The demonstrations were now reaching the proportions that James Bevel had worried about on Saturday. Fearing damage to downtown stores, the business leaders hastened the negotiations. After both sides declared a day of truce, clearing the streets, the merchants agreed to desegregate lunch counters and hire black workers in clerical and sales positions. Joseph Rauh, a lawyer for the United Auto Workers union and a long-time civil rights activist, arranged for the UAW and other labor unions to create a bail fund to secure the release of the 800 black people still in jail.
On Monday, May 10, at two separate news conferences, the accord was announced to the public. Bull Connor fumed. He demanded to know the names of the businessmen who had secretly negotiated the truce. Connor’s fellow commissioners, still seeking to retain control of the city, joined him in condemning the deal as “capitulation by certain weak-kneed white people under threat of violence by the rabble-rousing Negro, King.” On a local radio broadcast, Connor urged whites to boycott the downtown stores that had agreed to integrate.
The night after the accord was announced, the Ku Klux Klan rallied outside the city. Robert Shelton, Grand Dragon of the white supremacist group, said, “We would like to state at this time that any concessions that Martin Luther King or any other group of Negro leaders in Birmingham have received are not worth the paper they’re written on or the bag that’s holding the water. No business people in Birmingham or any other city have the authority to attempt any type of negotiations when it deals with governmental affairs with municipalities. Martin Luther King’s epitaph, in my opinion, can be written here in Birmingham.”
After the Klan meeting, bombs exploded at the home of Martin Luther King’s brother and at the Gaston Motel, where King had been staying. Crowds of blacks assembled at both sites. Over the objections of Jefferson County sheriff Mel Bailey, state troopers moved in, as did Connor’s police. As rioting erupted, the lawmen pummeled blacks with clubs and rifles. Thirty-five blacks and five whites were injured. Seven stores were set ablaze. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, fearing that the violence might trigger rioting nationwide, convinced his brother to send in federal troops. The president dispatched soldiers to Fort McClellan, thirty miles outside of Birmingham, hoping that the threat of federal intervention would induce state and local authorities to restore the peace. Kennedy said he would not allow the agreement between the businessmen and the SCLC to be “sabotaged by a few extremists.”
“This government,” the president announced, “will do whatever must be done to preserve order, protect the lives of its citizens, and uphold the law of the land … those who labored so hard to achieve the peaceful, constructive settlement of last week can feel nothing but dismay at the efforts of those who would replace conciliation and good will with violence and hate.”
Kennedy’s tactic quieted the city. The conflict ended altogether when the Alabama Supreme Court recognized Mayor Albert Boutwell and the new council as the legitimate government of Birmingham. The new mayor honored the negotiated settlement.
Connor, however, had not finished his assault on the civil rights movement. When a federal court ordered the University of Alabama to admit black students, Connor joined forces with Governor George Wallace. The governor sent Connor to a meeting of the segregationist Citizens’ Council in Tuscaloosa to ask them to stay away from the university. “Leave it alone,” he entreated the white supremacists. “Those Kennedys up there in Washington, that little old Bobby-soxer and his brother the president, they’d give anything in the world if we had some trouble here.” The crowd cheered as Connor ended with, “If we don’t have any trouble, we can beat ’em at their own game.”
On June 11, Wallace literally stood in the doorway of a university building, blocking the entrance of James Hood and Vivian Malone, two black students trying to register. “It is important that the people of this state and nation understand,” he intoned, “that this action is in violation of rights reserved for the state by the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state of Alabama.” With television cameras recording the confrontation, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach asked Wallace if he intended to act on his defiance. When Wallace failed to reply, the marshals and lawyers accompanied the black students to their dormitories.
Later that day, Alabama National Guard General Henry Graham, backed by federal marshals, asked the governor to step aside. Wallace left the campus, and the black students walked through the door, breaking the color barrier at the university.
That night President Kennedy spoke on national television. The civil rights issue dominated his agenda. “The fires of frustration and discord are busy in every city,” the president said. “Redress is sought in the street, in demonstrations, parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people.
Newly elected Governor George Wallace blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama as a representative from the U.S. Justice Department, Nicholas Katzenbach, informs him of the federal government’s intent to integrate the school.
