 14 percent. The population of the U.S. in 1963 was 190 million, versus 315 million today. And the Black population grew from 20 million in 1963 to 42 million in 2013. So the absolute number of unemployed has almost doubled in the last fifty years.

For me, my mantra in 2013 about the great March is “We may have come a long way, but we’ve got a long way to go!”