March on Washington

march-on-washington

The 28 August 1963 demonstration at which an estimated 250,000 people — the largest demonstration in American history to that point — gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand civil rights and economic justice. It was there that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the full name is rarely quoted but the ‘Jobs and Freedom’ half is essential — was organised by A. Philip Randolph, who had first proposed a march on Washington in 1941 to demand desegregation of the defence industry. The 1963 march was coordinated by the ‘Big Six’ civil rights organisations and brought together a diverse coalition from across the country. The day’s speeches addressed both racial justice and economic inequality: King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ peroration is universally known, but his prepared text also addressed the ‘bad cheque’ of American democracy — the gap between the founding documents’ promises and the reality of Black experience. John Lewis, speaking for SNCC, delivered a speech originally so militant that Catholic leaders threatened to withdraw unless it was softened; the version he delivered was still the most confrontational of the day. The march generated enormous television coverage and contributed to the political momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Kennedy had proposed in June and which Johnson would shepherd through Congress after Kennedy’s assassination in November. The march’s non-violent discipline — it passed with no arrests — was itself a political achievement in a summer of civil rights violence.

The March on Washington has been remembered and misremembered in ways that reveal the political uses of historical memory. The sanitised version — a beautiful day, a beautiful speech, a testament to American possibility — strips away the march’s confrontational economic demands and the considerable opposition it faced from white moderates who thought it provocative, FBI director Hoover who called King ‘the most dangerous man in America’, and President Kennedy who privately urged the organisers to call it off. The march that has entered national mythology is the one that could be safely incorporated into the consensus narrative of progress; the march that actually happened demanded structural economic change that the Civil Rights Act did not provide and that American society still has not made. A. Philip Randolph’s economic agenda — full employment, a minimum wage, an end to discriminatory union practices — was as central to the day as King’s dream, and it remains as unfinished.