“I am therefore asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theatres, retail stores and similar establishments. This seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure …”
Kennedy delivered a new civil rights bill to Congress on June 19. Stronger than the bill that had died in Congress at the beginning of the year, the new bill would outlaw segregation in all interstate public accommodations, allow the attorney general to initiate suits for school integration, and give the attorney general the important power to shut off funds to any federal programs in which discrimination occurred. It also contained a provision that helped ensure the right to vote by declaring that a person who had a sixth-grade education would be presumed to be literate.
King, the SCLC, CORE, the NAACP, SNCC, and other civil rights groups had no intention of allowing this bill to die in Congress. To demonstrate the strength of public demand for this legislation, they would march on Washington.
The March on Washington
August 28, 1963
Some of the march organizers worried that only a few thousand people would participate in the march. In fact, more than 250,000 demonstrators came to march on Washington.
In 1963, A. Philip Randolph was the civil rights movement’s elder statesman. The seventy-four-year-old leader’s closely cropped gray hair and stentorian voice reinforced his commanding presence. Randolph was the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), a union of black porters who worked on the country’s trains. When Randolph founded the BSCP in 1925, there were no railway unions open to blacks. For many years, BSCP members acted as “civil rights missionaries on wheels.” Traveling from station to station throughout the country, the porters organized not only for labor, but for civil rights as well.
For half a century Randolph was at the forefront of grass roots efforts to improve the lives of black Americans. In 1941, as the country prepared for World War II, he planned a mass march on Washington to demand more jobs for blacks in the defense industries. The war had ended the depression for millions of unemployed whites, but thousands of black workers remained out of work. Shortly before the day of the march, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Randolph and agreed to issue an executive order declaring that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.” Executive Order 8802 represented the federal government’s strongest civil rights action since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Roosevelt also agreed to establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In return, Randolph called off the protest march.
In 1963, finding a decent job was still very difficult for blacks in America. Black unemployment stood at eleven percent, while for whites the figure was just five
percent. And whereas a white family earned, on average, about $6,500 a year, a black family earned $3,500 a year. Randolph again decided to organize a national march on Washington to show that black citizens were tired of waiting for fair treatment and equal opportunity. After the violent attacks on the Birmingham demonstrators earlier in 1963, the march took on a broader meaning.
In the nine years since the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, America had witnessed intense racial turmoil. Media pictures of Bull Connor and his men turning attack dogs and firehoses on demonstrators had shocked the nation.
The Southern Regional Council, a biracial information and research group, estimated that, in the wake of Birmingham, nearly 15,000 persons—mostly black—were arrested during various protest demonstrations throughout the nation. Louis Martin, the Kennedy administration’s leading black adviser, wrote in a memo to White House officials, “Events in Birmingham have seemed to electrify Negro concerns all across the country. As this is written, demonstrations and marches are being planned … The accelerated tempo of Negro restiveness and the rivalries of some leaders for top billing, coupled with the resistance of segregationists, may soon create the most critical state of race relations since the Civil War.”
Randolph and his colleague Bayard Rustin met with labor and civil rights leaders to plan the August 28 march. They agreed to expand the goals of the march to include demands for passage of the Civil Rights Act; integration of public schools by year’s end; enactment of a fair employment practices bill prohibiting job discrimination; and the original demand for job training and placement.
A. Philip Randolph (right), the senior civil rights leader who first planned a march on Washington in 1941, with Bayard Rustin, deputy director of the 1963 march.
President Kennedy tried to persuade the civil rights leaders to call off the march, arguing that violence was likely. The president also felt that, to ensure passage of the civil rights bill, it was important for blacks to stay off the streets and portray themselves as unthreatening. On learning of the leaders’ determination to carry through with the march, however, Kennedy reluctantly endorsed the cause.
“The fact that he took that attitude rather than the attitude of almost everyone else in the Senate and Congress … made a difference to the character of the march,” remembers Burke Marshall, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, “because if he had opposed it, it would have been more of a rebellious type of march.”
The march’s themes became unity, racial harmony, and, especially, a cry to “Pass the Bill.” The March on Washington Committee appointed Bayard Rustin deputy director of the event. It was his job to work out the logistics. The organizers hoped that 100,000 marchers would participate. As Rustin later remembered, “We wanted to get everybody, from the whole country, into Washington by nine o’clock in the morning and out of Washington by sundown. This required all kinds of things that you had to think through. You had to think how many toilets you needed, where they should be. Where is your line of march? We had to consult doctors on exactly what people should bring to eat so that they wouldn’t get sick … We had to arrange for drinking water. We had to arrange what we would do if there was a terrible thunderstorm that day. We had to think of the sound system.”
