The Day They Marched

Ebony, Oct, 1999 by Lerone Jr. Bennett

IT was the beginning of something and the ending of something. It came 100 years and 240 days after the signing of the Emancipation of Proclamation.

It came like a force of nature.

Like a whirlwind, like a storm, like a flood, it overwhelmed by its massiveness and finality.

More than 300,000 people were in it, and of it, and millions more watched on TV and huddled around radios.

There had never been anything quite like it.

A TV spectacular, a Sunday School picnic, a political convention, an impressive demonstration of Black unity, "a visible exhibition of interracial brotherhood," an almost unprecedented exhibition of resolve, a new concept of lobbying, a living petition, a show of strength, an outburst, a call to the national conscience: The mammoth March on Washington was everything they said it was, and more--and it moved men and women as they had never been moved before.

It threatened, at points, to become a meaningless gesture, an extravaganza, an outing, a prayer said to the wind. But the people, the old ladies and the young boys, the students and the dreamers, the young girls in bright babushkas and the old men in shiny blue suits: the people--they redeemed it, and made it something to remember.

They came, these people, from points all over America, and several overseas; they assembled in Washington on the grassy slopes of the Washington Monument and walked about a mile to the Lincoln Memorial, where they said with their bodies that Black people had been waiting for 100 years and 240 days and that they were still not free and that 100 years and 241 days were too long to wait. There, in balmy 84-degree weather, in the shadow of the Memorial and the presence of God, they recalled (in Archibald MacLeish's phrase) "the holy dream we were to be"--recalled the dream and made it flesh and blood and bone in their black and white togetherness.

This, then, was the March: A long and uncomfortable trip on trains and buses and planes, a short walk down Constitution and Independence avenues, words said in the sun and, beneath it all, a quiet anger, a fierce hope and the wind and the fire of a dream.

Dreams brought the demonstrators to this particular place at this particular time--dreams and drastic demands within them. We are accustomed now to the dreams of the young, but there is a certain poetry in the fact that this march was the product of the dreams of a "New Negro" who was born in 1889. For Asa Philip Randolph, the 74-year-old president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice-president of the AFL-CIO, the March was the culmination of a half-century of agitation. He had come uphill all the way, this old man; he had won the first FEPC order from President Roosevelt in 1941 by threatening a March on Washington, and he had been threatening a March on Washington ever since. In January 1963, he suggested a march to dramatize the plight of unemployed Negroes, but nobody was listening and nobody seemed to care. Then came Birmingham; then came the thunder of Blacks in the streets; then came the Summer of Discontent; and men remembered the Old Man and what he had done in 1941 and what he wanted to do in 1963. In the end, the five major Black organizations--NAACP, SCLC, "SNICK," CORE and the National Urban League--closed ranks behind Randolph and his dream. A Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, and a labor leader completed the cast of leaders. They named Randolph director; and the Old Man went back to his Harlem office, and the years fell from him. He chose as his deputy director Bayard Rustin, a brilliant mover and shaker in the Freedom Movement, and another veteran of the March on Washington Movement of 1941.

Before Randolph and Rustin lay a formidable task--moving 200,000 or more people into Washington and out in one day, feeding, organizing and, to be blunt, restraining them for 24 hours. That this was done, and with such aplomb, spoke volumes about the quality of Black leadership in 1963.

Through the late summer, as the fires of discontent burned in the streets, Randolph and his aides prodded, pushed and organized. As they worked, ripples of fear spread across the nation. Washington, D.C., already more than one-half Black, was hysterical; the general feeling, the Washington Daily News said, was that the Vandals were coming again to sack Rome. Powerful politicians and big men in labor and business urged the leaders to abandon the March; it was unwise, they said, imprudent, unnecessary, and perhaps illegal. The press took up the cry, saying with increasing stridence that the March was social dynamite and that violence was almost unavoidable.

Despite the furor or perhaps because of it, preparations continued. In a yellow building in Harlem and in another yellow building in Washington, March aides wrestled with unprecedented logistical problems, contacting over 1500 organizations, naming regional directors, writing and rewriting organizational manuals.

March leaders went to extraordinary lengths to ensure a peaceful demonstration. As originally conceived by the more venturesome leaders, the March was to be a rasp across an exposed nerve. One student leader announced early in the summer that he and his wife and baby planned to pitch a tent on the White House lawn. Others spoke of sit-ins in the offices of Mississippi Senator James Eastland and other White legislators. The leaders vetoed these plans, banning inciting signs and forbidding picketing at the White House and on Capitol Hill. An internal police system was set up to isolate and exclude troublemakers. The March, according to the leaders, was for Freedom and Jobs. The immediate aim was to prod Congress on the pending civil rights bill.