The march represented a coalition of civil rights workers, church groups, and labor leaders. Some of the march organizers can be seen here leading the crowd.
People learned of the march through local civil rights and church groups all across the country. “Freedom buses” and “freedom trains” brought marchers from all across the country, north and south. In all, more than thirty special trains and 2,000 chartered buses delivered people to Washington, in numbers unimagined by the organizers—over a quarter of a million people, as many as 60,000 of them white. It was, at that time, the largest demonstration for human rights in the history of the republic.
It was a hot day in August, but the marchers refreshed themselves by cooling their feet in the reflecting pool.
Marchers came from across the country, black and white, young and old.
Musicians entertained the vast throng waiting for the speeches to begin. The performers included folksingers Josh White, Odetta, Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
A. Philip Randolph opened the program. “Fellow Americans,” he said to the sea of faces in front of the Lincoln Memorial, “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.”
SNCC’s John Lewis, one of the scheduled speakers, had planned to deliver a fiery speech denouncing the civil rights bill as too little too late. He wanted to warn the country that blacks would not wait for the president or Congress to end racial discrimination, but would soon “take matters into our own hands and create a source of power outside of any national structure … we will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did, leaving a scorched earth with our nonviolence.”
The march organizers received the text of all the speeches the night before the event, and copies were also delivered to the press. After reading Lewis’ speech, the organizers asked him to soften his attack on the government. Word came that Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle had threatened to withdraw from the march if Lewis were permitted to deliver his speech unchanged. The March on Washington’s fragile coalition of white liberals, church leaders, labor representatives, and black activists was in jeopardy.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Rustin, and others each spoke with Lewis, but the young leader would not compromise—not until A. Philip Randolph discussed the matter with him. In deference to Randolph’s position, Lewis finally agreed to modify his stance. He and fellow SNCC leaders James Forman and Courtland Cox rewrote the material, working furiously at a portable typewriter set up behind Lincoln’s Statue. They finished only minutes before Lewis stood to give his oration.
Even with modifications, Lewis’ speech was the most hard-hitting of the day. “By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers,” he said, “we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back together in the image of God and democracy.” He went on to say that SNCC supported the civil rights bill “with reservations.”
Then Martin Luther King, Jr., stood to speak. King, the most popular of all the civil rights leaders, delivered a speech that would be heard on television stations across the land. It was a speech of hope and determination, epitomizing the day’s message of racial harmony, love, unity, and a belief that blacks and whites could live together in peace.
The event was a resounding success, extensively covered by the media. There were no major disturbances. Many Americans witnessed for the first time black people and white united, marching and celebrating side by side.
James Forman (standing, wearing a suit) joins other SNCC workers in song. While SNCC participated in the march, the group doubted the effectiveness of such demonstrations.
As Bayard Rustin remembered, “The March on Washington took place because the Negro needed allies … The March was not a Negro action. It was an action by Negroes and whites together. Not just the leaders of the Negro organizations, but leading Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish spokesmen called the people into the street. And Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, white and black, responded.”
Only eighteen days after the celebrated march, four young girls were killed when someone threw dynamite into a church in Birmingham, Alabama.
There is no way of knowing whether the March on Washington boosted the progress of the Civil Rights Act through Congress. For many months afterward, the legislators resisted the bill. But America witnessed an unprecedented spectacle that day. The march brought joy and a sense of possibility to people throughout the nation who perhaps had not un
derstood the civil rights movement before or who had felt threatened by it.
But ardent segregationists remained unmoved. In Birmingham, Alabama, just eighteen days after the march, dynamite exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where children were attending a Bible school class. Four of the youngsters were killed—Denise McNair, age eleven, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all age fourteen. On that same Sunday, Birmingham police killed a black youth in the street, and another young black man riding a bicycle in that city was attacked and murdered by a group of whites.
To many outside observers, the March on Washington became almost synonymous with the civil rights movement itself. But the hard truth, brought home so soon by the Birmingham murders, was that it was only one day in the long and continuing fight for equality.
“I Have a Dream”
August 28, 1963
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
I’m happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free; one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land …
Eyes on the Prize Page 24
